Aliyya Swaby Photo
Bloss and Morant in court Wednesday.
After serving 21 years of a 70-year sentence, Stefon Morant will walk free as soon as this week — the second man released from prison thanks to revelations about a New Haven cop with connections to the drug trade.
At a hearing Wednesday morning in state Superior Court on Church Street, Judge Patrick Clifford ordered that Morant’s sentence be changed to time served and that he be released.
The decision came less than three weeks after Morant’s co-defendant, Scott Lewis, passed the final legal hurdle in his own court appeals to win his permanent freedom.
Thus one of New Haven’s highest-profile police misconduct dramas came to a close for two men imprisoned for decades based on the work of a detective, Vincent Raucci, who was revealed to have framed them for a spectacular double murder: the shootings of former New Haven alderman Ricardo Turner and his lover in their bed in 1990. The case’s delayed outcome comes amid a nationwide reexamination of black defendants’ treatment by the criminal justice system, fueling the #BlackLivesMatter movement.
An FBI investigation produced evidence that, amid deep involvement in the cocaine trade (independently confirmed in other documents), Raucci may have coaxed shaky witnesses to provide the crucial testimony used to convict Morant and Lewis. Until the past month, however, the state’s attorney’s office had pushed to keep them both behind bars.
On Wednesday morning, New Haven State’s Attorney Michael Dearington told Judge Clifford that he agreed with Morant’s lawyer, William Bloss, that Morant should now be released.
Morant’s brothers, wife, mother, niece, nephew and close family friends filled one side of the court’s benches, waiting for hours to see the judge decide on his case. They clutched each other and sobbed with relief after Bloss deciphered the judge’s decision outside the courtroom.
“He’s coming home,” Bloss told them. “He’ll need some help.”
“We were overwhelmed and joyed that victory is here for us. We’re speechless. We’ve been fighting this fight for a very long time,” said one family member (pictured in orange above), who declined to give her name.
Bloss said the paperwork for Morant’s release will go to Cheshire Correctional Institution, whose officials will calculate the amount of time he has served with the amount of good time credit he earned.
“We believe he will be discharged soon,” in the next few days, Bloss said.
In court, Dearington cited “numerous herrings” when explaining why the state agreed to release Morant on time served. “It’s public information that the police officer involved put him up to contriving the story,” he said in court Wednesday. “The state agrees to the resolution.”
Later Dearington said he acted because of “the information that’s now public about Raucci and [retired police Lt. Michaell] Sweeney” that Sweeney had observed Raucci coaxing the case’s key witnesses to fabricate a statement. Sweeney’s testimony about that fact in federal court proved central to judges’ decisions that Scott Lewis be released.
Morant’s appeals were always more challenging than Lewis — because unlike Lewis, Morant had given police a confession that he committed the murder. He later insisted Raucci had pressured him to invent that confession; until now the state did not accept that story.
Bloss Wednesday asked the judge to cut down Morant’s 70-year sentence to a total of 25 years — the minimum sentence for his charges, which he has now served counting time for good behavior.
Morant, who was charged and tried separately from Lewis, had exhausted his direct state appeals and filed his own federal habeas corpus application in 2009. That application is pending. Wednesday’s sentence modification will resolve the application, Bloss said.
“It is our belief that with statutory good time and the amount of credit he has to date that he will be effectively immediately released,” Bloss said.
“We felt this was the best outcome,” Dearington said later.
“The state made a reasonable and responsible decision in light of all that has happened. Mr. Morant is very much looking forward to starting a new life,” Bloss said. He said he has a “high degree of confidence in the support” his family will give Morant after his release.
Click here for a detailed account of the FBI revelations and the specifics of this case, from a 1998 exposé in the now-defunct New Haven Advocate. And click here to read the full FBI report, which covered wide ground about New Haven’s drug trade.
Paul Bass Photo
Scott Lewis, center, with attorneys Brett Dignam and Richard Emanuel.
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Hey Trust and the rest of you Pro Police People.What do you have to say about this?