{"id":165464,"date":"2026-03-16T21:40:13","date_gmt":"2026-03-16T21:40:13","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/165464\/"},"modified":"2026-03-16T21:40:13","modified_gmt":"2026-03-16T21:40:13","slug":"new-york-man-freed-after-19-years-in-prison-for-robbery-he-didnt-commit","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/165464\/","title":{"rendered":"New York man freed after 19 years in prison for robbery he didn’t commit"},"content":{"rendered":"

NEW YORK \u2013 A man who spent nearly two decades in prison for a roughly $550 robbery was exonerated and freed Monday, after prosecutors said they now agree he didn’t commit the crime. <\/p>\n

\u201cIt cost me 20 years, but they said they corrected it now. So that’s all that matters. So I\u2019m good with that,\u201d Kenneth Windley, 61, said as he left a Brooklyn courthouse, at liberty for the first time since 2007. <\/p>\n

A judge threw out his conviction and dismissed his case entirely, at the request of both prosecutors and Windley’s lawyers. Prosecutors said new evidence \u2014 including confessions from two other men who were convicted of similar robberies \u2014 supported his longstanding claim of innocence.<\/p>\n

\u201cThis case is really a cautionary tale of how things can seem one way but, without careful analysis, not be what it purports to be,” Brooklyn District Attorney Eric Gonzalez, a Democrat, said after shaking Windley’s hand outside court. <\/p>\n

\u201cHad we known what the evidence was, this case should have never happened,\u201d he said, adding that he had apologized privately to Windley. <\/p>\n

Windley was arrested in 2005, after buying a stove for his mother with a money order that turned out to be stolen. <\/p>\n

It had been snatched from Gerald Ross, 70, by two thieves who followed him home from a trip to a bank and a post office. The thieves put Ross in a chokehold and took money orders, cash, and a bank book from him, prosecutors said in a report<\/a> released Monday. <\/p>\n

Ross regularly got money orders for his rent and life insurance payments at that post office, which helped him and authorities follow a paper trail after the robbery. The trail soon led to Windley, who had given his name, driver\u2019s license and address when purchasing the stove at an appliance store.<\/p>\n

From the start, Windley said he had nothing to do with the robbery. He said he’d simply bought a $542.77 money order at a discount from a couple of acquaintances, who insisted that it was valid but that they couldn’t use it for a bureaucratic reason. <\/p>\n

\u201cHe was duped,” one of Windley’s lawyers, David Shanies, told the court Monday.<\/p>\n

Ross identified Windley in a lineup as one of the thieves, and a jury convicted him in 2007 of robbery. Because of prior felony convictions, he was sentenced to 20 years to life in prison. His appeals failed.<\/p>\n

Early on, Windley told prosecutors what he knew about the men who sold him the money order: their nicknames, and some information about their legal names. After his conviction, a friend and private investigators helped him flesh out the men’s identities and persuade the men to come forward about what had happened, according to the D.A’s report. <\/p>\n

In sworn statements and then in interviews with D.A.’s office representatives, the two men said that they had robbed Ross together and that Windley was not involved, according to the report. It called their admissions \u201ccompelling.\u201d<\/p>\n

It doesn\u2019t give their names, referring to them only as \u201cSuspect 1\u201d and \u201cSuspect 2.\u201d Both are serving prison time on other robbery convictions, according to the D.A.\u2019s office. Those convictions all involved male victims in their 60s and older who were followed home from banks and check-cashing offices in Brooklyn in 2005 and 2006. <\/p>\n

If the jury had known those men’s identities and robbery records, the information would likely have raised reasonable doubt about the charge against Windley, prosecutors concluded.<\/p>\n

No new charges have been brought in the case. The legal timeframe for bringing charges ran out years ago, and Ross has died.<\/p>\n

Windley, heading off Monday afternoon to celebrate with his family, said he wasn’t bitter about what he’d been through<\/p>\n

\u201cI\u2019m just going to move on from there,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

Copyright 2026 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed without permission.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"NEW YORK \u2013 A man who spent nearly two decades in prison for a roughly $550 robbery was…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":165465,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[67962,5533,67961,67960,9,11,10,421],"class_list":["post-165464","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-new-york","tag-david-shanies","tag-eric-gonzalez","tag-gerald-ross","tag-kenneth-windley-brooklyn","tag-new-york","tag-new-york-headlines","tag-new-york-news","tag-u-s-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/165464","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=165464"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/165464\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/165465"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=165464"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=165464"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=165464"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}