Dozens of people convicted of drug possession, trespassing and other misdemeanor crimes are getting those charges cleared from their records, after the convictions were tainted by the investigative work of a former NYPD detective who later admitted to lying in court, according to court records.
During a brief hearing in Queens Criminal Court on Thursday, Justice Joanne Watters dismissed 46 convictions that relied on the testimony of ex-detective James Donovan, who pleaded guilty to perjury last year.
“The fundamental fairness and reliability of each of these convictions has been called into question,” Bryce Benjet, director of the Conviction Integrity Unit at the Queens district attorney’s office, said in court.
The newly vacated convictions are among 148 convictions that judges dismissed after reviews by the unit. Of those, 132 have been based on investigations of former detectives found guilty of crimes that undermined their credibility, according to the DA’s office.
The NYPD and the union representing city detectives did not immediately respond to requests for comment, but a police spokesperson confirmed that Donovan retired in 2023. Donovan’s attorney could not immediately be reached.
The gallery of the first-floor courtroom was mostly empty as Benjet told Watters about the case that first called Donovan’s police work into question. He said that in August 2021, Donovan testified before a Queens grand jury that he had found a loaded firearm the year before while arresting someone who was sleeping in a car.
Donovan described observing the man lying down in the backseat of a Hyundai Elantra with his eyes closed and said he recognized the man’s face from pictures he had seen, according to a transcript of his testimony. “I know it was him,” he said.
Donovan also described being “really quiet” and pulling the man out of the car, placing him in handcuffs and finding a pink and white firearm where the man’s head had been, the transcript states.
But the former detective later told a prosecutor working on the case that another officer had made the arrest and observed the gun outside of Donovan’s view, prompting the DA’s office to drop the charges, according to court records.
As a result of that false testimony, Benjet said, his unit conducted an extensive review of Donovan’s cases and found that 46 misdemeanor convictions tied to his time working in the 103rd Precinct should no longer stand, because the “essential witness” — Donovan — was no longer reliable.
“This is a matter of both constitutional importance as well as accountability,” Benjet told the judge.
Benjet noted that the dismissal of the dozens of cases on Thursday didn't mean that those who were convicted have now been found innocent, but rather that their convictions should be vacated because their constitutional rights had been violated. He said all of those people's sentences had been completed.
The nonprofit Legal Aid Society’s Wrongful Conviction Unit collaborated with the Queens DA’s office on the request to drop the cases and reached out to all of the defendants, though some could not be reached, according to Elizabeth Felber, the team’s supervising attorney. After the hearing, she thanked prosecutors for their cooperation and told Gothamist that she hoped the DA’s office would continue to take cases of officer misconduct seriously.
DA Melinda Katz created the Conviction Integrity Unit in 2020. Prosecutors in all five boroughs have convened similar teams, following a nationwide trend to reexamine potentially wrongful convictions. Sometimes those units ask judges to exonerate people, after new evidence proves their innocence. They have also asked courts across the city to toss hundreds of cases connected to police officers accused of crimes.
The Queens DA’s office said it has also overturned 16 convictions for other reasons, such as newly discovered evidence. Last August, a judge tossed the cases against three men who spent years behind bars on charges they denied, including two men who said they were pressured into confessing to the 1994 killing of an exchange student and one who was wrongfully convicted of kidnapping and robbing two women in 1992.
