Anthony Sims, whose quarter-century-old murder conviction was reversed last week, stands with his family.
Provided by Jonathan Hiles
27 years after he was sent to prison for murder, Anthony Sims is finally free, thanks to an appeals court’s reversal of his conviction last week.
Sims should’ve never been locked up, his attorneys argue, pointing to new evidence they say shows prosecutors were looking for a way to point their finger at Sims and a key witness — who they believe actually committed the crime — lied on the stand.
When asked if prosecutors plan to retry Sims, a spokesperson for the Brooklyn District Attorney’s office told amNewYork Law prosecutors were “reviewing the decision.”
In 1998, Sims, 23, and his then-friend, Julius Graves, 24, walked into a Brooklyn Chinese restaurant after drinking together. When they ran out a few minutes later, a restaurant worker, Li Run Chen, had been shot dead, and the pair of young Black men became the prime suspects.
Prosecutors set their sights on Sims, purely based on Graves’ brother-in-law-to-be telling the New York Police Department that he’d “heard that Sims was the guy who shot Mr. Chen.”
At the 1999 trial, the jury heard testimony from Graves, who said Sims shot Chen, and Shalema Rodriguez, 24, who said she saw the “taller” man (Sims) run out of the restaurant with a gun. After initially being deadlocked, the jury convicted Sims of depraved indifference murder.
Sam Shapiro, an attorney for Sims, said he thinks the court got this case so wrong in 1999 because the police had “blinders to the evidence” and were trying “to get a conviction at the expense of tracking down actual leads.”
“Very early on in this investigation, [prosecutors] set their sights on Anthony Sims as their suspect,” Shapiro said. “They focused only on any evidence they could possibly find that would somehow support that theory, and chose to ignore all the evidence that wouldn’t support it.”
According to Shapiro and new court filings, what actually happened after the pair walked into the Chinese spot was that Graves, who brought a shotgun Sims didn’t know he had on him into the restaurant, shot and killed Chen because he’d been flirting with his fiancée. Sims then ran out of the restaurant, shocked, and was followed by Graves, who jumped into Sims’ car — and was promptly kicked out — as he drove away. Graves then wiped his fingerprints off the gun in front of two of his friends. Sims subsequently called Graves, upset, admonishing him for shooting the man and involving him in it, filings say.
This information came to light after Sims’ case was reopened when his wife, Keisha Sims, reached out to attorneys in 2020, spurring a post-conviction hearing that ran for six months, spread across 13 dates from Oct. 2021 to April 2022.
Graves was granted immunity for testifying, as well as given $22,000 in cash, hotel rooms, moving expenses and rent at a spacious home by prosecutors, who also arrested his fiancée to pressure him to testify, new evidence brought at that hearing showed. During that hearing, it also came out that Rodriguez was pressured to testify against Sims by police, and a new eyewitness, Rachel, testified she was “100% sure” she saw Graves, not Sims, run out of the restaurant with the gun in 1998, but had been intimidated out of testifying by Graves after the murder.
The new evidence was enough for judges on the Brooklyn-based Appellate Division, Second Department to vacate Sims’ conviction, finding that had this evidence been presented to the jury in 1999, at least one juror would’ve had reasonable doubt that Sims was guilty.
Sims, who’s been out on parole since 2022 and working for the social justice organization Ford Foundation, said news of his conviction’s reversal marked the end of a “nightmare,” but that it didn’t erase the injustice he experienced.
“The court’s decision to reverse my wrongful conviction is not just a victory for me, but also a testament to the power of unwavering support,” Sims said. “While I am overjoyed to finally walk free, my relief is tempered by the profound frustration I feel toward a judicial system that took over two decades of my life. This system needs a lot of work, and my hope is that my case will serve as a stark reminder of the urgent need for reform so that no other innocent person has to endure what I have.”
Shapiro said he expects a decision from the DA on whether Sims will face a retrial in the coming months.
“We certainly hope that the DA does not try him again,” Shapiro said. “But, if they do, I think this trial will be very different, and what the jury will hear will be very different from what the first jury heard.”