Life After Prison: Exonerations in NYC

By Vandana Rambaran

           

     On Jan. 25, 2017, Johnny Hincapie, a Queens native who had spent 25 years in prison for murder, stood outside a Manhattan courthouse, tears in his eyes.  

 

     In 1989, Hincapie was convicted of stabbing Brian Watkins, a 22-year-old Utah man, on a Manhattan subway platform. But on this sunny winter day, at last, a State Supreme Court judge had dismissed the charges that had led to his imprisonment. There would be no new trial. Hincapie was free.

           

     “I can finally put this behind me and not ever have to worry about this. I never have to look back, ever again. I can finally move forward with my life,” Hincapie said.

           

     But can he?

 

     Just over a year earlier, Hincapie had

been released from prison, his sentence

overturned after Manhattan District

Attorney Cyrus Vance Jr. decided that the

passage of time, the death of a key

prosecution witness, and unreliable

identification lineups made ordering a

new trial impractical. Now, Hincapie has

been formally exonerated, one of 240

exonerated people released from prison in

New York State since 1989, according to the

National Registry of Exoneration.

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     Hincapie says he is readjusting to life after prison, and it hasn’t been easy. He hasn’t found a job or a home, and he has not been able to shake the stigma of prison.

 

     He has learned that being exonerated sometimes isn’t enough. Living life as a free man comes with a new set of challenges, and he has received little help. Governments seldom offer financial assistance and support programs to exonerees.

 

     “Re-entry is afforded to the exonerated,” Hincapie said, “but re-entry is focused on the guilty.”

In New York State, more than 30 wrongful convictions have been attributed to false confessions by the defendant, and at least 150 involved some form of official misconduct, according to the Innocence Project, a 25-year-old organization that investigates allegations of wrongful conviction.

           

     Hincapie was convicted in 1989 when he was 18 years old. He says he was beaten and coerced by law enforcement officials into confessing to Watkins’ murder. Six other people, some of them friends of Hincapie’s at the time, were also convicted in the slaying.

           

     “The coercion and oppression that I faced from corrections officers, these are things I want to put behind me,” he said. “It’s painful.”

           
     Hincapie said his onetime friends had implicated him. Two days after the murder, he was taken into a room inside a Queens police precinct. When he told officers that he had been at the same subway station the night of the murder but wasn’t involved, was only looking for a friend, they did not believe him. One officer “went into a rage,” Hincapie said, and started beating him up while he was handcuffed to a chair.

           

     “He told me that if I wasn’t going to comply with his request to confessing and memorizing the story, I wasn’t going to make it out of that precinct alive,” Hincapie said. “I wanted to be driven back home, so I had to memorize the story. I was in fear for my life.”

           

     Hincapie’s confession robbed him of most of his early years as an adult. Now, with freedom facing him, a new set of challenges awaits.

 

     “Being released from prison with nothing, to coming home and starting life again after 25 years and trying to readapt and going through these measures of life where there are certain setbacks or disappointments, it’s hard,” he said.

 

     Lonnie Soury, a New York City-based communications expert who has long championed exoneration, played an integral role in freeing Martin Tankleff, a Long Island teenager who was convicted of murdering his parents in 1990. Soury says wrongful convictions place the imprisoned at a major psychological disadvantage in the future.

 

     “When someone spends decades in prison, they never recover. The psychological impact, the impact on the family is permanent,” Soury said. “They’ve lost their stages of development. They go in when they’re teenagers and come out when they’re 40 and 50 and in some ways are still teenagers.”

 

     Hincapie has tried to navigate his freedom, applying for a job as a parent coordinator at a local public school, for jobs at several nonprofit foundations and to government agency jobs as an advocate and counselor for children and adolescents. His search has been arduous and unsuccessful.

 

     “People still don’t want to give jobs to people that were in prison, whether you’re innocent or guilty,” he said.

 

     Shabaka Shakur, who was wrongfully convicted in 1998 of a double homicide and sentenced to two consecutive 20-years-to-life sentences, said that despite being exonerated, the stigma of his imprisonment hasn’t left him.

 

     He spent 27 years in prison before an appellate court dismissed the charges against him, and he was exonerated in 2015. He has since opened a restaurant with his partner, David Hamilton, who was wrongfully convicted in a separate crime. The restaurant, called Brownstone Restaurant and Bar, is located in Downtown Brooklyn and has become a beacon in the community for talent shows, festivals, concerts and more. 

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    Despite his successful business, Shakur said he still faces prejudices, even from his own landlord.

 

     “He says, ‘These are two ex-felons running a restaurant in which they hire other felons to work.’ In his mind, regardless of what was said about us not committing the crime, we’re still felons—felons hiring other felons,” Shakur said.

 

     Marilyn Reyes-Scales, who spent two years in jail on drug charges, said a hindrance to finding jobs for formerly incarcerated individuals convicted of a felony used to be “the box.”

 

     “That box that says ‘Have you ever been convicted of a felony?’ That has always been the one thing stopping me from starting my life,” she said.

