It’s not exactly a feel-good story, but in the end, almost everyone’s feeling pretty good. The wrongly convicted man who is finally released from prison; the victim’s family, friends, supporters and legal team who have been with him during all, or part, of his ordeal; the new district attorney who stepped up and re-examined the case; the judge who finally made things right; and the media that revels in reporting stories about one man’s struggle to overcome the odds and emerge all the stronger for it. Even the police officers that coerced the young victims into confessing and whose misconduct damaged dozens of lives, must be feeling good since in all likelihood, they will never be held accountable for their actions.
David McCallum walks free
With his arm draped around his mother’s shoulders, on Wednesday, October 15, David McCallum walked out of court as a free man almost 30 years after being wrongfully convicted of a murder in Brooklyn. William Stuckey, who had been wrongfully convicted along with McCallum, was not so lucky; he died in prison of a heart attack in 2001 at age thirty-one.
The conviction was based on confessions coerced by the police when McCallum and Stuckey were 16; they confessed to the kidnapping and slaying of Nathan Blenner, 20, whose body was found with a gunshot wound to the head in Aberdeen Park in the Bushwick section of Brooklyn.
“The police at the time captured confessions by McCallum and Stuckey on video, but the defendants asserted that they were beaten prior to their admissions and that they were told what to say by the investigating officers,” the Brooklyn Daily Eagle recently reported. “Brooklyn’s new district attorney, Kenneth Thompson, agreed that the confessions ‘were false in large part because these 16-year-olds were fed false facts.’"
Toronto Star reporter Peter Edwards wrote that “Thompson’s office and the Conviction Review Unit completed their reviews of McCallum’s case … and set him free. ‘We have determined that there’s not a single piece of evidence that linked David McCallum or William Stuckey to the abduction of Nathan Blenner or his death,’ Thompson said … [a]t a news conference afterwards, [adding that] he had ‘inherited a legacy of disgrace with respect to wrongful conviction cases.’”
“After 29 years, it’s a bittersweet moment because I’m walking out alone,” McCallum, 45, said as he left court to hugs from relatives and applause from supporters. “There’s someone else [Willie Stuckey] that is supposed to walk out with me but unfortunately he’s not.”
Edwards reported that “McCallum and Stuckey quickly recanted their confessions in the October 1985 killing, but they were found guilty and lost appeals. Thompson’s predecessor, District Attorney Charles Hynes, reviewed the convictions and decided to stand by them last year, but Thompson said the convictions hinged on untrue confessions, … rife with inaccuracies and peppered with details seemingly supplied by police.”
"After examining all of the facts and circumstances of the case against McCallum and Stuckey,” the Brooklyn District Attorney's Conviction Review Unit said in a statement, "the verdict against [them] was based entirely on their confessions – the convictions cannot be sustained. The CRU investigation concluded that the confessions were false and not supported by physical or testimonial evidence."
"I think we should not have a national reputation as a place where people have been railroaded into confessing to crimes they did not commit," Thompson told The Wall Street Journal.
“When I walked through the doors of this office in January, I inherited a legacy of disgrace with respect to wrongful conviction cases,” Thompson said, according to CBS New York. The McCallum case is the tenth to be cleared since Thompson became Brooklyn’s district attorney in January. About 30 cases have been reviewed and more than 100 are still pending, the International Business Times pointed out.
Hurricane Carter’s fight for McCallum’s freedom
For the last ten years of Rubin (Hurricane) Carter’s life, advocating for David McCallum’s freedom had been a special cause for the former professional boxer who, along with John Artis, had been released from prison after being wrongly convicted of a 1967 triple murder after having served 19 and 15 years respectively.
Carter, who worked on McCallum’s bid for exoneration for a decade after getting a letter from him, wrote a piece on his behalf that was published in The New York Daily News. “My aim in helping this fine man is to pay it forward, to give the help that I received as a wrongly convicted man to another who needs such help now,” Carter wrote. “Not a single piece of evidence ever implicated them in this crime nor placed them anywhere near the scene,” Carter pointed out. “Their two confessions, gained by force and trickery, are not corroborated even by each other; they read as if two different crimes were committed… potentially exculpatory police reports were lost, discarded or suppressed” while “DNA testing and fingerprint evidence all point in other directions.”
Sadly, Carter did not live to see McCallum’s release from prison; he died last April of prostate cancer.
David and Me – the documentary
Since 1989, there have been 1,461 exonerations according to The National Registry of Exonerations, a joint project of the University of Michigan Law School and the Center on Wrongful Convictions at Northwestern University School of Law (https://www.law.umich.edu/...). The reasons for these exonerations include a broad range of issues including, mistaken witness identification, false confession, perjury or false accusation, false or misleading forensic evidence, official misconduct, and inadequate legal defense.
Unlike many of the wrongfully convicted prisoners who are released and subsequently fall into relative obscurity as the headlines about their cases fade, McCallum’s story has been made into a documentary by Canadian filmmakers Ray Klonsky and Marc Lamy of Markham Street Films. The filmmakers had befriended McCallum, and spent ten years advocating for his release.
The film, titled David and Me (https://www.facebook.com/...), premiered at the 2014 Hot Docs festival in Toronto last spring. The filmmakers told the Star’s Edwards that “they plan[ned] to re-cut the ending and to tour with McCallum and the film,” and “they have also started a fund to help him get back on his feet.
“Preparing for release is one thing — actually being released is another,” McCallum told the Brooklyn Daily Eagle in an exclusive interview. “I am in shock, but I am not afraid of it. I embrace it.”
“I look forward to helping others recently released and those still incarcerated,” McCallum added. “During my process of trying to get out of prison, I came across many individuals who have been professing their innocence. I am willing to work to assist them because it is not about me. It is not about being selfish — and it would be mighty selfish of me not to give back. It is about helping other people in similar situations.”
“I think I’m mature enough to understand that I can’t get that back,” McCallum said of spending nearly two-thirds of his life in prison. “I think my life kind of starts from this point on.”