The New Yorker Radio Hour - After Serving Decades in Prison for Murder, Two Men Fought to Clear Their Names

Episode Date: June 11, 2024

For years, the staff writer Jennifer Gonnerman has reported on the case of Eric Smokes and David Warren. When they were teen-agers in Brooklyn, in 1987, Smokes and Warren were convicted of second-degree murder during the mugging of a tourist; the papers called them “the Times Square Two.” It was the testimony of another teen-ager, who received a reduced sentence in a separate case for his coöperation, that sent them to prison. Ever since, Warren and Smokes have protested their innocence, and Walker later acknowledged that he had lied. But in requesting parole, after years in prison, the two men had to take responsibility for their crime, and four years ago, a judge denied their appeal. Gonnerman tells the story of their long fight for justice, and how it finally came to pass.  New Yorker Radio Hour listeners, we want to hear from you.  We have a few questions about the show and how you listen to it. The survey takes about twenty minutes, and your feedback will help us make our podcast better.  Take the survey here.

This is The New Yorker Radio Hour, a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker. This is the New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick. I don't know one time we had a conversation, he said to me, he said, yo, man, do you got any feelings? So I'm like, wow, what are you talking about? Do I got feelings? That's Eric Smokes, talking with his friend David Warren. And he said, because, you know, throughout this whole thing, I haven't seen you cried yet. You know, we got convicted, we came from state, and I still haven't seen you cry. And I told him, no, I did my share of crying, but I couldn't cry in front of you.

Eric Smokes and David Warren both live in Brooklyn. They're middle age now, but they've been close since they were in their teens. Eric was a friend of my brothers. It seems like he was more older and mature, and he was like, God, me certain things I'll be doing, like, say if I'm doing something I ain't supposed to be throwing a rock across the screen. Hey, yo, what are you doing? Stop that. Come over here. You know, that sort of thing.

He always looked out for me. For much of the time that they've known each other, Eric Smokes and David Warren were in prison. In 1987, they were convicted of second-degree murder. Four years ago, staff writer Jennifer Gonerman reported for the radio hour on their decades-long effort to clear their names. And Jen is back now with an update. Eric Smokes and David Warren were best friends,

growing up in one of Brooklyn's poorest neighborhoods, two black teenagers in East New York. If you look at photographs of them from the time, Eric was the tall, husky one. David was smaller and shorter and looks much younger. We used to go to the park. Yeah, we did a lot of neighborhood things. Yeah, go to the park.

Hang out in the community. Hang out in the neighborhood. We just hung out. We just hang out. We're hanging loose, as you say. New Year's Eve, 1986, going into 1987, Eric smokes, David Warren, and several of their friends traveled on the subway from Brooklyn

to Midtown Manhattan to Times Square. So we arrived in 180 red lights looking like the flashy city it represents the big apple. So we arrived in Manhattan around 10 o'clock or so that night. It's Times Square on New Year's Eve. The streets are packed.

There are a few hundred thousand people there shoulder to shoulder, everybody waiting for the ball to drop. We ended up at Latin quarters. It was a nightclub for teenagers. When they got there, they said they realized the prices for the club had been raised for New Year's Eve and they could not afford to get him.

So they just hung around outside, watched the people go by. And then they said they eventually headed downtown and made their way back home to Brooklyn. So, you know, that was about it for us. Just, you know, being in the city, enjoying the atmosphere and moving around as best we could because it was very crowded. It wasn't like you could easily go from one point to the next. And we come home, next thing you know, they take me in for questioning. The police wanted to know about a crime committed a few minutes after midnight on New Year's Day.

A French tourist by the name of Jean Cass had been mugged, knocked down and his head smashed against the sidewalk. And ultimately, ten hours later in a hospital, he passed away. The next day, the police caught several young people mugging a man. not far from Times Square, the police have been told that they should interrogate anyone arrested for robbery

to see if they knew about the murder. Now, one of the mugging suspects, a 16-year-old named James Walker, gave the police a name, another teenager, whom he called Smokey. As I'm crossing the street, a van pulls up in front of us,

and the officers jump out and call my name, Hey, Smokey, because my last name is Smoke, so most people referred to me as Smokey. So, hey, Smoky. So I'm like, let me keep walking because something, you know, I felt something wasn't right about this. And for me, it was, my mother came to get me, says some police wanted me. So I said, police want me. And when you were at the police precinct, did you have anybody with you, a parent or a lawyer?

No, everybody was there with me, just me. When I was first being questioned, they was asking me, well, we know it was an assault that occurred in Manhattan at this place, at this time and I was like I don't know anything about that so they kept going on well from there it went from assault to a murder oh well you know the guy died and you're going to get charged with this you're never going to see the light of day again and I was like well that doesn't still change my answer I don't know anything about this and then they start saying like well well you know your buddy's telling on you and I start you know to myself I'm telling me about what I know it was had to be a lie One fact about their interrogations that is important, they both told the cops the same story.

On the facts and the evidence that they had, they could have pinned this on any number of young black guys in the city because they didn't get anybody at the scene who was able to make an ID. That's James Henning, a lawyer who represents Eric Smokes and David Warren today. So what you have is you have a group of teenagers who are brought in for an interrogation on a homicide. and you've got an officer who's got his first ever assigned homicide, and he doesn't believe he's going to close it. And then out of the blue, he gets this kid who seemingly hands him Eric smokes, who to him sounds like, you know, this is the guy.

Eric was 19 and David was 16, and over the next few months, a prosecutor offered David various plea deals. They were all contingent on him testifying against his best friend. If he pointed the finger at Eric, his own punishment would be minimal. If I'm not mistaken, the last offer was a year. And basically at that time, I could just went home. But of course, I had to turn it down because I'm not going to say he did something I know he didn't do. And I'm not going to say I did something I know I didn't do.

at the time that of the rest and we going through back and forth to court, you know, through that time period there, I was like, ain't nobody going to come to court and say we did this because we didn't do it. I have nothing to worry about it. So when we got the trial and then they bring forth these people and they're saying these days, it was like,

like, wow. Yeah, we looked at least like, do you know him? We were asking each other, do you know this person? Only person that we can say we knew was James Walker. James Walker was an acquaintance, a friend of a friend, and by this point he had cut a deal with prosecutors that allowed him to avoid prison time on his own mugging case

if he testified at their trial. That was the thing that always got me. What made you pick me and Eric out of all the people in the world? The police also relied on the testimony of four other young men who claimed that they had seen the two at the crime scene. And when I went back and read the trial transcript from 1987, it was really jarring to see the level of pressure that had been placed by police on some of these witnesses. The police had to use what's called material witness warrants, meaning that they arrested them and took them into custody in order to bring them to court and force them to testify. In at least one case, they held one of these young men in jail overnight to make sure.

sure that he testified so that in the morning they could pick him up from the jail and bring him to the courthouse and put him on the witness stamp. When the jurors came back after deciding on a verdict, they told the judge, we would like the court to know that we did not come to a decision lightly, but with great emotional turmoil. I remember when the decision was rendered and they was escorting us out the court told us to stand up or whatever, he just sat there. I had to hit and say, oh, come on. Because it was, it was like, it didn't register to him that we had, that we were, yeah, we was found guilty, but we had to leave now.

And when we got back, went back into the holding pens, the conversation was like, they really convicted us? Like, unbelievable. Like, he was, like, totally lost on that. David Warren got 15 years to life. Eric Smokes was given 25 years to life. And at that sentencing hearing, Eric shouted out. Eric shouted out, I've been framed.

Eric and David were both sent off to prisons in upstate New York. They were among the youngest people in the New York State prison system. And for most of their incarceration, the two were held at separate prisons. So they couldn't actually see each other or call each other on the phone, but they would write to each other regularly about once a month. He used to write me and be like, why did they do this to us? And I'd be like, you ask me, like, I got the answer to it. I do not know.

And we realized, early on, we realized that all we had was us, really. You know, we definitely had our family, you know, a few extended people out there who was on our side or what have you. But for the most part, we knew we had us. We had to believe in our union, our bond. It was like a marriage almost, you know. Both men tried to appeal. their convictions, but their appeals went nowhere, and the years slowly ticked by. 1988, 1988, 1989, 1995.

To pass the time, Eric started lifting weights in the prison yard and realized he had a real aptitude for it. He became known as one of the strongest men in the prison system. But for David, surviving in prison was much, much more difficult, because he was smaller, shorter, younger. What kind of strategies inside did you use to hold on to your sanity? Well, I'll be honest about, maybe about 97, 98. I lost all focus of being like, oh, we're going to get out of here. Somehow this situation is going to be rectified.

And it became like, okay, I got four years left. before I see the parole board. When Eric used to be like, yeah, what we're going to do about the case? I used to be like, man, I don't want to talk about that. I really didn't because of all the negativity that this case had brought to me. In 2005, after the two had been locked up for 18 years, Eric Smokes got a letter one day, and on the return address, he could see the name James Walker.

You know, mail call came around about 4 o'clock in the afternoon. The officer came by, I put a letter on my gate. I think I was locked in my cell at that time. So I see the name. I'm like, wow, I don't know what they expect from this, you know. This might be a pipe bomb or something. He apologized for lying on us at the time of trial to say, you know, what he said against us. And he was asking how it is that he can, you know, repair that.

things. How can you fix things? I told Eric, I don't want anything to do with that guy. You conjured up a whole story. You just told this fantastic tale to these officers. That's David Warren with his friend Eric Smokes.

The story of their fight to prove their innocence continues in just a moment. This is the New Yorker Radio Hour. This is the New Yorker Radio Hour and I'm David Remnick. If you're just joining us, we're hearing us, we're hearing the story of two men sent to prison when they were teenagers for murder. This was in the late 1980s, and they fought ever since to prove their innocence. David Warren and Eric Smokes were convicted

largely on the testimony of another teenager named James Walker, who implicated them in the crime. 18 years later, Walker sent them a letter in prison apologizing for having lied. Staff writer Jennifer Gahneman continues our story. Okay, so this letter from James Walker, recanting his testimony, is the kind of thing that anyone who is trying to overturn his conviction would dream of receiving. Here on paper, he's apologizing for lying on the witness stand and explaining he doesn't know why he chose to give police, Eric Smokes' name. Quote, honestly, I don't know why I did it, he wrote. One might think that this letter would be enough to overturn the men's convictions, that it wouldn't be that long before Eric and David walked out of prison as far. free men. But that's not what happened at all. Eric wrote to every lawyer and legal clinic he could

think of, begging for help, trying to find somebody to represent him pro bono, and he included copies of Walker's letter. But in the end, he couldn't find any lawyer willing to take on his case. Their efforts to get their convictions thrown out had gone nowhere, and they were running out of options. They knew that the only way they were ever going to get out of prison was to persuade the parole board to release them. Tell me what it's like to be locked up to be insisting on your innocence and then having to go before the parole board. What is that experience like?

For me, during research from all the guys that I was incarcerated with that knew my story, they told me you have two options. You can maintain your innocence, and we know you're innocent, and staying here with us, forever or you have to you can say that you did something that you know you didn't do

and try to get home and it was a gut-wrenching decision for me that I weighed on me heavily to this day it still weighs on me that I had to make and I chose to try to go home because I felt like I was between the rack and the hard place. There's a phenomenon called the Innocent Prisoner's Dilemma.

That's one of their attorneys, James Henning, again. And the nature of the beast with parole is that if you do not show remorse, you're most likely, almost certainly not going to receive parole. American David each had life on the back of their sentences. which meant that they might have to spend the rest of their lives in prison. There was only one way to avoid this fate, and that was to persuade the parole board to release them. They said they felt they had no choice but to lie.

They said they took responsibility for the crime, and in the end, they got to go home. That was a necessary evil in order for me to get out. I mean, I struggled with coming to that conclusion or having to accept responsibility, but the uneasiness I had. about it, didn't override my need for being free. David left prison in 2007 after about 20 years of being away, and Eric got parole in 2011 after 24

years. Eric and David had gone on trial as teenagers, and if David had decided to cooperate with law enforcement, if he had testified against Eric at trial, he never would have spent his entire adult life in a prison upstate. But he didn't hold that against Eric in any way. But he didn't hold that against Eric in any way. Instead, the two men stuck together. And when they came out two decades later, they were still good friends. And this next part is pretty astonishing.

Twenty years after they went to prison, both men ended up marrying the same women who had been their teenage girlfriends at the time they were arrested. And when David had a daughter, he asked Eric to be her godfather. You try to put it all together, like, because I have a young daughter.

and for me to try to explain all of this to her. It's exhausting for me. So imagine for a child eight years old because she want to know, why do they put you a goddaddy in jail? How did you decide to find attorneys and continue your fight to clear her name even after you got to prison?

Few people do that. Our whole relationship is really predicated on Big Brother Little Brother. and in life, you know, in the perfect world, the big brother always look out for the little brother. So that's why I couldn't give up. That's why when I got out, I couldn't let it go. You know, they would question they being a district attorney

or maybe just random people in general would question, why would you want to talk to a witness that testified against you? Why would not? I said, I'm innocent. Why wouldn't I want to talk and say, why would you do this to me? why wouldn't I want to know? In 2018, Eric and David finally got a hearing in front of a judge in state Supreme Court.

Now all the evidence in their case would get a second look. It was sort of like a murder trial in reverse. The lead detective and prosecutors from the original trial were now back in the courtroom, on the witness stand being cross-examined. Witnesses who had testified against them in 1987 were called back into court too. But this time, two key witnesses who claimed to have, seen Eric and David at the crime scene now recanted, saying they had lied in 1987 because they had been pressured by law enforcement. But James Walker, the man most responsible for sending

Eric and David to prison, couldn't testify. He had died one year earlier. When he died, we was like, you know, like the wind from on our sales was taken away. But, you know, at the same time, we still knew we had the letters and we had his affidavit, so we believed that that right did was sustain us. While Eric and David's murder trial had taken about a week, this hearing dragged on over the course of more than a year, with court dates held only occasionally. Good. How are you doing, Eric? How are you feeling? All right. I'm well. How are you feeling? I'm well. I'm well. You know, a little anxious, but, you know, it's to be expected, I guess, you know.

