Malisha Blyden & Latisha Johnson - Overwhelming Evidende

Blyden, Malisha AND Johnson, Latisha; attempted murder; NRE: mistaken witness identification, perjury/false accusation, [Johnson:] false confession, police officer misconduct, withheld exculpatory evidence, misconduct that is not withholding evidence, witness tampering or misconduct interrogating co-defendant, misconduct in interrogation of exoneree; "OVERWHELMING"

Suggestibility issues

[Blyden] [922:20]; 1st Dept. 4/19/11; affirmed

"[The prosecution's] case was overwhelming."

[The 1st Dept. 'justices' who signed off on this were Richard T. Andrias, David B. Saxe, Karla Moskowitz, Rosalyn H. Richter, and Sallie Manzanet-Daniels. ]

C23 "The elements common to many wrongful convictions -- young defendants, false confession, mistaken eyewitness identication -- converged in a Bronx case and forced two women to spend seven years behind bars for crimes they did not commit.

"Yet, Latisha Johnson and Malisha Blyden, who were sentenced to 40 years in prison for attempted murder, had the benefit of doggedly persistent attorneys and the luck to have the Bronx [DA's] office willing to consider that maybe, just maybe, the prosecution got it wrong back in 2007.

"The women's nightmare began with a misdialed phone number.

"In September 2005, a man met two women and brought them back to his apartment. The women spent the night and found in their host's cupboard what they thought was a fortune's worth of cocaine but was actually kassava flour. They left the following morning, but returned later with five men to pull off a robbery.

"According to a press release issued by the Bronx [DA] Robert Johnson at the time of sentencing, the victim was beaten, kicked, shot, bound, robbed, stuffed in a closet and left for dead. He suffered injuries requiring 15 surgeries and lingered in a coma for three weeks.

"When the victim awoke, and while heavily drugged with morphine, he told police that one of the women had used his cell phone. Police promptly checked the log of outgoing calls and discovered that one of the telephone numbers, which was unfamiliar to the victim, connected to a man named Tyrone Johnson.

"Johnson had an 18-year-old daughter, Latisha, who bore something of a resemblance to one of the women involved in the scheme. Police brought a photo array to the hospital, and the victim identified Latisha.

"Authorities caught up with Latisha Johnson a few weeks later when a transit cop cited her for playing music too loudly on a subway. She was accompanied at the time by Blyden, who looked something like the second woman. The victim identified Blyden.

"In the course of a roughly 24-hour interrogation, police elicited a 30-minute videotaped confession from Johnson in which she provided details that generally fit the facts as then known to detectives. Johnson implicated herself and Blyden.

"At trial, [ADA] Lawrence Piergrossi did not use Johnson's confession, apparently because, as facts later suggested, portions of it were inaccurate and seemingly contradicted other evidence in the case. Instead, the prosecution relied primarily on the victim's identification and the telephone call that allegedly tethered Johnson to the crime.

"Late in the trial, when discrepancies arose over the timing of phone calls on the victim's telephone, the prosecution for the first time handed over an unredacted log of the calls.

"Those records showed that the telephone number for Johnson's father was one digit different from a number the victim had called repeatedly, suggesting that the call led the police to focus on Latisha in the first place was a misdial. But it was apparently too late for the defense to make much use of the new information, and besides, the victim identified [Blyden and Johnson] as the perpetrators.

"With little else for the defense to use, Johnson and Blyden were convicted at trial of attempted second-degree murder, first-degree robbery, first-degree assault, first-degree burglary and second-degree criminal possession of a weapon.

"[County] Court Justice Megan Talmer sentenced them both to 40 years in prison. Johnson had rejected a six-to-eight-year plea offer and Blyden had refused a two-year deal."

[Thus, Johnson's sentence was about six times longer than the plea offer, and Blyden's was twenty times longer.]

"When the Office of the Appellate Defender (OAD) was assigned to represent Johnson on appeal, senior staff attorney Kerry Jamieson quickly latched onto the apparently misdialed phone number that set off the series of events leading to her client's conviction.

"For nearly three years, OAD worked the case, pounding the pavement, tracking down witnesses and interviewing anyone who would talk.

"The probe yielded evidence that the victim's former girlfriend, who had seen the women the victim brought to his apartment, had never identified [Blyden and Johnson]. OAD also interviewed all of the male defendants in the case, every one of whom said Johnson and Blyden were not the women who initiated the crime, records show.

"After conducting its own yearlong independent investigation, spearheaded by Piergrossi, the prosecutor who convicted the women, the [DA] agreed to release Johnson and Blyden and will move to dismiss the indictment on March 11.

"Jamieson said the wrongful convictions resulted from a perfect storm of coincidences and circumstances, all wrapped in a theory that police embraced from the start and would not let go.

"'It was really a confluence of a number of factors,' Jamieson said. 'One of the key problems in this case was the police had tunnel vision. They fixated on a phone number and they made everythng fit into that puzzle. That was the main problem in this case. The police failed to follow obvious leads.'"

[ Austin Babb synopsis says: "Detective [Steven] Smith had been involved in obtaining a false confession and several false witness identifications" in the Blyden/Johnson case.] from NRE synopsis (by Maurice Possley):

"Two of the men Johnson named as taking part in the attack had alibis and had been ruled out by police. Notably, [George] Peseo [the victim] had also incorrectly identified these same two individuals* during a photographic lineup."

[* The only plausible reason for this is that the detectives urged the victim to identify these two as perpetrators before they bothered to check whether they had alibis.]

"Prior to trial, the police tracked down Mario Nogueira, who told police that he and four other men had participated in the shooting of Peseo. Nogueira agreed to plead guilty to grand larceny,* and in return testified that Johnson and Blyden were 'party girls' who used the names Jackie and Lace and who had sex with men for money. Nogueira identified Johnson and Blyden as the women who had brought the men to Peseo's apartment. After she observed the two defendants in the courtroom, a witness who was oiginally subpoenaed to testify for the prosecution, informed the defense that the women on trial were not Jackie and Lace."

[* This was a much reduced charge, relative to the attempted murder, etc. charges he had been facing.]

[Blyden and Johnson were then convicted.]

"A motion to set aside the verdict was filed prior to sentencing and at a subsequent hearing, another witness testified that she knew Jackie and Lace and that Johnson and Blyden were not them."

"The defense interviewed a woman who was Peseo's girlfriend at the time of the attack. She told the defense attorneys that prior to trial, she told the police that she was in Peseo's apartment when both women were there. She said she told the police that Johnson and Blyden were not the women. This information was never disclosed to the defense by the prosecution.

"The new evidence was presented to the Bronx [DA's] office, which conducted its own investigation and re-interviewed witnesses. The investigation concluded that the lead detective, Steven Smith, had elicited a false confession from Johnson and five false identifications of Blyden and Johnson from three witnesses. Smith also obtained three false identifications of the two men who were alleged to be accomplices -- two from Johnson and one from the victim."

[So, this 'detective' was responsible for one false confession, and eight false identifications.]

"Blyden and Johnson filed federal lawsuits against the city of New York. They settled in March 2017 for $2,671,000 each. They also each received $900,000 in compensation from the New York Court of Claims.

"In 2020, Detective [Steven] Smith's failure to document reports of eyewitnesses who said that Austin Babb was not the gunman responsible for a murder led to Babb's exoneration."

[All emphases added unless otherwise noted.]