20 Years in Jail b/c White Prosecutors Withheld Favorable Evidence: Murder Charges Dropped Against "East Cleveland 3"

From [HERE] and [HERE] The "East Cleveland Three," cleared in August in the 1995 murder of Clifton Hudson after spending nearly 20 years in prison, had a hearing Monday.
A judge ruled in May of 2016 that Eugene Johnson, Derrick Wheatt and Laurese Glover should have a new trial after a key witness became unsure of her identification of the men. A motion was filed in June to dismiss all charges. The judge granted the motion.
At the hearing, prosecutors said that they will not dismiss the case without prejudice, which means that, if new evidence is found, the men can be tried again. The attorney for the three men is asking the prosecutor's office for expungement, but that will be ruled on at a later date.
The Black men, known as the "East Cleveland Three," were convicted in 1996 for the shooting of Clifton Hudson in East Cleveland.
Attorneys at the Ohio Innocence Project had discovered a trove of exculpatory evidence that had never been disclosed to the original defense counsel. The judge in the case called the Brady violation “deliberate and malicious.” It involved a notorious former chief prosecutor writing a letter to the East Cleveland police ordering them not to hand over evidence, including eyewitness statements that contradicted the state’s case.
In February of 1995, nineteen year-old Clifton Hudson was shot and killed on a street in East Cleveland. In its case against Glover, Wheatt, and Johnson, the state produced one eyewitness, fifteen year-old Tamika Harris, who testified that she had seen Johnson shoot Hudson and then get into a van with two other black men in it. In addition, they called two experts to testify on “gun residue” evidence obtained through an “Atomic Absorption Kit” (a now widely discredited forensic method).
The defense put on two eyewitnesses of their own. Both testified that they had seen the shooter, and that he was taller than Johnson, and lighter skinned. Assistant Prosecutor Michael Horn urged the jury to ignore these witnesses. Further, in order to explain why the “gun residue” was found on Wheatt, despite the state’s eyewitness identifying Johnson as the shooter, Horn urged the jury to believe his “two shooter” theory, in which Wheatt had fired, missed, and then handed the gun to Johnson, who he claimed must have been wearing gloves found in the vehicle. The jury took his urging and convicted all three men of murder.
By fits and starts, the case has been unraveling ever since. Most pointedly, in 2004, Tamika Harris recanted her identification of Johnson, saying she had never seen the man’s face, only his clothing, and that her testimony to the contrary had been weighing on her conscience. Based on her affidavit, a trial court granted Johnson a new trial. The grant, however, was overturned by a state appellate court, which held, first, that Johnson had failed to appeal within 120 days of learning of Harris’ recantation, and second, that her changed testimony wouldn’t have made a difference to the outcome of the trial because she had been cross-examined on what she did and didn’t see.
“Vindictive, Unprofessional, and Outrageous”
The recantation of the lead witness being insufficient to warrant a new trial, the case eventually wound up at the Ohio Innocence Project, which reviewed the history of the post-conviction proceedings. Back in 1998, the defendants had sought, through a public records request, to obtain the original investigative files of the East Cleveland Police. We now know that those files contained the following:
- Evidence that the victim, Clifton Hudson, had been threatened with deadly force the week before he was killed, and that his brother had been shot at, both by men other than the defendants.
- Statements by two previously undisclosed eyewitnesses, the Petty brothers, who had unobstructed views of the shooting, and said the shots had come from a different direction than the state asserted.
- A statement by Dante Petty that he personally knew the shooter he saw commit the murder, and that he was not one of the three defendants.
The First Assistant Prosecutor in Cuyahoga County at the time (later to become the Chief Prosecutor), was Carmen Marino (more on him in a minute). In response to the defendants request for these files, Marino sent a letter to the East Cleveland Police: