Inmate Brings Innocence Quest To Last Stop

Scott Lewis spent 18 years behind bars for a 1990s murder he insisted he never committed. After exhausting his appeals in the state courts, he turned to the federal court with a final plea — and won his freedom.

Maleek Jones now finds himself in the same situation: He is turning to the federal court with a habeas corpus petition, hoping history will repeat itself.

* * * *

The visitor room at the Garner Correctional Institution in Newtown is a true in-between space. It is the sole membrane through which the free and unfree can mingle, the turf on which the incarcerated meet with their counsel, friends and family outside prison. The room is a monochromatic brown, like the rest of the prison, and spartan, with four plastic chairs and a table. It has two windows, both larger than you’d expect to find in a prison, and does not lack for lighting.

But the windows open out to the prison atrium, rather than the woods outside. You are still aware that you are seen far more than you can see.

I met Maleek Jones in person for the first time in that visiting room. It was early May, and I was accompanying a criminal defense lawyer who’d agreed to help me get through the red tape of arranging prison visits. We had to meet four of his clients first, so Maleek was the last of five inmates I met with that day.

Maleek stood out from his counterparts in significant ways. Most of the others were young, in their early twenties, and new to prison. They complained about harassment meted out by officers, disagreements with other inmates, and the seemingly inescapable scourge of ​“tickets” for bad behavior, often filed, they maintained, for frivolous reasons. They often appeared concerned, frightened or aggrieved, making nervous glances out of the window.

Maleek, by contrast, is referred to in prison parlance as an ​“OG.” ​“OG” inmates like Maleek have typically been in prison much longer than any of the officers marshaling them. As elders of the prison, they’ve learnt to find their way around its interpersonal dynamics, aided by the sheer weight of time spent behind its bars. Maleek runs the prison’s mental health unit. He describes this job as ​“social worker, legal advocate and mentor,” all in one.

When Jones was ushered into the visiting room, he greeted me with a fist-bump and eased his heavyset frame into a chair. Tucked by his side was a stack of neatly-ordered papers containing files from his case, as well as stacks of certificates: for a range of academic courses he’s completed, exceptional standards at work, and a disciplinary record that was last blemished by a ticket in 1997.

“You weren’t yet born then, and I still had hair on my head!” he joked.

As we spoke, he held his blue surgical mask in place with one hand to prevent it from slipping off his nose. His other hand held a small piece of tissue, which he’d often apply to his bald head, wiping off small drops of sweat before they rolled down his cheeks. Below his mask was visible a thin white stubble.

Our previous conversations, held over the phone, had sometimes ended abruptly at the request of prison officials. He had expressed only a single complaint about prison, but it is one he often repeats: that the library lacks even a single legal book.

It was when we met in person that I realized the full extent of his unflappable, if pensive, demeanor. It is the look of a 48-year-old man who has spent 29 of those years in prison, insisting with defiance and grace that he is innocent. Maleek is serving a 65-year sentence for the murder of Eddie Harp. He swears he had nothing to do with it.

* * * * *

When I began inquiring into Maleek’s case, I spoke to James Jeter, who’d grown to know Maleek when their paths crossed as fellow inmates at Cheshire Correctional Institution. Jeter has since left prison and founded the Dwight Hall Civic Allyship Initiative. (Note: This Maleek Jones is a different person from the Malik Jones whose 1997 shooting death at the hand of an East Haven police officer sparked anti-brutality protests and became the subject of litigation.)

Over the course of my reporting, I spoke to many of Maleek’s family and friends, and on seven occasions to Maleek himself, including that in-person visit. I cross-checked their testimony against thousands of pages of court documents from Maleek’s trial in 1995, his two habeas corpus petitions in 2009 and 2015, and a multitude of appeals he has filed in between. The evidence casts serious doubts upon the integrity of the state’s criminal justice system at every step. Maleek’s case, in Jeter’s words, is a ​“stew”: of corrupt police officers, a complicit prosecution, and inadequate defense representation, baked in the pot that is the mass incarceration system.

