A Brooklyn man locked away for 28 years on a flimsy murder rap walked free today after a judge vacated his wrongful conviction.
Ronald Reagan was still president and a gallon of gas was 89 cents when 16-year-old David McCallum went to jail for a kidnapping and murder he did not commit.
After years of fighting for his freedom — a cause championed by the wrongfully convicted boxer Rubin “Hurricane” Carter — McCallum was finally given a second lease on life.
When Brooklyn Supreme Court Judge Matthew D’Emic said “I will dismiss the indictments” McCallum dropped his head to the table in front of him, remaining motionless as his lawyer Oscar Michelen rubbed his back.
The judge also vacated the conviction of Willie Stuckey who was found guilty along with McCallum.
Stuckey died in prison in 2001. Stuckey’s mother was in court to hear the news.
“It is a bittersweet moment because I’m walking out alone,” McCallum, 45, said in court. “There’s someone else who’s supposed to be walking out with me. I’m really very happy but very sad at the same time.”
D’Emic vacated both convictions after an appeal from DA Kenneth Thompson, whose Conviction Review Unit helped toss nine guilty verdicts.
“David McCallum walked into prison as a boy,” Thompson said. “Today he will walk out of the courthouse as a man.”
Thompson railed against the system in place that put McCallum and others in jail in the first place.
“My main duty as a DA is not just to convict, but to do justice,” Thompson said. We should not have a national reputation as a place where people are railroaded and convicted of murders they did not commit.”
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McCallum and Stuckey were found guilty of kidnapping and killing a young Queens man in 1986 and sentenced to 25 years to life behind bars.
After their 1985 arrests, McCallum and Stuckey admitted kidnapping and killing 20-year-old Nathan Blenner and taking a joyride in his car. They quickly recanted but were convicted of murder.
Lawyers for McCallum wrote Thompson a letter in January arguing that neither DNA nor handprints found at the scene of the crime matched those of McCallum or Stuckey, who died in prison in 2001.
Thompson said their convictions hinged on untrue confessions, made by teenagers, rife with inaccuracies and peppered with details seemingly supplied by police.
McCallum, the subject of a recent documentary film, “David & Me,” has said he felt pressed to confess and implicate Stuckey after being told Stuckey had done the same to him.
Recent DNA tests and fingerprint analyses from the stolen car matched other people, fueling questions about the case, Michelen said. No one else has been charged.
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The new developments caught Blenner’s family off guard.
“We were led to believe, for 29 years, that they’re the killers,” Blenner’s sister, Deborah, told the Associated Press. “They confessed.”
She said it was troubling that a review by DA’s staffers and an advisory panel of outside lawyers could overturn a jury verdict that appeals courts upheld.
McCallum’s innocence was championed Carter, who himself served 19 years in prison after he was wrongfully convicted of murder, inspiring the Bob Dylan song “Hurricane” and a Denzel Washington movie.
Carter had been working on McCallum’s bid for exoneration for a decade after getting a letter from him.
In February, the ailing Carter spelled out in an Op-Ed column what he called his “final wish.”
“My aim in helping this fine man is to pay it forward, to give the help that I received as a wrongly convicted man to another who needs such help now,” wrote Carter, who died two months later of prostate cancer.