Two Brooklyn friends who spent decades in prison for murdering a French tourist in Times Square on New Year’s 1987 were finally cleared of the charges Wednesday.
Eric Smokes, 56, and David Warren, 53, were teenagers when they were arrested for the fatal mugging of 71-year-old Jean Casse on W. 52nd St, which unfolded moments after the ball had dropped on New Year’s Eve.
Both men, who grew up together in East New York, insisted that they were innocent — ut they were convicted at a trial in July 1987 based on eyewitness testimony from other teens.
Warren was released from prison in 2007, and Smokes in 2011, Manhattan prosecutors said.
While he was locked up, Smokes received a letter from the prosecution’s key witness in the case — a 16-year-old at the time of Casse’s murder — admitting he had lied to a detective by claiming Smokes had told him that he had “caught a body,” the New York Daily News reported.
In fact, the then-teen had only identified Smokes in order to convince police to take it easy on him for his own unrelated mugging case, the letter said, according to the newspaper.
Smokes and and Warren’s attorneys uncovered other flaws in the prosecution’s case as well. But the Manhattan District Attorney’s Office, under then DA Cyrus Vance Jr., refused to back the pair’s bid to vacate the convictions — which was first denied in 2020 — even in light of this evidence.
“Anger, disappointment, hurt, pain, because we’ve been dealing with these same issues for 33 years and we still haven’t got justice,” Warren, now 53, said when asked by NBC News what he was feeling after the 2020 denial.
Current Manhattan DA Alvin Bragg ordered the case to be reopened soon after taking office in 2022.
Judge Stephen Antignani vacated the convictions against the two men at a hearing in Manhattan Supreme Court Wednesday after Bragg’s office joined defense lawyers for Smokes and Warren in calling for the case to be tossed.
“Eric Smokes and David Warren lost decades of their life to an unjust conviction,” Bragg said in a statement Wednesday. “I am inspired by the unyielding advocacy of Mr. Smokes and Mr. Warren and hope that today’s decision can finally bring them a measure of comfort and justice.”
The DA’s office’s Post-Conviction Justice Unit interviewed more than 20 witnesses and found several gaps in the case that Bragg’s office said were new — including that someone who a purported eyewitness to the fatal robbery claimed was with him at the time now maintains he was never at the crime scene.
Smokes and Warren also an alibi — that they were elsewhere in Times Square on the night of the crime — which several friends corroborated, Bragg’s office said Wednesday. The teenager alleged eyewitnesses who testified at the pair’s trial also had stories full of contradictions, the DA’s office said.
An attorney for Smokes and Warren did not immediately comment Wednesday on whether the pair planned to file a lawsuit against the city in light of their convictions being tossed.
