Why Is This Man Still In Prison?

Every morning for the past 30 years, Daryl Valentine has woken up to a cold, concrete cell.

He is out of bed by 4:30 to start work as a food server for the prison. He pushes a cart of breakfast to the 104 men in the 52 cells of his block in Cheshire Correctional Institution.

Around 5:15 a.m., the men have all been fed. Valentine returns to his cell for quiet time, going back to sleep, watching the news, reading books on the law, or just thinking, before morning recreation time. He keeps to himself, mostly

His son says it is because he is tired of being let down by other people.

Valentine has been in prison since George H.W. Bush was president, since the Berlin Wall fell, having spent 32 years of life doing time for a murder he has consistently said, since he was arrested in 1991, that he didn’t commit.

His first conviction was reversed on appeal. At his second trial, a 12-person jury found him guilty on the word of three eyewitness: one who had serious motive to testify against Valentine, and two who recanted their statements during trial, testifying that they were coerced and bribed by two New Haven police officers into identifying Valentine as the killer.

In both trials, the jury was prevented from hearing testimony about how these two police officers had a track record of coercing witnesses into giving false statements. There was no forensic or physical evidence that pointed to Valentine as the culprit. He received a 100-year sentence.

Valentine’s current lawyer, Vishal Garg, said he became convinced Valentine was innocent when he saw how ​“untrustworthy” the evidence in the case was. His first lawyer, the late Thomas Ullmann, was New Haven’s head public defender and had defended many guilty people; he swore from the beginning that Valentine was not one of them. The New Haven Police Department in the 1990s engaged in a well-documented pattern of misconduct; Garg found it completely believable that they would coerce witnesses into giving false statements in Valentine’s case. 

If what he says is true, Valentine has reason to be angry. But when I met him on a rainy afternoon, I was not greeted by an angry man.

Valentine is a mild-mannered, bald, grandfather of four with square glasses and a salt-and-pepper beard. He leans forward when he speaks and squints as if in deep thought as he listens. His efficient, almost prosecutorial manner of speech suggests someone who has grown accustomed to cramming important information into short phone calls: he is charged $4 for a 15-minute conversation with his son, daughter-in-law, mother, and four grandchildren.

He knows how much he has missed: his son growing up, his mom’s cooking, time with his grandmother, who died on Christmas Day 2008. 

“I’ve been trying to shed some light on this miscarriage of justice since October 16, 1991, the day I was charged,” Valentine wrote to me on May 7, 2021, on standard prison stationery. ​“I cried that day and still do about my situation. It’s just a big depressing emotional roller-coaster.”

He signs off every letter he sends to me with ​“Daryl Valentine, An Innocent Man!” 

1. Guilt

The moment that changed Valentine’s life was Sept. 21, 1991, at the Athenian diner, a popular late-night hangout on New Haven’s Whalley Avenue, where crowds of young people assembled out after a night of clubbing.

According to witness testimony, a verbal altercation between two men escalated into a physical fight that night at the diner.

In the scuffle were Christopher Roach, Hury Poole, and Andrew Paisley, childhood buddies who were getting food after a night out at Rip’s Cafe.
Someone yelled, ​“Shoot him, shoot him, fuck it, shoot him.” Then a man with a hooded sweater drawn tight pulled out a gun, shot Poole and Paisley, and ran to an awaiting car.

Roach said he ​“lost it,” chased the shooter to the driver’s side window. He glimpsed the barrel of a pistol, raised his arm to block himself, and was shot twice in the forearm. 

That weekend night in 1991, Valentine was out of prison on furlough; he was serving a five-year sentence for selling drugs. He said he went to the diner with his sister’s boyfriend, Tyrone Adams, to get something to eat.

He was inside the diner when the shooting happened. 

“My mind wasn’t about the shooting. It was going out with some young ladies,” he said 30 years later from Cheshire facility.

Joseph Greene and Anthony DiLillo arrested Valentine on Oct. 11, 1991, on the basis of witness statements by Christina Higgins and Regina Coleman, two friends who stated they were present in the parking lot of the Athenian diner. The two women identified Valentine as the shooter.

Four days later, he was charged with with two counts of murder and one count of attempt to commit first-degree assault.

This is where the truth gets interesting.

On March 8, 1994, shortly before Valentine’s first trial, Christina Higgins told the investigator at the public defender’s office that she had lied to the police in the original statement.

