a man has been cleared of murder after spending
25 years in prison this is a story
not only about incarceration system
and the judicial system but also about capital punishment
from the day of his 1989 arrest in a deadly new york city shooting
Jonathan whining said he had been more than a thousand miles away
on the day of the shooting vacationing at disney world
he even had documents that corroborated
this story but he was convicted of murder
anyway prosecutors now agreed with him flooding left a Brooklyn Court here in
New York City as a free man just days ago
after spending almost 25 years behind bars
a key witness had recanted a little while back
and now newly found witnesses
implicated someone else in this killing
and after prosecutorial review of the files
the documents turned out to support
one thing's alibi the exoneration was first reported by The Daily News
and it comes amid a a lot of scrutiny a brooklyn's prosecutors process for
reviewing these questionable convictions
and this is in part coming from the new district attorney Kenneth Thompson
remember from the beginning Fleming said that he was in Orlando when darryl's
they're all rush was shot in Brooklyn on august fifteenth nineteen eighty-nine
authorities suggested that the shooting was motivated by a dispute over money
bombing said not only was it not over money I had nothing to do with it
and it turns out that that was true Fleming had plane tickets yet videos
postcards from his trip
but prosecutors said no no no he still could have
quickly flown in committed the murder and then flown back
to his vacation in Orlando
there was a witness who said yeah I saw
lining take the shot later recanted her testimony shortly after the conviction
in 1990 thing you know what
actually lied to police because I wanted them to cut me loose
from an unrelated arrest unfortunately Fleming lost his appeals based on that
recanting
and now this has been reviewed and it turns out that
whining indeed was not guilty had a
alibi had an alibi which exonerated him
so I have a few things to say about this number one
at this is no big party right this is no great
victory broadly speaking about judicial and legal system
because he still spent 25 years in prison prosecutors
are a and it's questionable whether they
held back some exculpatory evidence which is of course prosecutorial
misconduct
and it took 25 years after he spent 25 years in prison
to free him so this is not a big party celebrating how great our legal system
is that he was freed it's good that he was freed
but it's incredible that he spent 25 years in prison in the first place and
then what this really gets me too
is about the death penalty in capital punishment this is yet another
reason why we should not have capital punishment because as
as horrible as it is that mister fleming spent 25 years in prison
and he deserves to be compensated for that he imagine
he would have been earning money that would go towards his retirement he has
no retirement because he was in prison for the last 25 years he deserves to be
compensated
but what if he had been sentenced to death and what if he had been
executed there would be no undoing it and
and again it is yet another of the many many many reasons why we should not have
the death penalty
other countries at that level of development that the US is that have
already figured this out
and it is just yet another problem
with our judicial and legal system and we don't want to be
exacerbating these problems where we sometimes have
innocent people in prison for 25 years
the last thing we want to be doing on top of everything executing innocent
people
which has happened in this country that an absolute disaster