{"id":188589,"date":"2026-04-07T18:28:10","date_gmt":"2026-04-07T18:28:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/188589\/"},"modified":"2026-04-07T18:28:10","modified_gmt":"2026-04-07T18:28:10","slug":"brooklyn-man-who-wrongly-served-31-years-for-murder-sues-nassau-county-for-malicious-prosecution","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/188589\/","title":{"rendered":"Brooklyn man who wrongly served 31 years for murder sues Nassau County for malicious prosecution"},"content":{"rendered":"

A Brooklyn man who wrongly spent 31 years behind bars<\/a> for the murder of a Hofstra assistant football coach is suing Nassau County and several detectives, alleging that cops withheld hundreds of pages of police investigation notes that would have cleared him.<\/p>\n

Christopher Ellis was 20 years old when he was coerced into confessing he shot Joseph Healy outside an Arby\u2019s drive thru on Sept. 29, 1990, after a grueling 18-hour in interrogation where he didn\u2019t get food, drink, sleep or a phone call, according to a federal civil rights and malicious prosecution lawsuit.<\/a><\/p>\n

\u201cI remember waking up the next morning after being interrogated, and it\u2019s like, \u2018Wow, these people really don\u2019t care,’\u201d Ellis, now 56 and living in Brooklyn, told the Daily News.<\/p>\n

He recanted, but police in Nassau arrested him, and he was tried for second-degree murder. Despite an alibi \u2014 he was hosting his brother\u2019s birthday party at the time, and the DJ and his brother\u2019s girlfriend testified he was there all night \u2014 a jury convicted him, based on the confession and a single witness. He was sentenced to 31 1\/3 years to life.<\/p>\n

\u201cMy son was just born at the time. He was born in November of 1990 and I went to prison in February of \u201991,\u201d Ellis said. \u201cSo I lost all that time with him, spending time with him, watching him grow\u2026. I lost my mother, my father, both of them passed away while I was in prison. Just lost a lot, you know, I didn\u2019t get to really enjoy life.\u201d<\/p>\n

Ellis maintained his innocence in prison, and eventually learned about an \u201cexclusion witness\u201d, a woman who the killing told Nassau Detective Richard Wells she was present when Healy was shot, and she didn\u2019t see Ellis anywhere at the crime scene.<\/p>\n

The witness \u201crecognized Mr. Ellis from the newspaper as one of the men arrested for the Arby\u2019s shooting, and repeatedly told Defendant Wells that Mr. Ellis was not one of the men she saw at the scene of the Arby\u2019s shooting,\u201d according to the lawsuit.<\/p>\n

Wells even went as far as testifying at a pre-trial suppression hearing that the woman didn\u2019t exclude anyone in her witness statements, the lawsuit said.<\/p>\n

\"Christopher<\/p>\n

Newsday \/ Howard Schnapp<\/p>\n

FILE – Christopher Ellis, the man accused of taking part in the 1990 stickup robbery where a Hofstra football coach was killed, reacts as he was found not guilty on Friday, Jan. 24, 2024 in Mineola. (Newsday \/ Howard Schnapp)<\/p>\n

That revelation led Ellis to move his conviction be overturned, and in August 2021, a Nassau judge agreed, vacating the conviction<\/a> and freeing him without bail.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s scary that if Christopher Ellis can be convicted of this crime, then anybody can be convicted of any crime\u201d his lawyer, Ilann Maazel of of Emery Celli Brinckerhoff Abady Ward & Maazel.<\/p>\n

The Nassau County D.A. announced shortly after his release that they would re-try him from murder. That trial brought fresh revelations Ellis had been railroaded \u2014 \u201ca 234-page file titled \u2018Unnamed Homicide Squad investigative file,\u2019 consisting of NCPD police notes, homicide lead sheets, arrest records, and statements by witnesses and suspects from the NCPD investigation, all pointing to additional leads and suspects never before disclosed,\u201d according to the lawsuit.<\/p>\n

In all, the lawsuit alleges, the reams of police documents Ellis never got for his first trial pointed to \u201cat least eleven other murder suspects and four separate confessions.\u201d<\/p>\n

In January 2025, a second jury acquitted Ellis.<\/p>\n

\u201cAfter the verdict, it felt like a weight was lifted, like finally somebody was listening,\u201d Ellis told the News.\u201dThat first jury, they didn\u2019t listen to anything\u2026. After that (second) verdict, it was like, finally, someone listened.\u201d<\/p>\n

At the first trial, the witness who fingered Ellis said Healy was eating with friends on Sept. 29, 1990 when two men approached him, one of whom pulled a gun and told them all to get up. The other man remarked, \u201cJust do it, just do him\u201d and then the gunman shot Healy in the face.<\/p>\n

That witness didn\u2019t recognize anyone from photo arrays for months, and even when two Nassau detectives, Wells and John Comiskey, went to her dorm room the following February with a six-photo array with Ellis\u2019 face in it, she failed to ID him, the lawsuit alleges.<\/p>\n

The two detectives brought her in for an eight-person line-up, and she only settled on Ellis after hearing him read the line, \u201cJust do it, just do him,\u201d the suit alleges.<\/p>\n

Representatives of Nassau County did not return messages seeking comment Tuesday, and attempts to reach the detectives named in the suit were unsuccessful.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"A Brooklyn man who wrongly spent 31 years behind bars for the murder of a Hofstra assistant football…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":188590,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[36],"tags":[98,100,99,262,263,266,85,267,9,24,264,12,63,261,265],"class_list":{"0":"post-188589","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-brooklyn","8":"tag-brooklyn","9":"tag-brooklyn-headlines","10":"tag-brooklyn-news","11":"tag-city","12":"tag-county","13":"tag-crime-and-public-safety","14":"tag-latest-headlines","15":"tag-local-news","16":"tag-new-york","17":"tag-new-york-city","18":"tag-new-york-county","19":"tag-news","20":"tag-nyc","21":"tag-nyc-crime","22":"tag-sub-county-region"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/188589","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=188589"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/188589\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/188590"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=188589"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=188589"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=188589"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}