When 29-year-old Corey Young received a prison sentence of 57 and a half years to life in September 1998, several of his relatives had to be escorted out of the courtroom due to their outrage over what they insisted was a miscarriage of justice.
“Wrong man, wrong man,” one supporter chanted.
By that point, Mr. Young — convicted of taking part in an armed robbery in Albany’s West Hill neighborhood and then firing at police as he fled the scene — had already spent nearly two years in jail following his arrest at a convenience store in North Carolina, an action attended by Albany Police Department detectives Kenneth P. Wilcox and Tony Ryan. It would take nearly three decades after that arrest for the truth of the courtroom chant to be recognized by the local justice system: It had sent the wrong man to prison, potentially for the rest of his life.
The use of “it” in the previous sentence is not quite right, because the justice system is composed of a chain of people who bear a share of responsibility for keeping the machinery operating properly — or not.
As recently laid out by the Times Union’s Brendan J. Lyons, Mr. Young’s exoneration is one of five life-sentence cases that in recent years have fallen apart amid allegations of induced confessions and ginned-up witness statements, abetted by prosecutors whose willingness to trust police despite abundant contrary evidence strains credulity.
Mr. Wilcox, who died in a car crash 20 years ago and was later revealed by this newspaper to have been involved in a sprawling mortgage fraud scheme, played a key role in many of these cases, but it’s fanciful to imagine he was the only bad actor either in the interrogation room or in the police department’s chain of command.
The toll in human misery should be enough to shock the conscience of anyone who believes in the concept of American justice.
The other cost of these official sins of commission or omission can be measured in the millions of dollars in taxpayer funds that will properly go to these exonerated men in settlements or civil judgments — money that could otherwise be spent on righteous law enforcement work as well as schools, parks and the other elements that make up the infrastructure of a civil society.
It is worth noting that Mr. Young and the other exonerated men were freed primarily because they were supported by attorneys willing to take their cases. We shudder at the possibility that others went to jail as a result of similar injustices — or might still be there — merely due to the lack of such representation. Even so, former Albany County District Attorney P. David Soares deserves credit for launching a review of these cases, as does his successor, Lee Kindlon, for keeping the work going after he took office last year.
We can take cold comfort that the intervening 30 years have seen the adoption of policies designed to prevent at least some of the shabby police work that put these men behind bars. Interrogations are now recorded as a matter of course, and most prosecutors are far less likely to move ahead on a case such as Mr. Young’s in which questionable witness statements aren’t backed up by a shred of forensic evidence.
More needs to be done. The serial nature of these alleged abuses by Albany Police Department personnel calls out for a formal probe by the state attorney general’s office, which can draw on the work already done by the local district attorney’s review. The attorney general’s office has for years been empowered to review police interactions that result in death or grievous injury; surely it should take a role when the injury takes the form of the civil erasure that comes with long-term incarceration.
As Mr. Lyons pointed out in his report, the district attorney’s office has stopped short of declaring any of these men to be innocent, but merely informed the courts they were seeking their freedom “in the interests of justice” amid the new evidence that their convictions were based on questionable evidence. The interests of justice clearly require more labor to properly sort out the innocent and the guilty.