Maleek’s is one of numerous cases that have exposed an epidemic of police corruption in the city of New Haven in the 1980s and 1990s, leading to multiple exonerations for wrongful convictions, a number of disgraced officers, and legal settlements in the tens of millions of dollars.

Less openly discussed are the stories of this era that have yet to emerge — those of dozens of Black men like Maleek who have long insisted on their innocence. At a time of a national reckoning the criminal justice system’s failures, old cases like Maleek’s serve as stark reminders that a reckoning with the past is far from complete.

******

Shelia McCray saw it all. It began, as the cliche goes, with a call.

The call came in on Oct. 14, 1992, at approximately 1 a.m. McCray was working her overnight shift as a security guard at Saint Raphael’s Hospital. Eddie Harp, McCray’s friend of over six years, was on the other end of the line. He told her that he had something to talk to her about, and that he’d drive to the hospital to meet her during her break.

When McCray came down from her shift half an hour later, she saw Harp parked on the ramp adjacent to the main entrance of the hospital, in a space reserved for security vehicles. The area was empty, apart from two young black men who were pacing up and down the street. McCray had heard of shootings in front of the hospital before.

“Do you know those two guys?” she asked Harp. Harp turned to look at them, and then turned back to her. ​“No.”

“You sure?” McCray said.

“I don’t know ​’em, Why do you ask me?” he replied.

McCray explained that she’d seen the pair pacing back and forth up the street once or twice already. ​“They were walking kinda funny… they didn’t walk normal than usual,” she told the police later that day.

McCray told Harp to come in and lock his car, a tan station wagon with tinted windows and large tires. The two walked over to the waiting area of the hospital’s emergency room to speak. When their conversation ended, Harp returned back to his car. It was around 2:10 a.m.

Just as Harp was pulling his car out of the ramp, the two men McCray had seen appeared and began firing at the car.

The first man, a tall, slim, and dark-skinned man in black sneakers, a white T‑shirt, a black jacket and a black knit cap, had pulled out a gun from his waist and fired multiple shots at Harp from the side of the vehicle. The other, a shorter, lighter-skinned man with braided hair and similar clothing, shot from behind the vehicle.

McCray dropped to the floor around when she heard the second shot. When the shooting stopped, she looked out of the window of the emergency room to see the car rolling into the hospital parking lot across the street, and the two men running away.

She ran to the phone and called security, who told her not to go out alone.

When McCray — and, a few minutes later, New Haven Police Officer Robert Losty — arrived at the scene, they found Harp unconscious and the car running. Three shots had hit Harp; one had penetrated his brain. He was pronounced dead in the emergency room six hours later.

On the same day, Oct. 14, McCray gave a statement describing these events, along with detailed physical descriptions of the shooters. The police now had their first leads.

Later that day, other leads followed. At around 9 p.m, Lee Roy Bember, who identified himself to police as a member of the ​“Red Line” gang, turned up at the police station and offered a statement. According to Bember, he had been standing at the intersection of Edgewood and Orchard Avenue alongside another man in their group named Jean John, or ​“Pepper,” when he was approached by two women. Both were clearly distraught. They confronted Bember and Pepper, accusing members of the ​“Red Line” gang of killing Eddie Harp.

Pepper grew concerned and led Bember away from the women into an apartment owned by the gang on 61 Beers St. to talk.

At the apartment, Pepper told Bember that he had been with a man named Tyrone Spears, or ​“Ty,” last night, and that Spears had shot Harp. Bember recounted this to Detective Thomas Trocchio, who in his field notes noted down that Bember quoted Pepper as saying that ​“Ty shot this dude last night.”

Several days later, the police interviewed McCray again. From a photo array, she identified a man named Tyrone Spears as one of the shooters.

But the police were not fully satisfied. ​“They were trying to get me to identify someone else, and the person they were trying to get me to identify wasn’t the individual I saw,” she said. The person who they were urging her to identify was Maleek Jones.

******

Maleek Jones was 19 at the time. The oldest of his four siblings, he grew up in a New York City public-housing project.

