Brooklyn Man Is Exonerated After 25 Years in Prison for Murder

When police officers came upon the body of Neda Mae Carter in a park in Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn, 25 years ago, her face and neck were battered, her arms splayed and her legs straight, in the pose of a crucifixion.

A man named Andre Hatchett would be convicted of second-degree murder, based on the testimony of a man who claimed to have witnessed the killing.

On Thursday afternoon, prosecutors in State Supreme Court admitted what Mr. Hatchett had maintained since his arrest: that he had not killed Ms. Carter.

“Mr. Hatchett was failed by almost every institution he came into contact with during the course of his prosecution,” Mark Hale, who leads the Brooklyn district attorney’s Conviction Review Unit, told a courtroom crammed with Mr. Hatchett’s friends and relatives.

A wide smile spread across Mr. Hatchett’s face and the audience burst into applause as a judge vacated the conviction and dismissed the indictment, carrying out the joint request from prosecutors and Mr. Hatchett’s legal team, which includes lawyers from the Innocence Project.

“I’ve been to hell and back, but it feels good to be free,” Mr. Hatchett said, his arms draped over his sisters as they walked through Downtown Brooklyn.

Mr. Hatchett is the 19th person exonerated in Brooklyn since the district attorney, Ken Thompson, took office in 2014 and bolstered efforts to review questionable convictions. Mr. Hatchett’s case had taken place during the tenure of Mr. Thompson’s predecessor, Charles J. Hynes, who had created a review unit but was faulted for not acting promptly in resolving questionable cases and for standing by prosecutors accused of misconduct.

Before his arrest, Mr. Hatchett was a new father and an ice delivery man living in an apartment in Bedford-Stuyvesant with his mother. Now 49, Mr. Hatchett has spent nearly 25 years behind bars. While in prison, he lost both his parents, as well as a son.

Seema Saifee, a staff attorney at the Innocence Project, said a confluence of forces had doomed Mr. Hatchett.

“This case involved a perfect storm of error — bad defense counsel, an unreliable witness, critical evidence that was never disclosed to the defense,” Ms. Saifee said.

When the killing occurred, on Feb. 18, 1991, Mr. Hatchett was 24 and hobbling on crutches after being hit with bullets in the throat and leg as a bystander in a shooting the previous year. He had an I.Q. of 63, with the reading and writing ability of a first grader, according to lawyers from the Innocence Project.

Mr. Hatchett and Ms. Carter had seen each other earlier on the evening of the murder, in a rooming house where his aunt lived alongside Ms. Carter and her mother. Mr. Hatchett gave Ms. Carter money to buy crack, his lawyers said in an interview. She left around 9:30 p.m. and never returned.

Though he cooperated with the police and provided an alibi, Mr. Hatchett was arrested and convicted almost entirely on the testimony of a career criminal named Gerard Williams, who said that he had seen, from 30 to 40 feet away, Mr. Hatchett striking a body on the ground in the park that night.

Mr. Williams offered the account after he was arrested in connection with a burglary a little over a week after the killing, and after having initially identified someone else as the killer — information the prosecutors never gave the defense, as was required.

The defense itself was so incompetent that a judge declared Mr. Hatchett’s first trial a mistrial. But even at the second trial, Mr. Hatchett’s lawyer failed to present evidence of his intellectual disability or of the fact that his injuries would almost certainly have prevented him from striking Ms. Carter with the force Mr. Williams had described or lugging her body across the park while leaning on crutches.

“It’s frightening how easy it is to convict an innocent person in this country,” Ms. Saifee said. “And it’s overwhelmingly difficult to release an innocent person.”

Barry C. Scheck, a founder of the Innocence Project, praised Mr. Thompson’s office for working tirelessly with Mr. Hatchett’s team, which also included a lawyer from Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison LLP, on their efforts. “Without this collaboration, Mr. Hatchett would likely still be in jail,” Mr. Scheck said.

Lawyers from the Innocence Project said that cases similar to that of Mr. Hatchett could be avoided with the right legal safeguards in place, though many proposed changes have languished in Albany for years.

The New York Legislature is considering legislation combating the roles that eyewitness misidentification and false confessions play in wrongful convictions. A 2016 proposal by Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo would mandate, among other regulations, that the police record interrogations of suspects in most violent-crime cases.

“I just know I’m not the only one,” Mr. Hatchett said. “There’s still a lot of innocent people in jail.”

Still, the moment demanded celebration. As Mr. Hatchett walked with his family to a Dallas BBQ restaurant for a steak dinner, he began planning a move with his sister Christal Hatchett-Simmons to a house in Pennsylvania.

“I can already see it,” he said. “My future.”

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