"Maybe you are innocent," presiding Judge Nicholas Colabella, state Supreme Court, offered at the sentencing 15 years ago of Jeffrey Deskovic, who was 17 years old, crying in the courtroom, and actually innocent. The judge told the defendant, who had pleaded that his conviction be overturned, that he agreed with the jury's guilty verdict and, therefore, would leave it undisturbed. He then sent the teenager away for 15 years to life.
Yesterday's startling developments — Deskovic walked out of Westchester County Courthouse an innocent man, cleared by new-and-improved DNA testing — capped a whirlwind of belated justice, one that is at once laudable, familiar and wholly lamentable.
The praise is reserved for the Innocence Project, the nonprofit legal clinic at the Cardozo Law School, which took up Deskovic's longstanding innocence claims in the 1989 slaying of Peekskill High classmate Angela Correa, apparently when few others would press the matter; and for Westchester District Attorney Janet DiFiore, who entered office Jan. 1. When the Innocence lawyers earlier this month requested new DNA testing, she promptly complied, instead of throwing a prosecutorial fit and further delaying justice.
That examination, which involved procedures unavailable so many years ago, and a subsequent search of the FBI's DNA database produced a "hit" that matched someone else's profile — the DNA of an inmate already behind bars in New York, serving a life sentence for murder. "Maybe you are innocent" was confirmed as a legal travesty, one that had cost a 17-year-old his liberty and the rest of his youth.
The turnabout was nothing new for the Innocence Project, whose commendable work has exonerated scores of imprisoned "rapists" and "murderers" like Deskovic; during his 1991 sentencing, prosecutor George Bolen, in pressing Colabella for a longer-than-minimum sentence, expressed the fear that "given the right circumstances (Deskovic) might do it again." At least Deskovic — who also chided the media for its early coverage — knew better.
DiFiore deflects any credit for "just doing my job" and said she would "hope and pray" her office would give "the exact same attention" to any similarly situated person. Regrettably, that was not the response Deskovic received when he pressed his case with DiFiore's predecessor, Jeanine Pirro, back in 1997. Deskovic said he got the brush-off from Pirro, "a very rude letter, the gist of which is, 'Mr. Deskovic, the DNA issue that you raise [in a letter to Pirro, who was elected in 1993] was considered by the jury which convicted you . . . There will be no prison review."
According to DiFiore, her inquiry revealed that the case was "righteously investigated by the police and righteously prosecuted" by the D.A.'s office, and she took no issue with the police work that secured a damning, however untaped, confession from Deskovic; at trial no DNA evidence linked Deskovic to the slaying, but those admissions, as purported by a Peekskill detective, put him away. Until yesterday.
The obvious lament is that this late-arriving contradiction has not adequately been explained. DiFiore should see that it is, for Deskovic's benefit and the edification of the people of New York; science and justice arrived way too late. "I'm not standing here in front of you because the system works," he said yesterday. "I'm standing here despite the system."