For a while, with both of his parents working jobs, he ​“didn’t need for anything.” As the big brother in the family, he made sure that was also true for his siblings.

“He was the protector,” was the first sentence Asmar, his younger brother, told me when I asked him about Maleek. ​“He always set out to live his own life and do things his way. But he always kept his family in mind, and put his family first.”

Maleek dropped his siblings off at school everyday, and kept a watchful eye over them. He was a good student in school, a gifted athlete across a range of sports, and a huge fan of the New York Mets. Maleek and his friends and family hoped he would receive a college athletic scholarship in one of the sports at which he excelle.

Then his father ​“self-destructed,” according to Maleek. His father began taking drugs, and grew abusive. ​“When my husband got on drugs, I had to move,” Maleek’s mother Denise told me. ​“We had to stay with my aunt, and things changed. I had to work a lot. I had to leave them alone.”

Denise worked as a nurse in a hospital, and took an additional job offering private care, working up to 16 hours a day. Nevertheless, as Maleek and his siblings grew, the apartments they could afford only grew smaller and smaller.

Maleek said he felt he had to toughen up fast. ​“It just got real real rough,” he said. ​“I had to get hard.”

Without either parent at home very often, and in trying to support his mother, Maleek ended up spending an increasing amount of time with what he later described as the ​“wrong crowd.” Maleek also began experiencing difficulties at school, which recommended he join a special-ed program, an idea neither he nor his mother was keen on.

When his mother expressed concern about how his illicit activities might affect his younger siblings, Maleek decided to leave so as to not endanger them.

One evening in January 1989, when he was 16 years old, he went on a ride with some of his new acquaintances to New Haven, where he moved into what he describes as a ​“drug den.”

“My whole life changed from that point,” Maleek remembers. ​“I ended up being out here with these older guys, these guys who were acting like my friends. They had me at the side of a house, selling narcotics to these [other] guys, and they would disappear for days and weeks, and I’d be here inside of a house with people I don’t know, who were angry because they wanted to be paid. They would kick me out, and I’d end up in the streets of New Haven, where I don’t have any family, where I don’t know anybody.”

“At the time, I never came home because I was so ashamed,” he said. ​“My mother had set me up to succeed and I just completely… shamed her by leaving.”

Maleek befriended Sabrina Mack, then a student at The Foote School in New Haven. In a manner akin to his siblings, she described him as ​“a big brother in every sense of what a big brother should be — a caretaker, a caregiver, a provider… He was always encouraging me, telling me how smart I was, how I didn’t belong in the area that we lived in, that I was going to go and do great things.”

Sabrina and Maleek dreamed of one day opening up a set of businesses together. Maleek had noticed that fashionable clothes were widely available in New York, but scarce and coveted in New Haven. He began to buy clothes in New York and sell them in New Haven, earning a profit.

“But I had to legitimize it,” he said. ​“You needed a vendor’s license to do these things. I was in the process of getting it done.”

Today, Sabrina owns a number of stores, and has been able to realize their dreams, but alone. The two remain in regular touch. In fact, when I interviewed Sabrina, she’d spoken on the phone to Maleek the day before.

“Even yesterday, when he called me — I just got back from Mexico, where I was on vacation — he wanted to hear about the sand and the snow and the sounds,” she said. ​“That’s the type of person he is, so detail-oriented, and he has so many dreams.”

Eleven months after he left home, Maleek decided that life he’d built in New Haven was proving untenably dangerous. On Thanksgiving 1989 — a day he remembers as among the most dramatic days of his life — he returned home to New York.

But home was different. Above all, Maleek couldn’t shake off the festering guilt he felt over leaving his mother.

He decided to take some money from his mother to take a bus down south, where he planned to live with his father in South Carolina.

“I felt that because I had let my mother down it was the only thing that would mend our relationship,” he said.

Maleek’s father lived in what Maleek called the ​“deep country.” The bus he took stopped off at the town of Orangeburg, S.C.; it didn’t go farther. Maleek didn’t want to venture any farther into the countryside himself. So he ended up staying in the city, waiting for his father.

