New York man freed after 19 years in prison for robbery he didn’t commit

NEW YORK (AP) — A man who spent nearly two decades in prison for a roughly $550 robbery was exonerated and freed Monday, after prosecutors said they now agree he didn’t commit the crime.

“It cost me 20 years, but they said they corrected it now. So that’s all that matters. So I’m good with that,” Kenneth Windley, 61, said as he left a Brooklyn courthouse, at liberty for the first time since 2007.

A judge threw out his conviction and dismissed his case entirely, at the request of both prosecutors and Windley’s lawyers. Prosecutors said new evidence — including confessions from two other men who were convicted of similar robberies — supported his longstanding claim of innocence.

“This case is really a cautionary tale of how things can seem one way but, without careful analysis, not be what it purports to be,” Brooklyn District Attorney Eric Gonzalez, a Democrat, said after shaking Windley’s hand outside court.

“Had we known what the evidence was, this case should have never happened,” he said, adding that he had apologized privately to Windley.

Windley was arrested in 2005, after buying a stove for his mother with a money order that turned out to be stolen.

It had been snatched from Gerald Ross, 70, by two thieves who followed him home from a trip to a bank and a post office. The thieves put Ross in a chokehold and took money orders, cash, and a bank book from him, prosecutors said in a report released Monday.

Ross regularly got money orders for his rent and life insurance payments at that post office, which helped him and authorities follow a paper trail after the robbery. The trail soon led to Windley, who had given his name, driver’s license and address when purchasing the stove at an appliance store.

From the start, Windley said he had nothing to do with the robbery. He said he’d simply bought a $542.77 money order at a discount from a couple of acquaintances, who insisted that it was valid but that they couldn’t use it for a bureaucratic reason.

“He was duped,” one of Windley’s lawyers, David Shanies, told the court Monday.

Ross identified Windley in a lineup as one of the thieves, and a jury convicted him in 2007 of robbery. Because of prior felony convictions, he was sentenced to 20 years to life in prison. His appeals failed.

Early on, Windley told prosecutors what he knew about the men who sold him the money order: their nicknames, and some information about their legal names. After his conviction, a friend and private investigators helped him fleshed out the men’s identities and persuade the men to come forward about what had happened, according to the D.A’s report.

In sworn statements and then in interviews with D.A.’s office representatives, the two men said that they had robbed Ross together and that Windley was not involved, according to the report. It called their admissions “compelling.”

It doesn’t give their names, referring to them only as “Suspect 1” and “Suspect 2.” Both are serving prison time on other robbery convictions, according to the D.A.’s office. Those convictions all involved male victims in their 60s and older who were followed home from banks and check-cashing offices in Brooklyn in 2005 and 2006.

If the jury had known those men’s identities and robbery records, the information would likely have raised reasonable doubt about the charge against Windley, prosecutors concluded.

No new charges have been brought in the case. The legal timeframe for bringing charges ran out years ago, and Ross has died.

Windley, heading off Monday afternoon to celebrate with his family, said he wasn’t bitter about what he’d been through

“I’m just going to move on from there,” he said.