On a cold January morning at the beginning of 2020, before the pandemic here, I met Eric and David on a sidewalk in front of a courthouse in lower Manhattan. He went inside it, up the elevator, and everybody packed into a small courtroom. This is calendar number three, and that in 249 of 1987, Eric Smokes and David Warren. And then the judge, Stephen Antignati, walked in and started to speak. My sort of thought process is laid out in great detail in my decision, which is, is approximately 125 pages long. The court has not been persuaded. Accordingly, defendant's CPL motion under 440. He denied their motion. He denied their request to vacate their murder

convictions. It don't get no better. Don't think it gets easier as the fight continues, especially when you get deny you after deny you after deny, knowing the truth. I was disgusted from the arrest date of January 8, 1987, until now. It hasn't gotten no better. So how do I feel? I'm angry. In his decision, the judge zeroed in on what they had said before the parole board years earlier. He wrote that their testimony, taking responsibility for the crime, was, as he put it, compelling evidence of their guilt.

I think the system is intensely resistant to admitting mistakes. I mean, what prosecutor, detective, or judge really wants to think, even. for one minute that they made a mistake and sent the wrong man to prison for 20 years. Can you imagine having that on your conscience? And there's also often an intense resistance to saying that your colleagues might have made that same kind of mistake too. So, you know, every day we think about this. Every day that we speak to one another, that's...

That topic come up. Topic of discussion. That's got to come up. Even going through the hearings coming home, some days, it was hard for me to process it. Then I have to come home and sit down for a minute just to get my bearings together, look at my wife, look at my daughter, and say, yo, you're free. Let it go because it eats at my soul. That was in 2020.

Their main attorney, James Henning, file an appeal. And while he was waiting for that appeal to work its way through the courts, a new district attorney took office in Manhattan named Alvin Bragg. We have been giving a profound trust tonight. The fundamental role of the district attorney is to guarantee both fairness and safety. That is the trust that's been given to me on the ballot, but given to all of us. That's what we've worked for to show the city. One of Bragg's campaign promises was to revamp the unit that reviews allegations of wrongful convictions.

That unit started reinvestigating Eric and David's case. and then one day last fall, they heard that the DA's office wanted to vacate their murder convictions. They were going to be exonerated. On January 31st, shortly afternoon in a courtroom in downtown Manhattan, they went before the judge and it was official.

Their names were cleared. So this is a vindication. Legally, they won the battle. But for Eric and David, it's not a simple moment of celebration. It's really, really complicated. No longer having the murder conviction means that, I mean, to me, I could never get back what was lost, meaning the time, the people that I lost during this journey.

So the murder conviction, disdain on my reputation, how can I undo going being in jail since 16 to 37? So clearing my name, it's cool, but you can't give me nothing back. Some of it, what I got is anger and disappointment. Like, what the fuck? How we get here, 37 years later? And then now you're telling me there's, you know, there's information that, you know, points to my innocence, you know? Like, how you allow us to go 37 years for a crime we didn't commit?

Why do you think this is happening now versus three, four years ago or 37 years ago? For me, I think it was the changing of the guard. Alvin Bragg and the team that he brought in, I think they was truly trying to get to the bottom of a wrongful conviction. You know, I didn't think that they had no bias in it, whereas the previous regime, it appears that they had a bias in protecting their brand and not doing what they should have done. This should have happened 37 years ago, and nobody wanted to take responsibility for their action, and that's what's more frustrating than anything else.

Only thing I really question, why now is this, why did the detectives do this? Like, if you have to manipulate some people to give a statement that you knew, you kind of, you got to feel this isn't true. So why did you do this to us? What made us, us, these two people that did do this to? Anybody, that's what I say. My lawyer even wants to tell me, he said anybody would have been convicted. Anybody able to put it up here, probably they were to convict them.

at this point, I got to put my hand out to receive, you know, this here. Like, I used to go to a Muslim service, and they used to say, put your hands out like you're going to receive a gift. So that's what I think about. You know, as angry as I am or frustrated, I'm going to take the win. I'm going to get bogged down in that, you know, in that pain and frustration. You're going to accept the win. Eric smokes with David Warren. Their conviction was overturned this year. You can read Jennifer

Gonerman on that case and much more for reporting on the criminal justice system at New Yorker.com. I'm David Remnick. That's our program for today. Thanks for listening. See you next time. The New Yorker Radio Hour is a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker. Our theme music was composed and performed by Merrill Garbus of Tune Yards, with additional music by Louis Mitchell. This episode was produced by Max Bolton, Adam Howard, Kalalia, David Krasnow, Jeffrey Masters, Louis Mitchell, Jared Paul, and Alicia Zuckerman. Our story with Jennifer Gonerman was originally produced by Stephen Valentino. The New Yorker Radio Hour is supported in part by the Cherina Endowment Fund.