Unbeknownst to Maleek, his father was very ill, and never came to pick Maleek up. He died not long after.

Maleek again found himself scrambling to make ends meet in a new, unfamiliar town. Maleek ended up being arrested. When he was released, the Connecticut police came for him, extraditing him back to New Haven on the same day as his father’s funeral.

“They said I had a fugitive arrest warrant. However, somebody in Connecticut was using my name, so they had five fugitive warrants for me,” Maleek stated.

Ultimately, when they checked his fingerprints, only one case stood — a drug possession charge that led to a suspended one-year sentence, because Maleek was still a juvenile.

When he was released in May 1991, the terms of his sentence mandated that he stay in the state of Connecticut, leaving him alone in New Haven with nowhere to go for the second time in two years.

Maleek was bailed out of jail by the only family he knew in New Haven — the group that sold narcotics out of 226 Edgewood Ave.

Maleek tried to blend in as best he could with the older men around him, even as he played basketball with other children from the area on their way back from school. He also began a relationship with Teeba Henderson, and the two were soon expecting a child.

On Oct. 2, 1992, Maleek was arrested by the NHPD’s Narcotics Unit, and remanded in jail for over a week. He missed the birth of his child on Oct. 7.

When he was released on Oct, 10, he went straight to see his son. In the days that followed, despite the fact that his mother didn’t want him in New Haven, Maleek moved back and forth between New York City and New Haven, visiting almost everyday. He said his son’s arrival crystallized a thought he’d been considering for a while — that a life dealing drugs was no longer feasible or wise. He said he wanted to return to school, finish his diploma, and finally get his vendor’s license. This would allow him to open a store with Sabrina, and a beauty salon for Teeba, who was in cosmetology school. Little did Maleek know that he’d be able to see his son for only two more weeks.

* * * * *

On the morning of Oct. 23, 1992, nine days after the shooting, Maleek Jones was at 56 Hallock St., his place of residence, when Officer Romano Ratti, a member of the NHPD’s Narcotics Unit, kicked open the door. Maleek was startled, but was not surprised. Maleek said Ratti had been harassing him for over a year.

When contacted for this story, Ratti refused to comment. ​“I don’t recall that case,” he told me.

Maleek claimed that when Ratti searched Maleek’s residence that morning, he didn’t find anything incriminating. Ratti uncovered the sparse belongings of a recent father who regularly commuted between New York City and New Haven to see his two-week-old son.

“They were on me about narcotics,” Maleek told me. ​“But they never found narcotics. So they were kinda pissed off about that.”

Ratti and another ​“Dirty Boy” policeman decided to take Maleek for a ​“rideabout” instead, ushering him into the back seat of a white Chevrolet Blazer. The offiers were both in plainclothes, and they didn’t handcuff Maleek. They ​“just wanted to talk.”

As their SUV cruised through the streets of New Haven, the officers allegedly demanded that Maleek deal drugs for them. When he refused, Maleek said, they dropped a bombshell on him: ​“OK, you’ll be going to jail for murder.”

The rideabout ended with Maleek being taken to the NHPD precinct, where he was arrested and charged with the murder of Eddie Harp. Maleek insisted his name was not initially on the arrest warrant for the murder in question, and that his name was hurriedly added when the Narcotics Unit decided to frame him. ​“Tyrone Spears was fingered as the person who committed the crime the day it happened,” Maleek told me, referring to the testimony of both McCray and Bember. He said he believes that once the police decided they wanted to go after him, all other evidence was suppressed or tweaked to further this case.

As he recounted the day of his arrest to me, he remembered a troubling detail. ​“When I got to the precinct, 1 Union Ave., one of the officers there asked, ​‘What are we booking him for?’” Maleek recounted. He found the question odd then, and only more so in hindsight. ​“Why would they ask what am I being arrested for, if I was arrested on a warrant for murder?”

