03/29/13
Hella Winston
Special
Correspondent
Late last month,
after 23 years behind bars for crimes he almost certainly did not commit, a
gray-haired David Ranta, 58, carrying a purple fishnet laundry bag containing
all his worldly possessions, walked out of State Supreme Court in Brooklyn a
free man. (Ranta suffered a serious heart attack just a day after his release
but is said to be recovering and in “good spirits).
Ranta, who was
convicted in 1991 of attempting to rob a chasidic jewelry courier and then
murdering a prominent chasidic rabbi, was released after a yearlong
investigation by the Brooklyn District Attorney’s recently established
Conviction Integrity Unit (CIU).
The investigation,
prompted by Ranta’s trial attorney, Michael Baum, found that “the evidentiary
foundation upon which the jury relied in delivering its verdict in this case
has been significantly eroded.” In its reporting on the unraveling of the case,
The New York Times highlighted the intense community pressure to solve the case
and the conduct of one detective in particular as playing major roles in
Ranta’s wrongful conviction.
Upon Ranta’s
release, the head of the CIU, John O’Mara, told The Daily News “We did the
right thing,” in releasing Ranta — something that can hardly be disputed.
However, the case against Ranta was clearly flawed from the start, observers
say. And a review of the various appeals and motions Ranta filed while he was
incarcerated — all of which were vigorously opposed by Brooklyn DA Charles
Hynes and denied by the courts — indicate that these flaws were not uncovered
by the CIU, but were well known to the prosecution for 20 years. (One piece of
new evidence was the admission by a chasidic man that he had been coached to
lie during the lineup).
The problems with
the initial case include the fact that there was no physical evidence
connecting Ranta to the crime, and that a key eyewitness insisted Ranta was not
the culprit. The main witness linking Ranta to both crimes was a crack-addicted
jailhouse snitch who received immunity for his crimes and a sweetheart deal on
his own numerous pending charges in exchange for his testimony. In addition,
the lead detective on the case removed potential suspects from prison and
entertained them. Ranta’s confession (which he denied making) was not tape
recorded, but transcribed by the detective.
And this includes
only what was known to the defense at the time of the trial.
All of this has
led some observers to suggest that Hynes’ release of Ranta, without
acknowledging any culpability on the part of his own office, was timed to
burnish his reputation in what is shaping up to be a potentially tough
re-election fight later this year.
“As in almost all
wrongful conviction litigations, so-called new evidence of innocence is known
to prosecutors and judges years, sometimes decades, before a case is finally
resolved,” Lonnie Soury, an expert in wrongful convictions who helped to free
Martin Tankleff and the West Memphis Three and is the founder of
FalseConfessions.org, told The Jewish Week.
“The Ranta case
was no different. The ‘new’ evidence was known to Hynes’ office for years, and
this man should have been released a long time ago. But one cannot overlook the
significance of the timing of this decision as Hynes has taken tremendous heat
for the wrongful conviction of Jabbar Collins, a [$150 million] civil suit for
which is now underway in the federal court. This is an election year.”
Collins was convicted
of the 1994 murder of a chasidic landlord and, after spending 15 years in jail,
won his release in 2010. It came after a federal judge vacated his conviction
in the face of significant evidence that Collins and his attorney had developed
of prosecutorial misconduct. (Last year Hynes was forced to drop charges
against Darrell Dula and Ronald Bozeman, both of whom had been jailed awaiting
trial, after evidence of misconduct by prosecutors emerged. In February, the
murder conviction of William Lopez, who had spent 23 years in jail, was thrown
out by a federal judge.)
According to the
prosecution’s narrative, the murder of Rabbi Chaskel Werzberger, for which
Ranta was wrongly convicted, stemmed from the botched robbery of a jewelry
courier, Chaim Weinberger, in the early morning hours of Feb. 8, 1990.
Weinberger, held up at gunpoint in his car, managed to get away. Then,
according to the prosecution, unable to locate his getaway car, the gunman
approached the idling car of Rabbi Werzberger, a chief assistant to the Satmar
sect’s then-Grand Rabbi Moshe Teitelbaum. The would-be robber fired at Rabbi
Werzberger through the car window, opened the door, shoved the rabbi’s body
onto the street and drove off in his car. Rabbi Werzberger died from his
injuries four days later.
The killing sent
shockwaves through the tight-knit Satmar community, where Rabbi Werzberger, a
Holocaust survivor, was revered.
Under mounting
pressure from the chasidic community to solve the crime, the police worked
feverishly, with Satmar power broker Rabbi Leib Glanz acting as a liaison
between the police and the Satmar community.