At the trial, she and Coleman both stood on the witness stand and recanted the initial statements they had given to the New Haven detectives, the statements that had given them grounds to arrest Valentine three years prior.

They said neither of them was at the diner when the murders happened, that they arrived only after the shooting. They charged that detectives Greene and DiLullo bribed and coerced them into making false written and tape-recorded statements against Valentine.

“I just told them whatever they wanted to hear so I can go. It was all lies,” Higgins said during Valentine’s 1998 trial. 

“Everything you said was a lie?” asked prosecutor James Clark. 

“Yeah,” Higgins responded. She had had an outstanding arrest warrant at the time that Greene had pressured her into giving a statement, she said.

“And all of these lies were because Joe Greene was going to put you in jail for a larceny sixth arrest?” the prosecutor continued.

“Yeah,” Higgins said.

“That was the only reason you lied?” the prosecutor asked.

“No, I was on drugs then,” she said. Higgins was a cocaine addict. She said the officers bribed her with drug money. After she gave her statement at the station, she said, Greene and DiLullo gave her $50. They took her to a package store on Whalley and Orchard Street, where she bought a six pack of Heineken and cigarettes for $10. Then they drove her home, where she went and bought four bags of cocaine with the remaining $40.

“I know Joe Greene threatened me, and he’s a crooked cop,” Higgins said. 

The other witness, Regina Coleman, said detective Greene would go to her house to harass her, demanding she give a statement against Valentine, even though she told him she was not at the diner when the shooting took place.

“Then he just kept telling me that, ​‘You know you was there. You just tell me what you seen and what happened,’ and I said I wasn’t there. I was not there,” Coleman testified.

Just as with Higgins, Greene promised to pay Coleman ​“whatever I wanted,” she said. Eventually she caved to the pressure and gave a written and taped statement that Valentine was the shooter, she said. At the trial, she testified that when the tape recorder was off, the detective would feed her information he wanted her to say, including that she saw ​“Daryl standing at the corner and firing them guns and getting to the blue vehicle — the blue Buick.”

“I gave him what he wanted to hear,” Coleman said.

“How do you know that’s what he wanted to hear?” asked the assistant state’s attorney, Michael Pepper.

“Because he was harassing me. He kept telling me —”

“What did he keep telling you?” Pepper interjected.

“He was telling me about letting a guy get off the hook for something like this, and you should make a statement because that’s not right for — that’s not right for someone to do this to the guys, to think about the people’s families,” she said. 

The prosecutor subsequently argued Higgins and Coleman were unreliable witnesses who recanted their original, truthful taped and written statements when they ​“realized really that they were putting themselves into what they perceived as danger by identifying somebody in a double homicide.”

“Isn’t it a fact, madam, that you are afraid to be here because you are a witness in a double homicide and you’re afraid to confront the defendant in this case?” prosecutor Pepper asked Coleman.

“No,” she replied.

“Do you understand that you’re accusing a sworn officer of the New Haven Police Department — do you understand what you’re accusing a sworn officer of the New Haven Police Department of, madam?” the prosecutor asked. Both officers testified during the trial and denied any bribery or coercion had taken place.

The jury believed the prosecutor’s story. To win the case, the prosecutor played into stereotypes of a black man harassing witnesses into recanting statements against him, all while tapping into their trust in authority: that police officers were honest men with years of experience and a career to protect, and that Valentine’s lawyer was trying to ​“excite the passions of the jury about their being bad police officers out there.”

“Twenty-seven years on the force,” the prosecutor said. ​“They are going to perjure themselves for one case where you got three odd witnesses? Doesn’t seem real likely, does it?

“For his arguments you have to find that they perjured themselves … They are evil. That’s what you have to find. I don’t think you’re going to do that. Doesn’t make any sense.”

What The Jury Didn’t Hear

The allegation that detectives Greene and DiLullo coerced Regina Coleman and Christina Higgins into giving false statements might have made more sense to the jury if they had been allowed to hear that both detectives had previously been successfully sued by people who were wrongfully arrested by them.

In both cases, witnesses had recanted the statements they initially gave to the police, saying they had lied earlier. 

In 1996, a jury awarded an African-American man named Erik Ham $1.4 million — the most a Connecticut court has ever given at the time in a wrongful arrest case — for a wrongful arrest by Greene and the then-head of the investigative services unit, Michael Sweeney. Two witnesses who gave statements identifying Ham ultimately recanted them. Witnesses described the shooter as a dark-skinned man, about 5 feet 5 and stocky; the police arrested Ham, a light-skinned African-American who towered at 6 feet 5 and was thin, weighing 165 pounds. 

