Man Convicted of Murder Exonerated After 15 Years
This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.
A father of three who has served 15 years in prison for a murder that occurred while he apparently was in another country was ordered released from state custody yesterday after prosecutors chose not to retry him.
U.S. District Judge Lewis A. Kaplan had ruled last year that Jose Garcia must be retried or freed because his defense lawyer had failed to gather evidence that he was in the Dominican Republic when the murder took place in the Bronx on July 16, 1991.
Mr. Garcia’s new lawyer, Martin Klotz, said it would surprise him if his client were released because a 1999 deportation order remains lodged against him since he was an illegal American resident.
The lawyer said he would work to legalize Mr. Garcia’s status in America so he could resume living with his ex-wife and their children, all of whom are American citizens.
Mr. Klotz praised the judge for taking a careful look at evidence that Mr. Garcia could not have committed the murder, and he said he was “absolutely delighted” that prosecutors did not attempt a retrial, which they would have had to initiate within two months of the judge’s initial ruling.
The judge said it was “exceptionally troubling” that Mr. Garcia was convicted in 1993 at a trial based largely on the testimony of one witness who said she saw the execution-style shooting. The judge had credited Mr. Garcia with a strong alibi, including documents that seem to prove he was arrested in the Dominican Republic for traveling with false documents a day before the murder of Cesar Vasquez.
The judge had said it took Mr. Garcia so long to prove he was entitled to a new trial because he only recently had a lawyer willing to interview witnesses, follow leads, and travel to the Dominican Republic to obtain official records.
Mr. Garcia’s eldest child is a scholarship student at the exclusive Philips Academy boarding school in Andover, Mass. Another child is in a high school program for gifted students in New York.
Mr. Garcia has told the court he was trying to repair his relationship with his estranged wife in the small town of Matanzas in the Dominican Republic at the time of the murder.