* * * * *

The police report for the case was written by Detective Trocchio on Oct. 23, the same day as Maleek’s arrest. It offers some answers to these questions. It raises questions, too.

McCray and Bember, according to the report, were indeed the first to be interviewed during the investigation. They both identified Tyrone Spears as a shooter on that night. But the police report also notes another witness, Danielle Lafreniere, a sex worker who was working in the area at the time. Lafreniere heard multiple gunshots that night, and told police on Oct. 14 that she had noticed three men at the scene, including a man named James Bailey, or ​“Memphis,” who was also a member of Red Line. According to the police report, when the investigating officers tracked down Bailey, he claimed to have witnessed both Tyrone Spears and Maleek Jones, or ​“Natural,” firing at Harp’s car during the early hours of Oct.14.

Additionally, the report notes that Detective Trocchio and Officer Ratti, following an anonymous tip, interviewed Jody Taylor, a woman who allegedly claimed to have noticed Tyrone Spears and Maleek Jones pacing in front of the hospital minutes before gunshots were heard. These interviews, according to police, provided them the probable cause for Maleek’s arrest. Maleek argued that these testimonies were added retrospectively, and that there is no coincidence that they came from individuals in precarious positions who could be coerced.

The report revealed other inconsistencies. According to the report, Detective Trocchio interviewed Tyrone Spears on the evening of Oct. 16, two days after the incident, and well after multiple witnesses had already placed him as the shooter. Spears offered the police one version of events, before recanting. On both occasions, however, he denied involvement in the crime, and, critically, insisted that he had been in the company of Jean John ​“Pepper,” and not Maleek Jones, on the night of Oct. 14.

Spears was ultimately arrested on Oct. 23, on the same day Maleek was picked up. When questioned on that day, he offered a third version of events; what remained consistent was that Spears had never yet mentioned Maleek as involved in the crime.

These discrepancies would still be overshadowed — not by another revelation, but an omission. The testimony of Sheila McCray, the primary witness to the shooting, was entirely missing from the record of the investigation. That she had spoken to police again, and picked Spears from a photo array, was nowhere to be noted.

This erasure foreshadowed much to come. McCray, the primary witness in the killing of Eddie Harp, would not be heard from in the context of the case for another 23 years.

* * * * *

When Maleek Jones’ case went to trial, not a single witness mentioned in the reports testified in front of the jury. James Bailey, Danielle Lafreniere, and Jody Taylor, all witnesses key to the arrest warrant against Maleek, were never called by the state — and, indeed, were never heard from again.

Maleek’s public defender, Leo Ahern, had attempted to call Leroy Bember to testify. The prosecutor in the case, David Gold, argued that his testimony was hearsay, and hence inadmissible. (Ahern failed to respond to numerous requests for comment for this article.)

Trocchio, the lead detective on the case who had interviewed Bember, testified in support of this argument — during which both his field notes and his taped recordings of the interview vanished. Trocchio’s word was taken over that of Bember’s, whose testimony was excluded as an ​“excited utterance.”

Even today, Maleek finds this astonishing. ​“That was crazy,” he kept repeating in one of our conversations. ​“That hurt me. That was crazy.”

The state’s case was instead built on the basis of the testimony of one man: Tyrone Spears.

Spears, who had previously never mentioned Maleek in interviews with police, now testified in court that Maleek and Pepper had joined him in the shooting — and, indeed, fired the fatal shots.

Spears was sentenced only after Maleek was found guilty. The charges against Spears were downgraded to manslaughter, with a maximum sentence of 20 years. During sentencing, Spears’ lawyer pleaded for a sentence of 18 years. Spears’ eventual sentence required him to spend eight years in jail. This pattern, Maleek argued, proves that the prosecution struck a deal with Spears.

In his testimony at trial, Spears claimed that Maleek and Pepper had arrived at the scene well before him. When they began firing, the two were nine feet away from the driver’s side of the vehicle, while Spears fired from the rear, over 50 yards away, he claimed. Spears’ testimony was never cross-referenced with ballistic evidence.

