![\"A7403448\"](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/03\/A7403448.jpg\" "\\"Quarter-century")
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Anthony Sims, whose quarter-century-old murder conviction was reversed last week, stands with his family.<\/p>\n
Provided by Jonathan Hiles<\/p>\n
27 years after he was sent to prison for murder, Anthony Sims is finally free, thanks to an appeals court\u2019s reversal of his conviction last week.\u00a0\n<\/p>\n
Sims should\u2019ve 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 \u2014 who they believe actually committed the crime \u2014 lied on the stand.\u00a0<\/p>\n
When asked if prosecutors plan to retry Sims, a spokesperson for the Brooklyn District Attorney\u2019s office told amNewYork Law prosecutors were \u201creviewing the decision.\u201d<\/p>\n
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.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Prosecutors set their sights on Sims, purely based on Graves\u2019 brother-in-law-to-be telling the New York Police Department that he\u2019d \u201cheard that Sims was the guy who shot Mr. Chen.\u201d<\/p>\n
At the 1999 trial, the jury heard testimony from Graves, who said Sims shot Chen, and Shalema Rodriguez, 24, who said she saw the \u201ctaller\u201d man (Sims) run out of the restaurant with a gun. After initially being deadlocked, the jury convicted Sims of depraved indifference murder.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Sam Shapiro, an attorney for Sims, said he thinks the court got this case so wrong in 1999 because the police had \u201cblinders to the evidence\u201d and were trying \u201cto get a conviction at the expense of tracking down actual leads.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cVery early on in this investigation, [prosecutors] set their sights on Anthony Sims as their suspect,\u201d Shapiro said. \u201cThey focused only on any evidence they could possibly find that would somehow support that theory, and chose to ignore all the evidence that wouldn\u2019t support it.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n
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\u2019t know he had on him into the restaurant, shot and killed Chen because he\u2019d been flirting with his fianc\u00e9e. Sims then ran out of the restaurant, shocked, and was followed by Graves, who jumped into Sims\u2019 car \u2014 and was promptly kicked out \u2014 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.\u00a0<\/p>\n
This information came to light after Sims\u2019 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.<\/p>\n
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 fianc\u00e9e 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 \u201c100% sure\u201d 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.\u00a0<\/p>\n
The new evidence was enough for judges on the Brooklyn-based Appellate Division, Second Department to vacate Sims\u2019 conviction, finding that had this evidence been presented to the jury in 1999, at least one juror would\u2019ve had reasonable doubt that Sims was guilty.\u00a0<\/p>\n