51 year-old Jonathan Fleming has been released by the court after a judge dismissed his murder case he was convicted for 25 years ago. The Associated Press said that New York prosecutors now finally agreed with him that he was more than a thousand miles away on a vacation at Disney World when his friend Darryl "Black" Rush, was fatally shot in Brooklyn in 1989. Fleming left a Brooklyn court on Tuesday as a free man after spending a quarter of a century in prison.
AP said that the dismissal of Fleming's case was due to the recanting of a key witness, a review of authorities' files on the Rush murder investigation, and the addition of newly-found witnesses who implicated someone else with the shooting.
Fleming in the beginning has since insisted that he was not in Brooklyn or nearby when Rush was shot to death in the early morning of August 15, 1989, AP said. Although lawyers Anthony Mayol and Taylor Koss said Fleming produced plane tickets, videos and postcards from his trip, prosecutors at that time posit that the accused might have made a quick trip to New York to do the alleged deed. Moreover, a woman testified that she had seen Fleming shoot Rush. AP said authorities had said that the a money dispute might be the motive of Rush' death.
After Fleming was convicted in 1990, the woman recanted her testimony, claiming that she only did it so police will be able to release her from an arrest unrelated to the case. Fleming, then, had lost his appeals, AP added.
A review petitioned by Fleming's defense lawyers to the state district attorney's office last year revealed that authorities overlooked witnesses who pointed someone else as the shooter, Fleming's lawyers have said. Moreover, documents such as Fleming's hotel bill he paid for in Florida and was found in his pocket on the day of his arrest, and a letter from the Orlando police to New York detectives saying that hotel employees remembered Fleming were not provided to the exonerated's initial defense lawyer. AP said that rules generally require investigators to turn over material that could possibly exculpate the defendant.
It is not known whether Fleming has plans to sue the state in light of the recent evidence that exonerated him from the fatal shooting of his friend. But when he was asked about his plans, AP quoted him as saying, "I'm going to go eat dinner with my mother and my family, and I'm going to live the rest of my life."