* * * * *

In a high-stakes cases like a murder trial, where conflicting versions of events are presented before a jury, the defense enjoys a constitutional right to present the sturdiest version of its own retelling of events, and to throw as much doubt as is possible on the version of events proposed by the prosecution.

To do so, most attorneys hire their own expert investigators. In Maleek’s case, because he lacked the financial resources to pay for an investigator, this responsibility lay at the hands of the public defender’s office, which had appointed Leo Ahern to be Maleek’s counsel. Ahern had the right to hire an investigator with funds from the public defender’s office. Ahern didn’t.

“He claimed he didn’t know about that,” Maleek exclaimed, his otherwise passionate but methodical tone giving way to a burning indignation. ​“I don’t get it. How are you an attorney, how did you have a contract at the public defender’s office, and you don’t know about money for an investigation or for experts for your clients? That didn’t make sense to me. This was a whole fiasco.”

Instead, Ahern advised Maleek’s mother, Denise Jones, to hire a private investigator, James Byrd, at her own cost. When I asked Denise Jones about this claim, she concurred. ​“The lawyer that he had, Ahern, told me that I needed to hire a private investigator who was Black, because a white investigator would be scared to go into that neighborhood to ask questions and investigate,” she said.

“My mother couldn’t afford an investigator!” Maleek said. ​“But she wanted to help as much as she could. So she gave whatever money she had to get an investigator that Ahern had advised her to get, a guy called Jim Byrd.” Byrd claimed to be an experienced investigator from New York; in reality, however, he had lied about his credentials, and would later be convicted by the state for perjury.

“She gave this dude Jim Byrd some money, he went and took a few statements, and then he started billing my mother thousands of dollars! She’s like, ​‘Hey, I can’t afford this!’” Maleek told me. ​“So he sent the termination letter, three or four months after he took the money from my mother, and said he’s not going to do anything else until he gets money. From that whole time, there was no investigation done. No more, that was it.”

Without an investigation, Ahern was unequipped to challenge the case laid out by the prosecution. The defense made no attempt to locate Sheila McCray, James Bailey, Danielle Lafreniere, Jody Taylor, or any other person listed in the police report. None of the detectives assigned to the case were interviewed, and no attempt was even made to secure key pieces of evidence, and examine them independently. Most glaring of all, Spears’ testimony was not even cross-referenced against the state’s own ballistic data.

The state’s ballistics report, produced on Oct. 30, noted that three bullets had been retrieved — all of the same type, from the same gun. Further bullets were believed to have embedded themselves in the car, but were never retrieved, creating what a lawyer later described as an ​“illusion that there were two other gunmen.”

The evidence collected supported a maximum of two shooters, and not three, which Spears now claimed. The two-shooter theory also corroborated the testimony given by Sheila McCray, just minutes after the shooting.

But McCray, who was still in New Haven, was never summoned. The car in which Harp was killed is no longer around.

* * * * *

Despite all the missing witnesses, Maleek had another potential defense — an alibi.

On the night of Oct. 13, Maleek had traveled to New Haven from New York City with his uncle Jerry to meet Maleek’s six-day-old son. ​“He was driving me because I had a gunshot wound to my hand, and my hand was incapacitated,” Maleek said. ​“It was in a cast, from my fingers to my elbow. I couldn’t bend my fingers, I couldn’t use my left hand at all.” (Note: The injury was from an unrelated incident a few weeks prior — someone had tried to rob him of a chain and shot him in the hand in the process.)

“That evening, I was driving around showing my uncle, he’s never been to New Haven,” Maleek continued. ​“I’m directing him around, we went to the area I used to frequent. When I went out there, I seen some of the guys that normally used to be out there with me. As we were out there — it was nighttime now — I seen a girl I knew coming down the street, and I asked to use her bathroom.” The apartment was at 224 Edgewood Ave., owned by a friend of Maleek named Terralyn Stevens, and located over a block from the hospital.

“When I went upstairs, I used the bathroom, and we talked,” Maleek said. ​“And we ended up having sex that night. That’s why I was there.” Maleek estimated that he was in her apartment from approximately 12:30 to 3 a.m., spanning the entire time frame during which he was accused of having committed the murder.