In another case, the second detective on Valentine’s case, DiLullo, was found to have included false statements and omitted exculpatory statements in an arrest warrant. In 1984, a man named Anthony Golino was arrested and charged with stabbing an ex-classmate, Penny Serra, to death inside New Haven’s Temple Street Garage. On the eve of his trial, Golina was exonerated, thanks to a DNA test that showed his blood did not match that of the killer’s. Golino sued the city for $43 million in 1993 for malicious prosecution. In court, DiLullo admitted that, in the arrest warrant, he misquoted witness statements and entirely excluded a parking attendant’s testimony in which they identified someone else entirely as the killer. A different man was arrested in 1997 and ultimately convicted. 

Ullmann, Valentine’s public defender, sought to question the detectives on their past misconduct in both trials. But both times, the judges blocked him from doing so. The judge in the second trial said, ​“I just don’t think that the matters on which you wish to cross examine Detective Greene are in any way relevant to his veracity. I think it would lead to great confusion on the part of the jury.” 

As such, Valentine’s jury never heard about Greene’s and DiLullo’s history of wrongful arrests. Instead, they heard the two stalwart police officers testify on the stand with their polite ​“yessirs” and ​“no sirs,” and believed them against the testimony of the two women: Coleman, a drug addict, and Higgins, who was nervous, easily confused and said ​“I don’t know” or ​“I can’t remember” or ​“I’m not sure” about 268 times during the trial.

It isn’t hard to understand why the jury members, who are allowed to consider subjective criteria such as the demeanor and manner of the witnesses in deciding whether they are reliable, favored the version of the truth claimed by the state and the police over the version of the truth claimed by Valentine, Higgins and Coleman.

Another tactic used by the New Haven Police Department in the 1980s and ​’90s was the deliberate destruction of witness statements by officers. In a 1989 appeal by a man named Anthony Williamson, who was charged with a robbery conviction, the court contended that ​“this case presents us with no less than our sixth occasion since 1981 to consider whether the New Haven police department’s destruction or loss of a witness’ statements requires the striking of the witness’ testimony in an ensuing criminal trial.”

A Reunion Behind Bars

Throughout Valentine’s two trials, his 9‑year-old son, who then grew into a 13 year-old young man, was sitting in the gallery.

The younger Daryl Valentine shares his father’s name and his warm brown eyes. He remembers his father would turn around during the trial to give him an encouraging smile, a smile that Daryl Jr. would come to learn hid even the deepest sorrows.

Daryl Jr. grew up in the Edgewood neighborhood of New Haven. He said that as he took on the ​“street mentality,” violence and aggression became his default. 

“Growing up on this side of the world without my father — I don’t blame him — but I think it took its toll,” the younger Daryl said. ​“My mom didn’t have much help. That’s a lot of the reasons why I felt I had to go out and kinda grow up before my time.”

He ended up in juvenile detention at 14 on gun charge. He was charged as an adult, sent to Manson Youth Institution, a high-security facility for boys aged 14 to 21 until he was 16.

When Daryl Jr. was a teenager being charged at the New Haven high court, Tom Ullmann, his father’s trial lawyer, would come visit the younger Valentine in the bullpen. Daryl Jr. remembers that Ullmann would take his shoulder, and say, ​“Your father is going to be all right. It’s hard, I know it’s hard, but your father is gonna be all right, and he is innocent.”

The younger Valentine said he takes full individual responsibility for his actions. ​“My dad and my mom helped me understand that with my choices in life come with payment,” he said.

Daryl Jr. was a member another generation of young Black men growing up with their fathers in prison. In her book The New Jim Crow, Michelle Alexander writes, ​“More African American adults are under correctional control today — in prison or jail, on probation or parole — than were enslaved in 1850, a decade before the Civil War began. The mass incarceration of people of color is a big part of the reason that a black child born today is less likely to be raised by both parents than a black child born during slavery.”

“You’re going to be just like your father,” prison staffers repeatedly told Daryl Jr. in juvenile detention and later, an adult in prison.

Hearing those words made him mad. For one, he wanted to be like his father, whom he knew as an honest, caring man, who sent him his favorite Chicago Bulls basketball gear on birthdays, whom he had never seen get angry and who he didn’t believe could commit murder.

For another, Daryl Jr. believed his father was innocent.

