Earlier this month, Derrick Hamilton stood in the State Supreme Court in Brooklyn, New York as his 1991 murder conviction was vacated. The hearing capped more than two decades of his filing motions, sending letters and securing affidavits arguing his innocence. “Mr. Hamilton never for one second doubted his own ability to convince a court of law he was innocent,” one of the defense lawyers who has worked on his case, Scott Brettschneider, said in court. “His capacity to turn out legal work was astounding.” From the spectator section, Mr. Hamilton’s daughter, Maia, 2, placed her doll next to her on the wooden bench. Also watching were men who are fighting their convictions or who have had their convictions vacated, holding “Wrongfully Convicted” caps that Mr. Hamilton had made up: Sundhe Moses, Jonathan Fleming and Kevin Smith. Mr. Hamilton, 49, who was paroled in 2011, was one of the first to notice that there were troubling similarities in convictions involving a former police detective, Louis Scarcella. Mr. Hamilton discovered that Mr. Scarcella would often use the same eyewitness and produce confessions that defendants said were coerced or false. To learn about the law, Mr. Hamilton took a paralegal course from prison and began researching his case, both on his own and with outside lawyers’ help. “I just couldn’t do anything else,” he said in an interview. “I wasn’t a guy that worked out because I didn’t have time to work out. I made motion after motion after motion after motion.” At Auburn, he got a job at the law library, where he joined a group of men also working on their convictions. Daniel Rincon, convicted of a 1991 quadruple murder in Manhattan, was the letter writer; he would summarize cases in neat narratives and send letters to journalists and lawyers. Shabaka Shakur, convicted of a 1988 double murder in Brooklyn that Mr. Scarcella worked on, was the researcher, looking up case law and helping hone arguments. Nelson Cruz — whose 1998 Brooklyn murder conviction came in part because of the work of Mr. Scarcella’s longtime partner, Stephen W. Chmil — would sketch out crime scenes, illustrating where witnesses and victims stood. Once a week, in the afternoon, they would write their names on the law library sign-in sheet and take their seats at tables with a security officer stationed above them. Mr. Hamilton would put up a chalkboard and distribute handouts about whatever they would be working on that day. Some days, they would dive into a recent ruling, like the Supreme Court’s decision on actual innocence in the 2009 Troy Davis case. Some days, they would analyze a recent article in The New York Law Journal. They received instruction on how to use the legal-research service Westlaw. And at just about every meeting, they would work on one of their members’ legal motions or letters or responses or arguments. Once Mr. Hamilton was released on parole, he helped persuade others, like Mr. Moses and Mr. Smith, who had also been paroled, to make this a public cause. Mr. Hamilton has been a regular presence at hearings about innocence claims since then and is helping prisoners and former prisoners with legal aspects of their cases. Other members of the “actual innocence team,” including Mr. Rincon, Mr. Cruz and Mr. Shakur, are all still fighting their convictions from prison. “I sit there to watch the proceedings because when I see things, I’m going to talk about them; I’m not going to be quiet,” Mr. Hamilton said. Seeing the injustice at his own trial, he said, “taught me that I have to be involved.”
Posted on: Tue, 20 Jan 2015 12:05:01 +0000
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