nothin Framed “Killer” Is Free At Last | New Haven Independent

Framed Killer” Is Free At Last

Paul Bass Photo

Lewis (center) celebrates his freedom Friday with his lawyers.

Unlike Michael Brown, unlike Eric Garner, unlike Tamir Rice, unlike Walter Scott, Scott Lewis has his life back.

Lewis savored his first full day of freedom Friday after spending decades alleging — with the support of an explosive FBI report about a New Haven detective’s connections to the cocaine trade — that a crooked cop framed him for the 1990 murders of former Alderman Ricardo Turner and his lover in their bed in a Hill apartment.

Lewis spent 18 years in prison. He’s been out of jail since February 2014, wearing an electronic ankle bracelet with a GPS monitor, while the state appealed a federal judge’s granting of Lewis’s habeas corpus petition.

On May 14 a second federal judge, writing for a three-judge panel, upheld that ruling. Then Assistant State’s Attorney Mike Proto informed Lewis’s attorney Thursday that Connecticut will not pursue the case further.

So on Friday Lewis, who turns 50 in July, packed up the bracelet to return it to the state — and resume the new life he’s been building as a husband and a real estate agent. He can now travel out of Connecticut without the state’s permission.

It’s still seeping in,” he said during a conversation over a cup of white mocha with a shot of espresso at B Natural Cafe on Orange Street. I always envisioned this day. I always knew it would come. I just didn’t know when.”

A law professor named Brett Dignam, a public defender-turned criminal defense attorney named Richard Emanuel, and 40 law students from Yale and Columbia devoted countless hours over more than five years to Lewis’s case. Lewis’s freedom offers an optimistic counter-narrative to the stoires of slain unarmed African-American men like Brown, Garner, and Rice, poster ghosts for a new #BlackLivesMatter movement rallying against racism in the criminal-justice system.

Dignam said Friday she hopes it inspires more attorneys and law students to take up cases like Lewis’s.

There are more of these stories,” Dignam said. But they take a lot of work.”

Why You Go To Law School”

That’s an understatement.

For years, Lewis (pictured Friday) did that legal work largely alone, researching the law from prison and mounting a series of state appeals.

Lewis was one of two drug dealers sent to prison in effect for life for allegedly carrying out one of the most sensational murders in recent New Haven history. A jury found Lewis guilty of shooting a former New Haven alderman-turned-drug-dealer named Ricardo Turner and his lover in their bed in 1990. He was sentenced to 120 years behind bars.

Lewis protested his innocence from the start. An FBI investigation subsequently revealed evidence that suggested a crooked cop involved in the cocaine trade set up Lewis and his co-defendant, Stefon Morant, for a murder they didn’t commit. The report was a damning indictment of not just police work in Lewis’s case, but police complicity in the drug trade, with connections to the mafia. Revelations about the cop, Vincent Raucci, were independently substantiated in city records and interviews.

But the state remained convinced it had prosecuted the right killers — and fought Lewis’s and Morant’s efforts to go free. (In personal conversations over the years, the cop, Vincent Raucci, has repeatedly denied the allegation of framing Lewis.)

Lewis kept battling for his freedom from behind bars, representing himself in legal challenges. Even a Cheshire prison guard accustomed to protestations of innocence from guilty inmates believed his story, and developed an ongoing friendship.

But a procession of seven state judges, leading up to Connecticut’s Supreme Court, rejected Lewis’s appeals on a variety of procedural grounds. They and prosecutors were unmoved by the fact that Lewis had not been able to use, in his original defense, a police report in which a cop (a future chief named Francisco Ortiz) revealed that a trusted source had heard a local drug dealer nicknamed Bullet” confess to the crime. Or testimony by a (now retired) police lieutenant, Michael Sweeney, that he had observed Raucci coach the state’s key witness to make up his story, and that he had confronted Raucci to try to stop him.

At one point Lewis sent a letter from jail to Richard Emanuel, the former public defender who as a private attorney had won the freedom of another wrongly accused inmate in a landmark Connecticut case. Lewis had read up on that case, about how Emanuel had made new law in winning the right to have DNA evidence tested. Lewis asked Emanuel to help him.

Emanuel hesitated. These cases,” he said, are hard to do.”

But Emanuel found Lewis’s letter very thoughtful,” the pro se brief he’d enclosed very good.” He had read about Lewis’s case. He visited Lewis in jail — and was hooked.

This,” said Emanuel (pictured), is why you go to law school.”

Soon Emanuel was negotiating with the state to have DNA tested and trying to track down Bullet. With the help of a private investigator, he found Bullet in a Hill laundromat on a Sunday.

The investigator handed Bullet a subpoena; Bullet threw it on the ground. But Bullet now had to show up at a court hearing, where Lewis, acting as his own attorney, questioned him under oath. (Bullet denied committing the murder; he acknowledged having had dealings with Turner.)

Meanwhile, Emanuel convinced the state to have a key witness view a photo array; she promptly picked out Bullet’s photo as that of the man she saw at the property at the time of the murder. But she said she was only 60 percent” sure. After Lewis’s mom, Ruth Lewis, raised $10,000 to cover the cost, the state also tested blood samples from the scene. The conclusion was that the DNA matched the victims’.

It wasn’t enough to free Lewis. But Lewis now had more than a dozen folders of useful information for his next step: appealing to the federal court for his freedom.

Enter The Professor

He filed on his own for a writ of habeus corpus. The first federal judge to consider it, Robert Chatigny, decided Lewis needed some help. In 2009, Chatigny’s clerk contacted Brett Dignam (pictured), then a clinical professor at Yale Law School.