The first time the elder Valentine would be reunited with his son since his arrest would be in MacDougall-Walker Correctional Institution in 2011. Daryl Jr., then 27, had just been convicted on a felony gun charge. He was about to serve a year and a half with his father, who was arrested when Daryl Jr. was 4.

In the property room, as the younger Daryl had handed over his possessions to be sealed and stored away for the duration of his sentence, the property worker noticed his last name, grinned, and said, ​“You DV’s son?” 

“Yes I am,” Daryl responded. 

“Aw man, your father talk about you all the time,” the worker said. That made Daryl feel good. He felt his dad was proud of him regardless of his conviction. It also made him feel sad, because it reminded him how his father did not get the life he deserved.

The father-son reunion took place along the prison corridor, as Daryl Jr. and Daryl Sr. were each being taken someplace that neither of them can remember anymore. They locked eyes. Daryl Jr. saw recognition, confusion, hurt, shock and happiness dawn on his father’s face. The elder Mr Valentine asked the correctional officer, a lieutenant named Smith, for time with his son. Smith gave them five minutes. 

Daryl Jr. said he had never been too proud to hug or cry. So he hugged his father, tears in eyes.

Daryl Sr. was dry-eyed; he did not want to show tears to his son. He did not want him to see behind the front he put up with his smile. He never told
Daryl Jr., but he did tell his sister, that he was heartbroken to see his son in prison with him. 

In prison, Daryl Jr. got to know his father again.

The man three cells down from him had no money to buy food for his cell. When Daryl Jr. told his father about it, the elder Valentine put together what people in the prison called a “‘care package” — a bag of soups, chips, cookies, peanut butter and jelly, and other food. He asked a correctional officer to pass it to him.

When Daryl Jr. wrote to his father saying he was hungry, Daryl Sr. realized his son didn’t have any commissary provisions. The elder Valentine bagged ​“everything, underclothes, I had in my possession,” he said. He bought candy, ramen noodles, coffee cups, bowls, and everything else he imagined his son might need to keep moving, and sent it to his son’s cell. 

Daryl Jr. learned from his father to fight with his pen and his words, not with his fists. While in MacDougall prison, Daryl Jr. would often get excruciating migraines. When they came, he would lash out and ​“cut someone out to fight,” he said. His father penned a set of instructions for him, explaining how to write a formal medical grievance to ask the prison’s health services for more medication and to see a doctor. Jr. copied his father’s instructions out on a sheet of paper. The approach worked.

The father and son pair would spend time together in the prison library, a large space with books in every section and cameras on every corner. Under sunlight streaming through what Daryl Jr. called the ​“church windows,” the father-son duo would talk about Daryl Sr.’s ongoing habeas corpus petition, the legal arguments, and how the court refused to unseal the court records of Christopher Roach, whose witness statement Daryl Jr. said ​“nailed my father.”

Star Witness’s Turn

On the fifth day of Valentine’s second trial in 1998, the prosecution called its star witness to the stand: Christopher Roach, who was shot in the forearm by the man who killed his two friends.

Roach said that on that night seven years prior, he looked at the shooter and recognized him as Daryl Valentine, the same man who was sitting in the courtroom that day in a brown sweater and collared shirt. 

This is where the question of what the truth, again, gets complicated. When he was interviewed the morning of the murders, Roach was ​“uncooperative.” Two days later, he refused again to give a statement. Two weeks later, when he finally gave a statement, he said he had blacked out from alcohol the night of the shootings and didn’t remember anything. He said he was unable to identify his own assailant.

On Oct. 5, just two weeks after the shooting, he shot at the house where Tyrone Adams lived with his girlfriend, Daryl Valentine’s sister, Tolja. Tolja still remembers crawling through the kitchen, pregnant, with Adams, to hide in the neighbor’s house. Two years later, in early 1993, he was extradited to Connecticut from Georgia on charges of attempted assault and reckless endangerment for the 1991 shooting of Tyrone Adams’ house. For the crime, he faced a mandatory minimum sentence of five years and a maximum of 27 years and three months imprisonment

While awaiting prosecution, Roach told the detectives Greene and DiLullo that he now remembered who shot him at the diner two years prior.

It was Daryl Valentine, he said in a tape recorded statement. The 1991 statement was a lie, he claimed.

All charges connected to Roach’s crime against Adams were dropped shortly thereafter. 

