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| Hope for the Wrongfully Convicted |
| By nytimes.com |
| Published: 11/23/2009 |
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In a recent 79-page decision, a Manhattan judge could well have stopped after the first four sentences of his concluding paragraph and still conveyed his main point: that Fernando Bermudez was no longer guilty of murder. Instead, the judge, Justice John Cataldo of State Supreme Court in Manhattan, tacked on a fifth sentence that ended with two powerful words: “actual innocence.” By going further than merely finding that the murder conviction was wrongfully obtained — and by ruling unequivocally that Mr. Bermudez, of Washington Heights, did not commit the crime he had spent the past 18 years in prison for — Justice Cataldo injected hope into a movement. To the layperson, the distinction might seem nuanced, if not trivial. But to advocates for the wrongfully convicted, Justice Cataldo’s decision, which was released Nov. 12, clawed toward what they viewed as a groundbreaking push to get New York State courts to focus more on the content of evidence, rather than procedural roadblocks. “The Bermudez case, this dramatizes the need to ensure that actual innocence is established as a legitimate ground for a hearing,” State Senator Eric T. Schneiderman, a Manhattan Democrat, said. Read More. |
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