News Item
"The New York Times" featured former Pace Law Prof. Adele Bernhard in "‘No One Would Listen’: Cleared of Murder, After 33 Years in Prison"
"The New York Times" featured former Pace Law Prof. Adele Bernhard in "‘No One Would Listen’: Cleared of Murder, After 33 Years in Prison"
For four decades, Keith Bush insisted he had been convicted as a teenager of a murder he did not commit: strangling a 14-year-old girl in Bellport, N.Y. The police, he said, had beaten him and forced him to sign a confession that he had never read.
While imprisoned, he had enlisted the help of a lawyer at Pace Law School, who sued to obtain records and unearthed evidence showing Mr. Bush had not gotten a fair trial. Even after he was released from state prison on parole, Mr. Bush continued to fight to clear his name.
On Wednesday morning, 44 years after his arrest, Mr. Bush was exonerated in Suffolk County District Court in Riverhead, Long Island. The Suffolk County district attorney, Timothy D. Sini, asked a judge to throw out the conviction, saying prosecutors never told the defense the police had interviewed another possible culprit.
“I cannot give you that which was taken from you in the 1970s, but what I can restore to you today is your presumption of innocence,” Judge Anthony Senft Jr. told Mr. Bush.
Mr. Bush, now 62, wore just a hint of a smile. “I am truly humbled by this decision,” he said. He told the judge he had lived a long time in pain. “No one would listen,” he said. “No one would at least hear me out.”
Mr. Bush was only 17 years old in 1975 when he was charged with the murder of Sherese Watson, a teenager who never returned home from a house party in Bellport, N.Y. She was found in a vacant lot, strangled and sexually abused. Mr. Bush was arrested four days later and signed a confession to the crime.
At trial, the jury believed the confession, though he insisted from the outset it had been coerced. Another partygoer who had testified she saw Mr. Bush leave with the victim that night recanted her testimony at a hearing five years later, saying she had never even been to the party. But it did not lead to a new trial.
In 2006, Mr. Bush wrote to Adele Bernhard, then a lawyer running a clinic at Pace Law School, from the Green Haven Correctional Facility in upstate New York. He was innocent, he said, and he hoped she would help him prove it. He had written similar letters to other lawyers.
Ms. Bernhard was interested in his case immediately, she said, after reading the statement he had signed.
“It was internally inconsistent,” she said. “The facts that they put in it, the words that they use, none of it rang true.” His statement did not match forensic evidence about how the girl had died, she said.
Ms. Bernhard discovered that the DNA underneath the victim’s fingernails did not match a sample Mr. Bush had given in prison. She also re-interviewed the witness who had recanted her testimony about seeing Mr. Bush with Ms. Watson at the party.
But a judge denied her 2008 motion to vacate the conviction, and turned down her request for additional testing on clothes and other crime-scene evidence.
Ms. Bernhard persevered. Over the next decade, she went back to key witnesses, analyzed fiber evidence, pored over the confession and did more research on the detectives involved. She also filed a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit to obtain records of the case.
Those records contained evidence that the police had another possible suspect for Ms. Watson’s murder — another young man at the party named John W. Jones Jr.
In a statement, Mr. Jones, who has since died, told the police he had stumbled over Ms. Watson’s body in the empty lot after leaving the party drunk, Mr. Sini said. He also said a comb found next to her body looked like one he had dropped.
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