Unyielding in His Innocence, Now a Free Man

POUGHKEEPSIE, N.Y.

SEVERAL times over the 26 years he spent in prison for the 1977 murder of a 92-year-old woman, Dewey Bozella was dealt a potential get-out-of-jail card.

In multiple plea-bargain offers during his trial in 1990 and in four subsequent parole hearings, confessing and expressing remorse for the crime could have given him a chance to go free. He did not bite.

“I could never admit to something I didn’t do,” said Mr. Bozella, 18 at the time of the crime, 50 now. “I realized that if I was going to die in prison because of saying I’m innocent, well that was what was going to happen.”

He said these things on Wednesday afternoon, outside the Dutchess County Courthouse, rain cascading down, finally a free man after a judge threw out his conviction.

Mr. Bozella’s exoneration culminated one of the too-familiar nightmares of the justice system — poor defendant, botched investigation, tainted testimony, withheld evidence. In this case, absent DNA evidence, it took a small miracle to make it happen: the case file saved by a police officer who said it was the only one he kept after retirement, figuring that the conviction was so problematic lawyers might want it someday.

Mr. Bozella was convicted twice — first in 1983, then at a retrial in 1990 — in the vicious murder of Emma Crapser, who was beaten, bound with an electrical cord and suffocated after coming home from a night of bingo. The first verdict was overturned after a court ruled that black people had been unlawfully struck from the jury. Mr. Bozella, who is black, had a history of petty crime at the time of the crime.

From the start, the case against him was so slim as to border on threadbare.

“This was without a doubt the most troublesome case in my legal career,” said Mickey Steiman, a veteran Poughkeepsie lawyer who, with his partner at the time, David Steinberg, defended Mr. Bozella. “We always genuinely believed Dewey was innocent.”

The prosecution relied almost entirely on the testimony of two men with criminal histories, both of whom repeatedly changed their stories and both of whom got favorable treatment in their own cases in exchange for their testimony.

There was no physical evidence linking Mr. Bozella to the killing. Instead, there was the fingerprint of another man, Donald Wise, who was later convicted of committing a nearly identical murder of another elderly woman in the same neighborhood.

Mr. Bozella would still be in prison except for a few lucky breaks. The first came in 2007, when he contacted the Innocence Project, a legal group that focuses on wrongful convictions. The group, after determining all the physical evidence had already been destroyed, asked the high-powered law firm of WilmerHale to handle the case on a pro bono basis. Ross E. Firsenbaum, a senior associate, said the firm’s lawyers had spent 2,500 hours — worth $950,000 at customary rates — on the case, the kind of representation almost never available to indigent convicts.

Among the people the lawyers interviewed was Arthur Regula, a retired Poughkeepsie police lieutenant, who surprised them by pulling out the case file. In that file, in other interviews and through Freedom of Information Law requests, the lawyers found numerous pieces of evidence favorable to Mr. Bozella that had not been turned over to his lawyers.

After reviewing the material, Justice James T. Rooney of State Supreme Court ruled on Oct. 14 that Mr. Bozella had been wrongfully convicted. “This court does not lightly disturb a conviction in such a serious case as this,” Justice Rooney wrote, but “the court, without reservation, is firmly and soundly convinced of the meritorious nature of the defendant’s application.” He called the legal and factual arguments “compelling, indeed overwhelming.”

That ruling set in motion Wednesday’s hearing, where the Dutchess County district attorney’s office, without expressing a view on Mr. Bozella’s innocence or guilt, said it did not have sufficient evidence to go forward with a new trial. Mr. Bozella was immediately released.

In prison, Mr. Bozella earned a bachelor’s degree and a master’s in theology, developed interests in the theater and became the light heavyweight boxing champion at Sing Sing. In 1996, he married a sixth-grade teacher, Treena Boone, whom he met when she was visiting her brother, an inmate at the prison. He said he hopes to work with children to steer them away from the kind of life that, he readily concedes, helped ensnare him in the case.

After the hearing, Mr. Bozella hugged his wife. He looked for a relative of Mrs. Crapser to whom he could express his sympathy. He hugged friends and his two trial attorneys, Mr. Steiman and Mr. Steinberg. He thanked all the lawyers who had worked on his behalf, and Lieutenant Regula for keeping the file. Those lawyers said the case raised troubling questions about preservation of evidence, funding for indigent defense and other aspects of the legal system, but also provided a lesson in courage and perseverance.

Mr. Bozella said that the lesson for others unfairly convicted was to pursue justice against all odds.

“If I’d given up, I wouldn’t be in the position I’m in now,” he said. There were times I wanted to sit down and cry. I’d say when does it end? When does it end? Today it finally ended.”