An unreliable witness like Roach, alone, would not be able to derail justice. The state would also need an accomplice — in this case, a court that prevented his unreliability from coming to light before the jury, so that the jury would still believe their testimony.

During the trial, Crystal Greene, Christopher Roach’s relative by marriage on his mother’s side, testified for the defense under oath but outside the presence of a jury, that she had met Roach outside a club, Page One Cafe, in September or October 1993. At this point, Roach had given the police a statement that Daryl was the shooter. She testified that Roach told her, ​“Somebody has to pay the price; somebody has to go.” She testified that in a second conversation at New Haven’s Union Station, Roach said, ​“I can’t say Daryl did it. I didn’t see who did it.”

The first trial court blocked her from testifying before a jury, an act which a 1997 appeal court later ruled to be a trial abuse and which resulted in the reversal of the first trial decision. By preventing Crystal Greene from testifying that Roach told her he did not know the identity of the shooter, the appeal court found, the trial court committed harmful error and bolstered the credibility of Christopher Roach, who was the key witness who identified Valentine as the murderer. 

So a second trial took place. In that trial, Roach said Greene was lying.The jury was left to decide whether they believed Roach or whether they believed Greene.

Ultimately, the state prosecutor convinced the jury that Tyrone Adams’ ​“allegations” against Roach that his house was shot at were just that, allegations; and that the ​“accusations [were] later thrown out in court.” Only then, the prosecutor’s story went, did ​“Roach [feel] secure enough to name Daryl Valentine and does so as the shooter.”

The jury found Valentine guilty of all three charges. 

“Ultimately I think the jury just got it wrong,” said Vishal Garg, Valentine’s current lawyer. ​“That’s the first error and maybe the fundamental error. And the legal system does not have a way to fix that.”

Today, as the nation debates police accountability, misconduct and allegations of racism in the jury system, the question remains about what we owe to men and women like Daryl Valentine who may have been convicted and imprisoned for life on the basis of police and judicial practices that society has long deemed reprehensible. 

Redemption?

For Valentine to be exonerated now, either new evidence needs to come to light, or courts have to rule that some other legal error was harmful enough to justify a retrial.

Alternatively, he could be granted a commutation of his sentence by the state’s Board of Pardons and Paroles. The board alone hse the authority to issue a pardon or commutation for any offense against the state.

Valentine’s lawyer, Garg, said it is difficult to free Valentine because there was no forensic evidence in this case, no DNA evidence to be tested that could prove him innocent, no weapon for the murder that was ever found.

Valentine has filed two petitions for a writ of habeas corpus, which is a request to be released from unlawful detention. Both petitions have been denied, the first in 2005, the second in 2021. Garg is now appealing the second denial. ​“I’ve kind of learned to accept that habeas cases almost always lose,” he admitted.

Daryl Valentine is most proud of his son for staying out of prison for five years and counting. Ever since the younger Valentine met his wife in 2017, he has kept him out of trouble. They got married in November, moved out of New Haven into a peaceful neighborhood in Derby. Unlike the two to three-bedroom house Daryl grew up in, their current home is a five-bedroom apartment, with an upstairs and downstairs. He has a backyard, two grills, and bikes for their four boys. 

When Daryl Valentine Sr. entered prison, he was a 23-year-old new father. Now he is a grandfather whose body hurts when he works out. An old foot injury still pains him. He has met his son’s two youngest children in the prison’s visitation room; he couldn’t stop staring at them the whole time. As his baby grandson, also named Daryl, played with his glasses, he kept repeating, ​“He looks like me. He looks like me!” He sends the grandchildren birthday cards, just as he sent his son a Chicago Bulls gear when Daryl Jr. was a kid. He sent his Covid-19 stimulus check to his nephew and son, $100 for each child. 

“He’s fighting with his pen and mentally,” said Daryl Jr. ​“He’s studying law. He ain’t give up. That’s a fighter. That’s a person who, I feel, is innocent.”

The last time I spoke to Daryl Valentine Sr., he said he was surviving. But he sounded depressed. As the conversation wore on, his sentences grew shorter and the pauses longer.

I asked him what he wanted readers to know about his case.

“Know that I’m not the monster that the state says I am,” he replied, his voice breaking. ​“I did not commit this crime.”

I asked him what he has lost during his three decades in prison.“Miss I lost my grandmother on Christmas Day,” he began. ​“Miss…I can’t talk right now … OK … I’m gonna go.” 

A click, a crackle, and an automated voice announced, ​“The caller has hung up.”