Man Wrongly Convicted Sues City
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 man who spent 22 years in prison for a rape he did not commit is suing the city for $150 million, claiming that despite his repeated requests, authorities failed to look hard enough for the evidence.
Alan Newton, 45, who was released and exonerated last July, says in the lawsuit that he began requesting from prison in 1994 that the “rape kit” from the crime scene be examined for the DNA evidence that would have freed him, but that prosecutors repeatedly told him the rape kit had been lost.
“No NYPD official ever actually took the step of looking for the missing evidence beyond looking up a bare file entry,” the suit, filed Tuesday in federal court, says. “They performed merely a cursory review of the existing records and files, found nothing, and concluded that the evidence had been lost.”
Authorities eventually found the evidence in a storage unit after prodding by lawyers from an organization dedicated to exonerating the wrongfully convicted, the Innocence Project.
Mr. Newton was found guilty in 1984 of rape, assault, and robbery on the strength of a faulty eyewitness identification by the victim. A spokeswoman from the New York City Law Department said it had not yet received the lawsuit.