Initially, Maleek’s version of events did not include details of an affair. ​“At the time I was involved with somebody, and she was involved with somebody. Nobody actually knew that me and her had sexual relations. But she was my alibi, right?” he stated. As the case got more serious, Maleek and Stevens knew that disclosing the affair would be necessary to his case.

“She [Stevens] wrote my attorney, and she called my attorney months before I went to trial, telling him that she knows that I was with her during the time when they saying this crime ended up taking place,” Maleek said. Ahern never returned her messages until it was too late. ​“The day the state rested, the lawyer put in a late notice of her alibi, which I believe was on March 24. On March 27, she met him early in the morning at his office right before the court opened.

“He spoke to her for the first and only time in person at his office, and then they ushered her over to court. He only spoke to her for 10 – 15 minutes. When she got on the witness stand, the prosecutor grilled her. She did not mention having had sex with Maleek that night, and the prosecutor was able to cast doubt on the details of her story.

Two days later, the trial concluded. Without multiple key witnesses, an independent investigation, ballistic evidence or his alibi, Maleek Jones was found guilty of murder, conspiracy to commit murder, and carrying a pistol without a permit. He was sentenced to sixty-five years in prison.

* * * * *

In 1995, Scott Lewis and Stefan Morant were found guilty of the 1990 murder of former New Haven Alderman Ricardo Turner and his partner. The star witness in the case was Orvil Ruiz, a teenager with a history of schizophrenia and a criminal case of his own. Like Tyrone Spears, Ruiz did not initially indict Lewis and Morant, but then altered his testimony at trial. Ruiz was promised that his false testimony would be rewarded with favorable treatment in his case — an outcome mirroring the lightened sentence that Tyrone Spears received in Maleek’s trial.

In 2015, two decades after his conviction, Scott Lewis joined a select group of individuals who had overcome the odds to exonerate themselves. At his habeas corpus trial, NHPD Detective Michael Sweeney testified that he saw Vincent Raucci, a cop in the Narcotics Unit who had a cocaine habit, feed Ruiz material that would help frame Lewis and Morant. Lewis had owed Raucci $10,000, but when he was unable to pay, Raucci began to collect evidence to frame him for the murder. Lewis’ case was also boosted by the fact that Raucci was accused of corruption and tampering of evidence in a 1997 FBI investigation, one that also revealed that Raucci worked under a New Haven drug kingpin. (Raucci denied it.)

Lewis sued the city for wrongful conviction and won a settlement of $9.5 million. When his lawyer for the settlement, Emma Freudenberger, was asked by the New Haven Register to comment, she noted that Lewis’ settlement had not solved a number of deeper problems. ​“Raucci was not just one rogue bad apple, as the city has claimed,” she said. ​“All of it was done with the knowledge and participation of other officers.”

One could argue, moreover, that this complicity extended beyond police officers. At the trial, Ruiz, like Spears, was a lone but star witness, whose testimony did most of the work in securing a conviction. As the layers of misconduct surrounding the case were peeled back, much scrutiny was directed on Vincent Raucci, who had already left the force. But observers glossed over an important detail. The prosecutor in the trial was David Gold — the same David Gold who led the prosecution in Maleek’s case the same year, and who secured Spears’ testimony. In 2000, five years after the two trials, David Gold was appointed to the Connecticut Superior Court. David Gold became — and remains — Judge David Gold.

* * * * *

In March 2009, 17 years after the shooting, and 14 years since his testimony helped find Maleek guilty, Tyrone Spears was subpoenaed and brought back to court for the first time since the trial, for a habeas corpus petition hearing. Maleek was 36 years old, and had, by that point, spent almost half his life in prison.

Within minutes of Maleek’s new attorney, Bruce MacIntyre, began questioning, Spears recanted his testimony from the trial. He admitted that he had been pressured to lie in 1995 to receive favorable treatment from the prosecution. He stated that he and Pepper alone had shot Eddie Harp.

