New York City To Pay $6.25 Million To Man Exonerated In 1989 Killing
NEW YORK (CBSNewYork/AP) -- New York City will pay $6.25 million to a man who spent nearly 25 years in prison before being exonerated for a crime that happened while he was on vacation out-of-state.
City Comptroller Scott Stringer said Tuesday that settling Jonathan Fleming's claim was "in the best interest of all parties.''
"We cannot give back the time that he served, but the city of New York can offer Jonathan Fleming this compensation for the injustice that was committed against him,'' Stringer said.
New York City To Pay $6.25 Million To Man Exonerated In 1989 Killing
Fleming filed notice last year that he planned to sue the city for $162 million.
Fleming's lawyers, who praised the city for moving expeditiously, said the settlement will let him build a new life.
"The swift settlement will enable Jonathan and his family to build a new life without the painful and costly prospect of further litigation,'' attorneys Paul Callan and Martin Edelman said.
Fleming was released last year after the Brooklyn district attorney's office agreed his alibi in the 1989 fatal shooting was valid.
Defense attorneys and prosecutors asked a Brooklyn judge to dismiss Fleming's conviction after a key eyewitness recanted, new witnesses implicated someone else and a review by prosecutors turned up a hotel receipt putting Fleming in Florida hours before the killing, defense lawyers said last year.
"He was in his 20s when he went to prison. He's in his 60s now. Four kids have grown up without him," Callan told WCBS 880's Marla Diamond.
From the start, Fleming told authorities he had been in Orlando, Fla., when a friend, Darryl "Black" Rush, was shot to death in Brooklyn early on Aug. 15, 1989. Authorities suggested the shooting was motivated by a dispute over money.
Fleming had plane tickets, videos and postcards from his trip, his lawyers said, but authorities suggested he could have been in New York at the actual time of the shooting, and a woman testified that she had seen him shoot Rush.
The eyewitness recanted her testimony soon after Fleming's 1990 conviction, saying she had lied so police would cut her loose for an unrelated arrest, but Fleming lost his appeals.
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