Three men wrongfully imprisoned for 28 years for a New Orleans murder have been freed after prosecutors agreed with defense attorneys that their conviction was based on shoddy evidence and the involvement of two corrupt police officers.
Kunta Gable, Leroy Nelson and Bernell Juluke were released from prison on Wednesday night after a New Orleans judge threw out their convictions in a fatal 1994 drive-by shooting.
"Mr. Juluke maintained his innocence from the moment of his wrongful arrest. I am relieved that he has finally been vindicated, if dismayed that it took so long," said Juluke's attorney, Mike Admirand of the Southern Center for Human Rights.
"Nothing can make up for the three decades Mr. Juluke and his family lost because of his wrongful conviction, but thanks to the Court’s action yesterday, at least they will have their future together," Admirand said.
Prosecutors and attorneys for the three men filed an agreement with the court stating that they had been found guilty in March 1996, based on the testimony of a single witness who got the color of the car involved wrong.
That agreement also cites the presence at the crime scene of two New Orleans police officers who were later found to have helped cover up murders for drug dealers and to have manipulated evidence in the case.
At an emotionally charged post-conviction hearing on Wednesday, prosecutors for the Orleans parish district attorney’s civil rights division presented evidence in court that linked the 1994 murder to disgraced former police officers Len Davis and Sammie Williams. Records revealed the pair were the first officers present at the scene of the shooting.
Prosecutors also unveiled additional evidence of innocence, involving the testimony and credibility of the lone eyewitness to the shooting, which had been withheld from the defense at trial.
Davis, who is currently on federal death row after being convicted on multiple civil rights charges, became a key target in an FBI undercover operation in the mid-90s as it emerged the patrolman was a lead enforcer in a protection racket for city drug dealers operated by corrupt police officers. During the investigation, Davis was recorded on a wiretap commissioning a hit on a woman named Kim Groves, who had filed a brutality complaint against his partner Williams. Groves was murdered less than two months after the Santinac killing.
On Wednesday, prosecutors told the court that Davis and Williams were the first to arrive on the scene of Santinac’s murder, just two minutes after the shooting and before any of the officers dispatched by 911 operators had arrived. This behavior, they argued, followed a pattern of covering up for the drug dealers they were providing protection for.
“They [Davis and Williams] would go to the scene to make sure they [their criminal associates] were not caught,” said Emily Maw, the chief of the Orleans parish civil rights division. “They would arrive at the scene before the dispatched officers … Given the clear record of that, that came out only weeks after the defendants were tried in this case, it is clear to the state that this is a wrongful conviction.”
Davis was the only officer to provide any description of the alleged assailant and immediately called in a suspect’s name, an alias he associated with Bernell Juluke, according to a joint motion and exhibits filed in the case.
“The state won a conviction against three teenagers that came from the actions of NOPD officers that we knew were actively contributing to the record homicide rate that the residents of this city were suffering through in 1994,” Maw added, as the three men watched proceedings over Zoom from Angola prison and members of their family wept in court.
“The injustice in this case … is further compounded by the fact that for all these years these three defendants have cried out for someone to look into this case and no-one has.”
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