The Last Resort Exoneration Project at Seton Hall University School of Law has won the freedom of two men wrongly convicted of a double murder in Camden in 1995.
The two men, Kevin Baker and Sean Washington, have served almost 25 years in prison for a crime they have steadfastly maintained they did not commit. Imprisoned since 1995, Baker and Washington were serving life sentences with no parole eligibility for 60 years.
The Last Resort Exoneration Project is headed by Director Lesley Risinger and her husband, Associate Director D. Michael Risinger.
After a New Jersey Appeals Court unanimously overturned the verdict against the two men, the Camden County Prosecutors Office reversed course and announced that "in consultation with the Office of Public Integrity and Accountability within the Attorney General's Office," it would move "to dismiss the indictment against Kevin Baker and Sean Washington and retract its notice of intent to appeal this case to the New Jersey Supreme Court."
In so doing, the Prosecutor removed the last barrier to freedom for Baker and Washington and the two men were freed from custody on Lincoln's Birthday, February 12.
Prior to this case, Lesley Risinger has been involved in winning the exoneration of two men in two different cases without the help of DNA evidence – one even before she attended law school at Seton Hall. With the release of Baker and Washington her total now is four.
D. Michael Risinger, the John J. Gibbons Professor of Law Emeritus at Seton Hall University School of Law, served for 25 years as a member of the New Jersey Supreme Court Committee on Evidence; a life member of the American Law Institute, he is considered one of the foremost evidence scholars in the United States.
The Last Resort offers free investigative and legal services to the convicted innocent of New Jersey. Specializing in cases in which DNA evidence is not a factor, the project faces significant hurdles in seeking exoneration for those it believes are factually innocent. The Risingers, with the help of investigators, ballistic experts, forensic pathologists, students and former students, had been working on the case at hand for the better part of a decade.
"Without DNA evidence the road to justice and freedom is uphill– and it's a very big hill," said Lesley Risinger. "But if the DNA exonerations have taught us anything, it's that the system can be fundamentally flawed, and all too often innocent men and women pay the ultimate price," she said. "But it is virtually impossible that these errors in the justice system occur only in cases that lend themselves to DNA analysis. In fact, statistically it is likely that there are more convictions of the innocent in cases without DNA proof – and like this one, are primarily reliant on flawed witness testimony."
At the end of December 2019, a three-judge panel of the New Jersey Court of Appeals unanimously decided that the two men be given a new trial, noting in its opinion that "our independent review of the record, in light of the newly discovered evidence, compels us to conclude it would be unjust to allow this verdict to stand."
Lesley and Michael Risinger represented Baker on the appeal, and Lawrence Lustberg of Gibbons PC represented Washington on appeal. Four New Jersey exonerees were represented as amici by Raymond M. Brown, and three innocence organizations, The Innocence Project, the Exoneration Initiative and the Innocence Network, were represented by Linda Mehling.
In vacating the sentence of the two men, the court said:
In reaching our determination today, we are very mindful of the passage of time and the serious proof difficulties the State faces if it chooses to proceed with a new trial. That is an unfortunate practical reality. But it cannot overcome the compelling reasons to grant defendants the relief they deserve.
Elaborating on "the serious proof difficulties" the State would face, the court noted that:
Viewing the totality of the evidence, the 'new' evidence – particularly the forensic evidence, in context with the State's weak trial proofs that hinged so vitally upon [a single witness] account – was material and probably would have changed the jury's verdict.
Describing the single witness account, David Porter wrote an Associated Press story, described the case along with the holes in the State's "one witness case," made clearer by the forensic evidence presented by Lucien C. Haag, who was qualified as an expert in ballistics, firearms identification, wound ballistics, and shooting incident reconstruction, and Dr. Michael Baden, a prominent expert in forensic pathology. In the AP story Porter writes:
The pair was convicted of the 1995 murders of two people outside a Camden housing project. The primary witness against them, Denise Rand, was a drug addict who was the only person to observe the shooting but whose testimony was inconsistent. A cousin who said he was with her and told police she couldn't have seen the shootings wasn't called to testify by the defense.
After numerous appeals were rejected, in 2013 two forensic experts testified at a hearing that Rand's account of seeing Baker and Washington run up to the victims, shoot them in the head and run away was wholly inconsistent with one of the victims' wounds. One expert also testified that specialized testing not in common use in 1996 led him to conclude that the bullets had struck the ground and ricocheted before hitting one of the victims.
The shooting as described by Rand "was, in essence, a 'run-by shooting,'" the court wrote. "By contrast, the new forensic evidence shows it likely was an execution-style killing, in which at least one victim was forced to lie on the ground before being shot."
The court noted numerous other facts that supported Washington and Baker's exculpatory accounts, particularly highlighting the distraught 911 call reporting the murders, made by a person identified as Sean Washington, as well as the discovery of a film clip of a TV news show that corroborated the alibi of Kevin Baker.
"It's taken nearly 10 years of our lives and the help of many, but it's done," said D. Michael Risinger. "Now we'll focus on reentry. It's been a long time and the world has changed significantly while these two men were buried under an unjust verdict and a life sentence."
Republished courtesy of Seton Hall University. Photo: Lesley Risinger and D. Michael Risinger