Maleek still remembers the atmosphere in the court that day. ​“Everyone was crying,” he told me, describing his friends and family as overwhelmed with relief and surprise.

Unfortunately for Maleek, Attorney MacIntyre was also among those surprised. He later described himself as ​“flabbergasted,” and admitted that he was unprepared for the answers. To prove Maleek’s claim of actual innocence, MacIntyre had to support the new evidence revealed by Spears’ recantation. MacIntyre was unable to produce and challenge any exhibits that the prosecution had used to support Spears’ testimony, or to recall any other witnesses. The tan station wagon in which Harp was killed was missing, as was various other ballistic evidence.

Sheila McCray, the primary witness in the case, was still not called in to testify.

The state argued that Spears’ recantation was made under coercion, out of a desire to not be seen as a ​“snitch.” The judge ruled against Maleek’s petition.

Six years later, in March 2015, Tyrone Spears repeated his recantation in court, at a second habeas trial. On this occasion, Sheila McCray was finally called to testify, 23 years after she’d last been contacted by the NHPD. At the hearing, she repeated her testimony from 1992, identifying Spears and Pepper, and not Maleek, as one of the shooters.

During cross-examination, McCray was pressed hard on the strength of her memory.

“Is it fair to say that what you observed back in October of 1992, the early morning hours of Oct. 14th, 1992, was more fresh in your mind on that morning than it is today, some 27 years later?” she was asked.

“That’s not fair to say,” she replied.

“Okay. And why is that?”

“Because I never saw anything like that in my life,” she said.

“Okay.”

“Somethings you just hold onto… You’ll never forget birthdays and holidays because that’s what it is, but when you — a shooting is different. That’s something that stays with you, and when I saw this individual, Mr. Harp, slumped over with a gash in his head, that’s something I’ll never forget.”

McCray’s testimony was backed up by Spears’ second recantation, as well as expert testimony from Deborah Stevenson, a criminal defense lawyer who argued that both Ahern in 1995 and MacIntyre in 2009 had been ineffective in their assistance. James Harper, a ballistics expert, also testified, establishing that the initial three-shooter theory that had led to Maleek’s conviction was unsupported by the physical evidence recovered on the scene — even with the disappearance of the car.

Maleek’s habeas corpus petition was still denied. Susan Cobb, the presiding Judge, insisted that McCray’s testimony could not be trusted due to the passage of time.

It is no longer news that New Haven’s criminal justice system has demons in its closet. The city’s archives are littered with stories of convictions secured by coercing false testimony or tampering with evidence.

Cases like Maleek’s have fallen through the cracks. When I spoke to Attorney Stevenson, she noted that the Connecticut State Attorney’s Office is considering appointing a Conviction Integrity Unit (CIU), an instrument used in other jurisdictions with a history of wrongful convictions. Although the interest seems to be real; the most recent state budget has even apportioned funds for the unit.

* * * * *

Every morning, between 7:45 and 8:00, Maleek begins a soliloquy in his prison cell. It always occurs after he makes his bed, and before he cleans up his personal space, part of a broader routine that is marked by the attention to detail that his friends describe as a key facet of his character. He thinks about ​“what I can do to help my situation, hold my sanity with positive reinforcements.”

This September, Maleek submitted a habeas corpus petition in federal court. The stakes are higher than ever: while some distance from the Connecticut justice system might offer him better luck, he is soon running out of legal remedies.

“I’m at the end,” he said, his voice cracking. These worst moments of despair come when he realizes his distance from his family. Maleek is a mentor to young men in prison, but not, to his dismay, his own son. ​“I often say to myself we were robbed of a father-son relationship,” he told me.

“I’m fighting for the truth,” he said over and over again. In his telling, the truth lies between turning his deepest ache into his most powerful motivator, and it comes to the fore whenever he meets his friends, his family, and in particular, his son, within the brown walls of that same visiting room. ​“One day,” Maleek said, the truth will help him ​“build a relationship with him and them outside these prison walls.”