A Brooklyn man who
claimed the police manufactured gun-possession charges against him had his case
dismissed on Thursday, amid two investigations into the practices of a group of
police officers in the 67th Precinct in East Flatbush.
The man, Jeffrey
Herring, had maintained his innocence ever since his arrest on June 4, 2013,
asserting that officers had planted the gun on him and fabricated the
circumstances of his arrest.
The officers claimed
that they got a tip from a confidential informer that Mr. Herring had a gun.
Prosecutors had been instructed to bring the informer to court on Thursday; the
defense had challenged whether that informer even existed.
At the hearing,
prosecutors offered no evidence or mention of that informer.
“Based upon
information provided to us by defense counsel” and on the office’s own
investigation, said Paul Burns, an assistant district attorney, “we do not
believe at this time that we can prove beyond a reasonable doubt the charges
against Mr. Herring.”
Justice Dineen
Riviezzo of State Supreme Court dismissed and sealed the case, saying she was
“glad to hear there’s an ongoing investigation.”
In researching the
case, a lawyer for Mr. Herring, Debora Silberman of Brooklyn Defender Services,
found others that mirrored it, involving the same group of police officers. In
the other cases, defendants also said the guns were planted, with the police
saying that officers saw the suspects storing the guns in plastic bags or
handkerchiefs.
After the arrests,
more similarities arose: The use of confidential informers was suddenly
mentioned months into the proceedings, and the informers were never produced in
court even after judges’ and lawyers’ requests. Judges had called some of the
police version of events “incredible,” and the accounts “extremely evasive.”
The Brooklyn
district attorney, Kenneth P. Thompson, said, “We will investigate the arrest
of Mr. Herring and other arrests by these officers because of the serious
questions raised by this case.”
After inquiries from
The New York Times, the Police Department opened an Internal Affairs Bureau
investigation into the officers’ conduct.
As the charges were
dismissed, Mr. Herring, 53, a rangy man dressed in gray slacks and a blue
oxford, brought his hands up to his face, his eyes tearing up. If convicted of
the top charge of gun possession, he could have faced up to 15 years in prison.
In 2013, Mr. Herring
was arrested as he stood next to his bike outside his apartment on a sunny
afternoon. He had just gone shopping, and had several plastic bags with him.
The police said Mr.
Herring reached into a white plastic bag, removed a gun, put it in a black
plastic bag and tossed that bag into the bushes as a plainclothes officer
watched him.
Mr. Herring says he
lives a quiet, nonviolent life, mostly taking care of his collie, Snowy. His
last arrest, for drugs, was in 1997; he says he has been clean since then.
Eight months into
the case, prosecutors gave defense lawyers papers showing that the police had
requested a $1,000 tip for a confidential informer in this case. The informer
had given a highly detailed description, according to the police paperwork,
saying “one male black” matching Mr. Herring’s approximate age, height, weight,
skin color, hairstyle and outfit, standing where Mr. Herring was standing,
“near a bike with several shopping bags,” was carrying a firearm “believed to
be a .380 caliber semiautomatic” that was “inside of a shopping bag.”
Police officers
arrived about 10 minutes after the call. Mr. Herring “had conveniently not
moved an inch, and then like clockwork, chose to display exactly what the
supposed C.I. had described at exactly the right time,” Ms. Silberman and
another lawyer, Scott Hechinger, wrote in a filing.
The officers
involved in Mr. Herring’s case have had their conduct and methods questioned
before. One, Lt. Edward Babington, had testified along with other officers in a
federal case including a gun charge, prompting District Judge Dora L. Irizarry
to call the officers’ testimony “just incredible, and I say ‘incredible’ as a
matter of law,” adding that she believed “these officers perjured themselves.”
In another federal gun case, prosecutors said they considered Lieutenant
Babington to have given inconsistent testimony.
Leaving court on
Thursday, Mr. Herring said, “I dreamed of this day.” However, he said, he was
still thinking about two other defendants accused of gun possession by these
police officers; while Mr. Herring had been out on bail as he fought his case,
others spent far more time in jail.
One man, Eugene
Moore, could not afford bail. He spent a year in jail until a hearing in which
a judge said he did not find the testimony from a detective, Gregory
Jean-Baptiste, “to be credible” and dismissed and sealed the case. Another man,
John Hooper, also spent almost a year in jail after his arrest. After a hearing
in which a justice said he found it “incredible that they thought it was a
gun,” speaking of the officers, prosecutors offered Mr. Hooper time served and
he accepted.
“I look at my
journey, but they were incarcerated,” Mr. Herring said.
A version of this
article appears in print on January 16, 2015, on page A21 of the New York
edition with the headline: A Gun Case Is Dismissed as the Police Face
Inquiries. Order Reprints| Today's Paper|Subscribe
