Not Guilty

Another victory for Justice, from our friends at the Innocence Project:


http://www.northcountrygazette.org/articles/100706ManFreed.html

Brooklyn Man Free After Wrongfully Convicted 21 Years Ago

BROOKLYN--- DNA tests prove that Scott Fappiano did not commit a rape in Brooklyn for which he was convicted in 1985. Twenty one years after he was wrongly convicted of rape, Scott Fappiano was released from prison Friday.

Fappiano was convicted based on significantly flawed eyewitness identification procedures and his innocence was almost impossible to prove because New York City's trouble evidence preservation system lost items that could be subject to DNA testing, according to the Innocence Project. Ultimately, the Innocence Project located evidence at a private DNA lab which had merged with another private lab that had received two items of evidence from Fappiano's case in 1989 and kept it in storage. A wealth of other evidence that could have been tested years earlier was never located in the New York Police Department's storage facility.Fappiano was released from custody after the Innocence Project filed a motion to vacate his conviction.

In 1983, the NYPD officer and his wife were asleep when a man broke into their home, restrained the man and raped his wife. At trial, the only evidence against Fappiano was an eyewitness identification from the rape victim, the cop's wife--an identification that was made in lineups that the Innocence Project said were deeply flawed and unreliable. The victim's cop husband viewed the same lineup but did not select Fappiano who was five inches shorter than the 5'10" perpetrator described by the victim.

Despite blood-typing tests which excluded Fappiano as the source of what police initially believed was critical crime scene evidence left by the perpetrator (cigarettes and stained clothing), the prosecution twice took the case to trial. At his trial in 1984, the jury could not reach a verdict, voting 11-1 for acquittal, and he was retried in 1985, when the jury convicted him. He was sentenced to a term of 20 to 50 years in prison.

"Scott Fappiano's case is the starkest yet in a long line of New York cases where innocent people were convicted based on eyewitness misidentification. In case after case, we have proven that faulty eyewitness identification procedures in New York lead to wrongful convictions", Innocence Project attorney Nina Morrison said. "Nobody can look at these cases and say there isn't a serious problem---yet New York still hasn't taken problems with eyewitness identification seriously and implemented reforms". The Innocence Project also said that the NYPD's inability to locate evidence in Fappiano's case demonstrates the urgent need to reform the city's system of collecting, preserving and retrieving such evidence.

Earlier this summer, another Innocence Project client, Alan Newton, was exonerated a full 12 years after he initially requested DNA testing. In his case, the evidence was finally located in the NYPD Pearson Place Warehouse, in the exact location it was supposed to be in the first place. On Tuesday, Oct. 10, the New York State Assembly Committee on Codes is holding a public hearing in Manhattan on evidence preservation and retrieval problems. Newton is expected to attend the hearing. "Scott Fappiano could have been exonerated more than three years ago, when the Innocence Project began searching for the evidence in his case, if the NYPD had adequate policies and procedures for its evidence warehouse", Morrison said. "New Yorkers have to wonder have many innocent people are sitting in prison because the NYPD can't find evidence that could be subjected to DNA testing". Indeed, the DNA which established Fappiano's innocence, a 23-year-old pair of sweatpants, were only located because a portion of that material happened to have been preserved outside the NYPD's custody. Last year, Orchid Cellmark Inc, a DNA laboratory based in Princeton, NJ, discovered two vials of DNA material containing spermatozoa from the perpetrator of the rape for which Fappiano had been convicted. The material had been submitted to a now-defunct DAN laboratory, Lifecodes, for attempted, but unsuccessful, DNA testing in the case in 1989, and, following a corporate acquisition of the former Lifecodes lab, Orchid Cellmark obtained and diligently catalogued dozens of boxes of Lifecodes' old DNA materials. New DNA teting by the New York City Medical Examiner's Office scientifically confirmed that the evidence came from this case and that Fappiano was not the rapist.

In New York City, the Innocence Project has six open cases and 17 closed cases where evidence in NYPD custody has still not been found after years of searching. At Tuesday's legislative hearing, the Innocence Project will share details about some of those case and the organization's efforts to work with NYPD leadership to resolve the systemic problems.There have been 183 DNA exonerations nationwide. In 75% of these cases, eyewitness identification played a role in wrongful convictions, according to the Innocence Project which is affiliated with Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law at Yeshiva University. 10-07-06
© 2006 North Country Gazette