By Jacob Kaye
The Queens district attorney’s office told a judge on Thursday that it plans to appeal her January decision to vacate the conviction of Allen Porter, a 54-year-old who served over three decades in prison for a double murder he says he didn’t commit.
Prosecutors with the Queens DA said they disagreed with Queens Supreme Court Administrative Judge Michelle Johnson’s decision to overturn Porter’s conviction after finding that prosecutors hid key pieces of evidence in Porter’s original trial, in which he was convicted of the 1991 murder of drug dealer Charles Bland and his girlfriend, Cherrie Walker, in the Woodside Houses.
Johnson said in January that the level of evidence concealment in the case was “substantial” and “alarming,” according to reporting by Gothamist.
But the DA’s office stuck to its case on Thursday and said it has begun working on an appeal. Should their appeal fail, prosecutors said they would likely attempt to retry Porter, 35 years after the killings.
Porter, who was released from Green Haven Correctional Facility earlier this year, has spent the past several months on house arrest, waiting to hear what Queens prosecutors planned to do after Johnson’s ruling. Following the hearing on Thursday, Porter told reporters that he was “deeply disappointed” in the DA’s decision.
“I think I’ve suffered long enough, my family has suffered long enough,” he said. “I just want this to be over.”
“My life is on hold yet again, after it’s been on hold for over three decades,” he added.
Porter’s innocence claim is not new. Since his 1995 conviction, Porter has taken various legal avenues in the hopes of having his conviction overturned. An appeal in 1998 failed in the Appellate Division, as did a writ of habeas corpus submitted in federal court several years later.
His case was even up for review by Queens District Attorney Melinda Katz’s Conviction Integrity Unit – he eventually pulled his case from consideration, the Daily News reported.
Much of the legal work has come as a collaboration between Porter and Jabbar Collins, who had his own murder conviction overturned in 2010. Porter and Collins first met behind bars and continued their friendship after Collins was released and began Horizon Research Services, a legal research firm.
Together, they pored through Porter’s case alongside attorneys Karen Newirth and Charles Linehan and began to find a troubling pattern.
The lone eyewitness in the case, who was 17 years old at the time of the murder, recanted her testimony and said she had been coerced by detectives to pin the killings on Porter, Gothamist reported.
Even more evidence turned up in 2023, when Porter filed a motion to overturn his conviction in Queens Criminal Court. That’s when they found notes written by prosecutors describing Porter’s potential innocence and alternate suspects.
“It’s outrageous,” Linehan said. “This is a clear cut example of a case that should have been dismissed immediately when the notes were finally turned over in this case, and every minute since then that the DA’s office has failed to do that is a failure of justice and a failure of DA Katz’s promise to the people of Queens to not only do justice and continue promoting public safety, but to correct mistakes of the past.”
“The idea that they would keep this going is completely vindictive,” he added.