NYC NOW - August 23, 2023: Midday News

Episode Date: August 23, 2023

Advocates and elected officials are calling on City Hall for great transparency around policing in New York City. Meanwhile, a former Long Island police chief has been arrested for allegedly soliciting sex in a park. Also, attorneys for Chanel Lewis, the man sentenced for the murder of jogger Karina Vetrano in Queens in 2016, claim crucial evidence was withheld during the trial. WNYC's Samantha Max has more on the developments in the case.

Welcome to NYC Now, your source for local news in and around New York City from WNYC. It's Wednesday, August 23rd. Here's the midday news from Lance Lucky. Advocates and elected officials, including New York City public advocate, Jamani Williams, are gathering at City Hall at this hour to push for greater police transparency. They're calling on the City Council to pass a proposal called the How Many Stops Act. It would require the NYPD to provide quarterly reports giving detailed information on when and why officers stop and question people. The race, age, and gender of the person stopped would also be included.

Police would also have to report whether the stop led to any use of force. A second bill under the act would require police to report any time someone denies an officer consent to a search. Both bills were introduced last summer and referred to the Council's Committee on Public Safety. A former Long Island police chief who once led the Gilgo Beach. Killings' investigation and later went to prison for beating a suspect, has been arrested for allegedly soliciting sex at a park. James Burke was taken into custody in a Farmingville park yesterday. A Suffolk County spokesperson says he faces charges of offering a sex act, public lewdness, indecent exposure, and criminal solicitation. Steve Layton of the Suffolk County

Parks Rangers explains why they were patrolling that particular park. Vietnam Veterans Memorial is one of those areas that we've received numerous complaints about quality of life issues up there. So we're attempting to do our best to curtail that. Burke led the Suffolk County Police Department from 2012 until 2015. An attorney for Burke could not be reached. It is 74 right now, mostly sunny and 78 this afternoon, becoming mostly cloudy tonight around 66,

and showers are likely tomorrow morning at about a 60% chance, still a slight chance in the afternoon and near 75. This is WNYC. For WNYC, I'm Michael Hill. Attorneys for a black man sentenced to life in prison for the 2016 sexual assault and murder of a white woman are asking a judge to give their client a new trial. Channel Lewis was convicted of murder after a lengthy search to find the person who killed Carina Vitrono while she was running in a park near home in Queens.

But Lewis's attorneys say police and prosecutors did not disclose key evidence, and that if they had, their client might not have been convicted. WNBC Samantha Max has been reporting on this latest development, and she joins us now. Hi, Sam. Hi, Michael. It's been a few years since this all happened. Would you remind us, please, of the details of this case? Yes, so Karina Vitrano was a 30-year-old speech pathologist working with kids with autism.

She lived in the Howard Beach neighborhood of Queens with her parents. And one day in the summer of 2016, she went for a run on a path near their house and she never came back. So her parents were looking for her and her dad actually found her in the reeds near the path with her clothing partially pulled off and her body was beaten up. This case was tragic. It made national news and many police were pulled into the investigation. But for months, they just could not figure out who did it. Eventually, they swabbed Channel Lewis, a young black man who a police lieutenant involved with the case had seen walking around the neighborhood a few months before the murder and thought he had looked suspicious. Police said his DNA matched DNA that was found at the crime scene.

Then the case went to trial. There was a hung jury. There was a second trial. They voted to convict. but there were just lots of twists and turns along the way. One jury member actually alleged that other jurors were breaking rules that were supposed to be in place to make sure that the verdict was fair and saying that, you know, at least one juror had announced on date two that he had made up his mind. So just lots of questions that came up throughout the case. Okay, so what happened this week?

So this week, Lewis's attorney filed a new motion asking the court to throw out the conviction against Lewis and either toss the indictment altogether or order a new trial. They say that, you know, there was this mounting pressure to hold someone accountable in the high profile case and that that led the NYPD and the Queen's DA's office to find someone guilty by whatever means necessary, even if that meant violating Lewis's constitutional rights. The motion is saying that police violated Lewis's rights by swabbing him for DNA without a warrant. And they also say there wasn't enough evidence to suspect him of the crime and that other black men were targeted because of their race. One of Lewis's attorneys, Ron Kuby, says he thinks this case follows a long running pattern of police and prosecutorial misconduct. Once the cops and the DA are convinced, that they have the right person and can sell it to a jury, they don't care how they got there. And that's been the story of our criminal justice system, our criminal legal system, since we've had one.

So Kubi says he is not arguing at this point whether his client is innocent, but he says that questions are surrounding this case that need more investigation. And the motion states that the case against Lewis rested on just two pieces of everything. evidence, a confession, and a DNA test, and that neither is reliable enough to convict their client because of the misconduct they allege. It's also saying that prosecutors should have told the defense attorneys that police identified Lewis as a suspect through mass testing of black men's DNA. I understand this was a pretty dense 65-page legal filing. Would you tell us more about the key takeaways in it? Yeah, so it focuses on the story that police and prosecutors told in court about how they zeroed in on Lewis as a suspect after months of not being able

to figure out who had done it. According to the motion and NYPD lieutenant testified in court that he thought to swap Lewis's DNA while working on the investigation after just kind of spontaneously remembering this encounter with Lewis months earlier. So he had said he had seen Lewis walking around Howard Beach and called 911 because he thought that Lewis might be planning a burglary. But when police later stopped and risked him, they found no evidence of a crime. And is that what Lewis's attorneys say they believe really happened? You know, they're still trying to figure out what happened, honestly. These are not the attorneys that represented him at trial. But what came out later from news reports and a letter from an

anonymous NYPD whistleblower is that police had actually been testing hundreds of black men's DNA after initially looking for white suspects. And the motion alleges that the shift in focus happened after police hired a private DNA testing company called Parabon Nanolabs to conduct ancestry test. The company last year confirmed to a reporter at the nation, Amos Barshad, that their tests of samples from the crime scene found that the DNA likely belonged to someone of European and African descent. The private company's ancestry test was not revealed to the defense attorneys or mentioned at trial, according to this motion. And Lewis's defense attorneys say that it really should have been. And I should note here that we did reach out to the NYPD and the unions that represent the officers named in the motion.

They haven't yet responded to request for comment. neither has Parabon, but the Queen's DA's office declined to comment about pending litigation. And so what happens next? The judge will review the motion. Yes, and prosecutors will probably file some sort of response. Then the judge will decide whether to order a new trial or take some other course of action, but for now we just have to wait. Samantha Max covers the courts for WNYC. You can read her story on this case at our news website, Gotham. Sam, thank you. Thanks, Michael.

Thanks for listening. This is NYC Now from WNYC. Be sure to catch us every weekday, three times a day, for your top news headlines and occasional deep dives. And subscribe wherever you get your podcast. We'll be back this evening.