By Jacob Kaye<\/p>\n
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\u2019t commit.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Prosecutors with the Queens DA said they disagreed with Queens Supreme Court Administrative Judge Michelle Johnson\u2019s decision to overturn Porter\u2019s conviction after finding that prosecutors hid key pieces of evidence in Porter\u2019s 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.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Johnson said in January that the level of evidence concealment in the case was \u201csubstantial\u201d and \u201calarming,\u201d according to reporting by Gothamist<\/a>.\u00a0<\/p>\n But the DA\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n 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\u2019s ruling. Following the hearing on Thursday, Porter told reporters that he was \u201cdeeply disappointed\u201d in the DA\u2019s decision.\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cI think I’ve suffered long enough, my family has suffered long enough,\u201d he said. \u201cI just want this to be over.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cMy life is on hold yet again, after it’s been on hold for over three decades,\u201d he added.\u00a0<\/p>\n Porter\u2019s 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.\u00a0<\/p>\n His case was even up for review by Queens District Attorney Melinda Katz\u2019s Conviction Integrity Unit \u2013 he eventually pulled his case from consideration, the Daily News reported<\/a>.\u00a0<\/p>\n 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.\u00a0<\/p>\n Together, they pored through Porter\u2019s case alongside attorneys Karen Newirth and Charles Linehan and began to find a troubling pattern.\u00a0<\/p>\n