prosecutors

NY Man Wins $4.5 Million Settlement After Being Wrongly Convicted By Dishonest Prosecution

Evidence shows that NYPD detectives colluded with prosecutors to falsely convict of a man of a deadly drive-by shooting in 1993.(AP/Mary Altaffer)
Ruddy Quezada, a 54-year-old man wrongfully convicted of a deadly drive-by shooting in 1993, has won a $4.5 million settlement from New York state, according to court papers.
Quezada spent 24 years in prison for murder before winning his freedom in 2015 when, after decades of failed appeals, the Brooklyn district attorney’s office conceded that prosecutors involved in his case had withheld critical evidence during his trial.

Debtors Prison Not a Tale of Charles Dickens

Once you’re labeled a felon, the old forms of discrimination — employment discrimination, housing discrimination, denial of the right to vote, denial of educational opportunity, denial of food stamps and other public benefits, and exclusion from jury service — are suddenly legal. As a criminal, you have scarcely more rights, and largely less respect, than a black man living in Alabama at the height of Jim Crow. We have not ended racial caste in America; we have merely redesigned it.
– Michelle Alexander, author of The New Jim Crow