 

     Reyes-Scales became an activist and a leader for a state  policy reform known as “Ban the Box,” or the Fair Chance Act, which eliminated that question from job applications, college and graduate school applications, and financial-aid applications to make it easier for the formerly incarcerated to obtain jobs after imprisonment.

 

     Still, Hincapie said, although exonerees do not have to check “yes” to this question, there are tools far more prevalent in today’s changing society that alert employers to a person’s previous conviction, even if it was wrongful and unjust. Online searches conducted by companies turn up articles and news coverage of an individual’s history, a legacy that lasts forever even when a conviction is overturned.

 

     “It’s been disappointing,” Hincapie said. “It has a psychological affect.”

 

     Vikrant Reddy, senior research fellow at the Charles Koch Institute, describes these barriers to re-entry into society as “collateral consequences of incarceration.”

           

     For all the years lost and the collateral damage, the law affords exonerated individuals the right to file a civil claim for reparations. However, the success of these claims varies.

           

     “New York, unlike most places, has a good but far from perfect compensation system,” Ron Kuby, Hincapie’s lawyer, said.

 

     Kuby, a criminal defense and civil rights lawyer who has worked to overturn many high-profile wrongful convictions, explained that exonerated individuals have two routes to obtaining government compensation. If the conviction was brought about by police or prosecutorial misconduct—for example, a police beating in order to obtain a coerced confession—the claimant can file a civil suit asserting a claim against the City of New York under both state and federal tort and constitutional law in federal court. To do so, the defendant must prove that he was legally wronged by law enforcement agents and that the legal wrong caused the claimant to suffer substantial damages.

 

     According to the National Registry of Exonerations, at least 166 exonerations were recorded last year in the United States, with at least 70 of them involving some form of official misconduct.

In these scenarios, the New York City courts will seriously evaluate the claim for early settlement. Kuby said many claimants are willing to settle for less than what they deserve for an immediate payout to lessen the time they spend fighting a civil lawsuit.

 

     “We’re poor,” Shakur said. “$200,000 a year, which is typical in a settlement, is a lot of money, and honestly, you have to wonder, ‘If I hadn’t went to prison, would I ever have seen this much money in my lifetime?’”

 

     If the case proceeds to trial, claimants not only may win the full extent of the reparations they deserve based on their particular circumstances, but also the city becomes responsible for reimbursing attorneys’ fees as well. The lawyers receive a third of the winnings in any civil reparations case.  

 

     For people who cannot or will not claim that official misconduct was a factor in their cases, the burden is on the claimants to prove that they are innocent and did not contribute to their own convictions.

 

     “Essentially, it is a no-fault statute for the innocent; you don’t have to prove that anything was done wrong by the government,” Kuby said.

 

     Regardless of the money, people still need help adjusting to life on the outside.

 

     “There are parts of my life that I’ll never get back,” said Shakur, now 52. His mother died five years before his release, and his father died shortly after from dementia. Neither of his parents got to see his innocence proven.

 

     “How do you repay someone for that? It’s impossible,” he said. “Money helps, but it doesn’t solve the problems. It just makes you comfortable within the problems, but you still have those problems.”

 

     

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

     

 

 

 

 

With the advent of modern digital technology as well as the gentrification and significant decline in crime rates in New York City neighborhoods, exonerated individuals can find they have a hard time fitting in.

 

     “I have a hard time socializing with people on the street even now,” Shakur said, nearly two years after his release. He was held in a maximum-security prison. wrongfully convicted for shooting two of his friends, and has found it difficult to transition to life after prison.

 

     In prison, he said, “It’s a violent environment. Trouble always finds you.” Now that he’s free, “It’s completely different to talk to people now, and it’s scary.”

 

     Unlike individuals who were guilty of a crime and released, exonerated people do not get a parole period. They are not afforded programs that aid them in getting jobs, securing housing or learning how to integrate into society again, as a parolee would.

 

     For people like Hincapie, exoneration has not been enough to win him a new life. His name was cleared, but his past still haunts him as he struggles to move forward.

 

     “I never thought when I left prison that I’d need the help, psychologically and in other things, that people told me I needed,” Hincapie said.

 

     Shakur said that even after his release, he was in a perpetual state of paranoia that hasn’t completely subsided to this day. “I would always go from the lawyer’s office to my house to somewhere where there were lots of people to say ‘He was here’” he said, never wanting to be implicated in a crime he didn’t commit ever again. “It’s sad, but the fear was real to me.”

 

     Hincapie said feelings of fear and self-doubt plague him, too. “Now I realize I need help, and I don’t know where to go to get it,” he said. 

 

     Still, exonerees like Shakur insist that these issues can be overcome if exonerated people band together. He credits his activism for helping him cope. He speaks at rallies and spreads awareness about civil rights issues and police misconduct to prevent wrongful conviction from happening to someone else.

 

     “No person who has been wrongfully accused should feel alone,” he said. “You have to reach out. You have to make sure it never happens again.”