Six months after
Rabbi Werzberger’s killing, Ranta was arrested on charges of murder and weapons
possession; the arrest was announced by the police commissioner at the
Williamsburg precinct.
Ranta was placed
in a lineup after his arrest and, notably, a number of supposed eyewitnesses,
all chasidic teenage boys procured by Glanz, did not pick him; one who did had
initially failed to do so until after he was removed from the lineup and taken
into a room with a detective, an assistant district attorney and a Yiddish
interpreter not employed by the police department.
Further,
Weinberger, the one person who had gotten a close look at the would-be thief
(but not the rabbi’s killer), also failed to identify Ranta. Indeed, Weinberger
repeatedly insisted to the detectives and prosecutors that Ranta was not the
man who tried to hold him up. Ranta’s attorney moved to suppress the eyewitness
witness identifications, but the judge ruled against it, with the exception of
the identification involving the Yiddish translator.
In a phone
interview with The Jewish Week last week, Weinberger recounted how he met with
one of the prosecutors, Barry Schreiber, for several hours on two separate
occasions before the trial and “argued, probably yelled and screamed,” trying
to convince him that Ranta was not the man he had seen that February morning.
An e-mail to
Schreiber was not returned. Several e-mails to a Hynes spokesman did not
receive replies.
Weinberger also told The Jewish Week that Hynes, newly elected to office at the time of the crime, seemed to take a personal interest in the case, recalling that Hynes himself spoke to him before he testified in the grand jury and was also present in the courtroom when Weinberger testified — for the defense — at trial.
Weinberger also told The Jewish Week that Hynes, newly elected to office at the time of the crime, seemed to take a personal interest in the case, recalling that Hynes himself spoke to him before he testified in the grand jury and was also present in the courtroom when Weinberger testified — for the defense — at trial.
“It was against my
own interests to say that Ranta wasn’t the guy who tried to rob me,” Weinberger
told The Jewish Week, noting that the real gunman could still have been on the
loose and thus a threat to him. “But it wasn’t Ranta, and my conscience
wouldn’t let me say it was."
At the trial, the
conduct of the lead detective, Louis Scarcella, led the judge, Francis X.
Egitto to question Scarcella about how Ranta’s confession was obtained and why
it had been transcribed by him rather than tape recorded, according to mandated
DA policy. Eggito also voiced serious concerns about Scarcella’s procedures
more generally, and in the middle of the trial, expressed his mistrust of the
detectives to the prosecutors, but failed to take any further action.
In May of 1991,
Ranta was convicted on two counts of second-degree murder as well one count
each of robbery and attempted robbery.
In a statement to
the court before his sentencing, Ranta proclaimed his innocence and railed
against the “two very corrupt cops” who used “a hooker,” “a junkie” and
“somebody who had raped” to convict him. Ranta noted that one of these
witnesses, Alan Bloom, got “his immunity from 109 years to a 3 ½ to 10.” Ranta
also excoriated the prosecutors for taking “my credible witness, the diamond
courier, who looked at me face-to-face -- supposedly I’m the shooter, right --
he said it wasn’t me. You took him, Mr. Schreiber and Ms. Mondo [the other
prosecutor], and you abused him. You made that man look like a jerk…”
The judge
sentenced Ranta to 37 ½ years to life.
Ranta appealed his
conviction in 1994, claiming, among other things, that prosecutors had violated
a judicial order to turn over audiotapes of the witness identifications by a
certain date, instead giving the defense transcripts; one of the transcripts
omitted key information potentially favorable to the defense (they turned over
the actual tape just before summations).
Despite
acknowledging that the district attorney’s office had delayed in meeting its
obligations to turn over witness statements and potentially exculpatory
information (otherwise known as Brady material) to the defense — something the
court said it did “not condone” — the court denied Ranta’s appeal and ruled those
claims would not be reviewed by the appellate court.
Shortly after
Ranta’s conviction, his attorney, Michael Baum, received anonymous calls from
two women, one of whom named Joseph Astin as the man responsible for the
crimes. Ultimately, one of the callers identified herself to Baum as Astin’s
wife, Theresa (the other caller was Astin’s mother), and told him that her late
husband had confessed to being involved in the crime, committing the botched
robbery and accidentally shooting the rabbi in an attempt to take his car to
flee the scene. (He died in a car chase with police two months after the
crimes).
She gave other
details that made Baum feel she was credible, and also revealed that her
husband’s two accomplices were “your people” (Baum is Jewish), Jewish men who
"wore yarmulkes," but she gave no names. Baum tried to persuade
Theresa to come forward, but for several years she was afraid, telling him that
“snitches wear stitches.”