Attorneys are reluctant to take on these cases. They’re notoriously hard to win.

Dignam hesitated. I don’t like to get into cases where there’s no hope. It gives clients false expectations,” she said. And the procedural issues in this case were particularly complex. This would take a lot of time.

Also, she had already told Yale she was planning, after 18 years teaching there, to take a new job soon at Columbia’s law school.

However, the case intrigued her. She, too, had read about it. The FBI report in particular interested her. If the FBI devoted 22 months to this investigation, she figured, there’s got to be something there.”

She signed on. She and her students — first at Yale, then at Columbia — spent years interviewing witnesses, poring through and recreating thousands of pages worth of filings, researching the law.

They prepared three arguments: That the key witness had committed perjury; that the suppression of the Bullet police report had deprived Lewis of the right to present a fair defense; and that the state violated Lewis’s rights under the 14th amendment of the U.S. Constitution to have access to exculpatory evidence to make his defense. The last item is called a Brady” claim under the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision in the case Brady v. Maryland. The basis for that claim in this case: the withholding of Lt. Sweeney’s testimony about the fabricated witness statement.

Ten Yale students, then 30 Columbia students, took turns working on the case. All traveled to meet Lewis in prison.

Lewis said he connected with all of them. Like Dignam and Emanuel — and unlike previous lawyers he had fired, preferring to represent himself — they listened to him, Lewis said. They were eager to get to the bottom of what was gong on. The help that I needed had finally arrived. They listened to what I had to say” before dictating” to him what he should do. He called the students my angels.”

Dignam’s team made its first arguments before U.S. District Court Judge Charles S. Haight Jr. in October 2011. More than a year-and-a-half of brief-writing and subsequent hearings ensued until the main event, an eight-day evidentiary trial in June 2013. Two months before the trial, the state produced 20 boxes of documents from the Lewis and Morant cases. A scramble was on.

We spent four days going through the boxes,” Dignam recalled. We were able to put more pieces of the puzzle together.”

Haight issued his ruling in December. It was a 68-page smoker: Not only did Haight side with Lewis’s team that Sweeney’s testimony was crucial, supporting the Brady claim; but he tore into the seven Connecticut judges who thwarted Lewis’s quest for justice. (Click here to read the judge’s decision.)

Realty

Lewis outside court with his mother Ruth after the federal appeals hearing.

Game over? Not quite.

Lewis remained in jail while the state filed an appeal to the judge’s habeas decision and weighed whether to seek to retry Lewis for the murders in case the habeas decision prevailed. Then, on Feb. 14, 2014, lawyers on both sides worked out a deal for Lewis to leave prison and return home pending that habeas appeal, and the judge ordered Lewis freed, for now. With an ankle monitoring bracelet in place. (Click here to read an interview with him upon his release.)

The state allowed Lewis to travel to Cape Cod last summer to get married. Meanwhile, Lewis obtained his real estate license and began working for Century21. (He has since moved to Robert Hoskie’s Outreach Realty firm.)

And he never lost faith. Even when the state appealed Haight’s ruling to a three-judge panel, seeking to send Lewis back to jail.

Wearing a charcoal-grey suit, white shirt, Florsheim loafers, and a look of quiet, determined confidence, Lewis and his family showed up in a crowded room on the second floor of the U.S. District Court on Church Street last October to watch Dignam and the state’s attorneys argue over his fate one last time before a three-judge panel. (Read about that here.)

The judges considered the case for close to another seven months. They issued their ruling two weeks ago — upholding Haight’s decision.

The state had 14 days to decide whether to appeal the case again.

On the 14th day, at 10:02 a.m., the assistant state’s attorney emailed Dignam.

[T]his office,” he wrote, has decided not to pursue this matter further.”

Scott Lewis was free.

#AccountabilityMatters

Contributed Photo

Lewis didn’t learn that right away.

Nor did Dignam. She was visiting with a different client at a different prison, preparing for a parole hearing. She found the email message when she returned to her Columbia office in the early afternoon. She emailed Lewis with the good news.

He didn’t receive it right away, either. He had his phone on vibrate; he and his wife Racelle work at home, and he tried to keep the noise down as he reviewed his real-estate clients’ files.

Some people might have been checking email every 10 minutes, if this were the deadline day for them to learn about the rest of their lives. Lewis was accustomed to make-or-break dates in his decades-long quest for justice; he’d learned not to expend energy” worrying about the news. Some things you can’t control. You’ve got to wait for it to happen,” he said.

When a half hour later he did see the message, he exclaimed, Sweetheart! Look!”

Does that mean it’s over?” Rachelle asked.

I believe so.”

The probation officer responsible for his monitoring informed Lewis over the phone that, yes, it was over. Lewis could remove the ankle bracelet.

Which he promptly did, as Rachelle captured the moment (pictured above).

Scott Lewis hasn’t marched in any of the #BlackLivesMatters rallies. He hasn’t followed the related stories on the news. He’s been too busy, he said, with his work, with rebuilding his life.

But he does see a lesson for the movement in his case. It lies in the example of Lt. Sweeney, who had the courage to cross the thin blue line. Sweeney’s testimony convinced the judges to give Scott Lewis his life back.

There’s good police. There’s bad police. People make poor judgements, because we’re all human. There has to be some responsibility taken by good police.’ They have to hold their brothers accountable.” Similarly, communities facing mistreatment by law enforcement nevertheless have to hold their own members responsible, as well, for misbehavior.

Click here for a detailed account of the FBI revelations and the specifics of this case, from a 1998 expose 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.

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