As it turned out,
Astin was briefly investigated early on in the case, based on an anonymous tip
to police. Theresa told Baum that Detective Scarcella and his partner had
visited her the evening after her husband’s death and asked her if she knew
whether he had shot a rabbi in Brooklyn. They notified her of a $20,000 reward
being offered to find the rabbi’s killer, but she failed to respond. They also
spoke to Astin’s parole officer in a failed attempt to get him to come in and
give his fingerprints. In addition, Scarcella had shown Weinberger a photo of
Astin, and later took him to see his dead body, whose face had been disfigured
in the car crash, in the morgue; Weinberger was unable to make a positive
identification.
Despite
indications that police felt Astin might be involved in the crimes, Baum says
that no police reports concerning the substance of their investigation of Astin
were turned over to him.
In 1995, Theresa
Astin signed an affidavit in support of her statements to Baum, and in November
of 1995 Ranta filed a motion to vacate his conviction. He alleged that “the
judgment was procured by fraud on the part of the prosecutor and police
personnel acting on behalf of the prosecutor, that material evidence adduced by
the prosecution at trial was false and known by the District Attorney or his
agents to be false and newly discovered evidence from Theresa Astin and
Weinberger.”
The trial judge
granted a hearing 1996, at which Theresa Astin testified to what she had told
Baum. But the Appellate Division ultimately unanimously affirmed the
conviction, citing questions about Theresa’s credibility and a failure by Ranta
to show that her information would have led to a more favorable verdict. In
1997, Ranta sought a federal writ of habeas corpus; the DA moved to dismiss
Ranta’s petition but lost.
In 2000, federal
judge Edward Korman denied Ranta’s petition on technical grounds. While
acknowledging the numerous Brady issues, Korman upheld the state court’s ruling
that, when finally given Brady material (when it was arguably too late to use
it) the defense did not make an adequate objection. Ranta appealed this
decision in 2005 and lost.
According to
observers, the substance of these appeals begs the question of why Hynes’ office
decided only now to support the vacating of Ranta’s conviction, given that the
problems his office used to justify Ranta’s release have been evident for 20
years.
Indeed, the very
same day Ranta was released, a man named William Lopez, who recently had his
conviction overturned after spending 23 years behind bars, also left jail a
free man. However, unlike Ranta, Lopez’s case was overturned on appeal by a
federal judge who proclaimed it “rotten from day one.” Hynes vowed to retry
Lopez, but the judge took the unusual step of blocking him from doing so,
though Hynes has said he will appeal the judge’s decision.
Some speculate
that the Ranta case was an easy pick for Hynes’ Conviction Integrity Unit, as
many of the problems with the case could be blamed on the detective, and a
likely suspect in the crimes is long dead, obviating the need for a
reinvestigation. (John O’Mara, the head of the CIU, recently told the Daily
News that while Ranta is “legally innocent,” he doesn’t “have the unadulterated
feeling that this is an actual innocent person that got let out.”)
According to
former prosecutor and defense attorney Mark Bederow, who represented Ronald
Bozeman (who had charges against him thrown out last year), “freeing Ranta,
while having a dead man and a now-disgraced detective to blame, allows the DA
to claim that ‘justice was served’ while at the same time assuring an end to
the inquiry and the years-long criticism which would likely hover over any
investigation.
“Given the
bruising primary, Ranta’s release also seemingly provides political cover from
the incoming flak about the disturbing amount of wrongful convictions and
prosecutions, and serves as the perfect opening trailer for the DA’s CBS show
designed to glorify the DA,” Bederow continued. He was referring to the recent
announcement by CBS of an upcoming six-part reality show focusing on Hynes’
office.
“Left unanswered,”
said Bederow, “is why Astin’s wife’s claim that her late husband conspired with
‘Jews who wore yarmulkes’ was apparently ignored. Indisputably, the political
pressure to close this case in the 1990s was great and investigating members of
the rabbi’s community would not help relations between the community and DA.”
Bennett Gershman,
a professor at Pace Law School and a leading expert in prosecutorial
misconduct, asked: “Should Hynes take credit for exposing this terrible
miscarriage of justice? His office brought the case initially, allowed
dishonest cops and witnesses to testify, and steadfastly and aggressively, even
desperately, sought to preserve the conviction for nearly 20 years and did
absolutely nothing for 20 years to investigate the case to help Ranta gain his
freedom.
“It was entirely
the work of Ranta’s lawyers,” Gershman continued, “as is usually the case.”
