After nearly two decades behind bars for a robbery he long insisted he did not commit, Kenneth Windley was exonerated Monday when Brooklyn District Attorney Eric Gonzalez moved to vacate his conviction in the 2005 robbery of 70-year-old Crown Heights resident Gerald Ross.
On the afternoon of April 1, 2005, Ross returned to his apartment building in Crown Heights after stopping at the bank and the post office, carrying cash and two money orders he had just purchased. As he stepped into the elevator, two men followed him inside. During the short ride up, they robbed the man of his cash and took two blank, unsigned money orders for $542.77 and $9.48, then fled.
On the same day, Windley left his girlfriend’s apartment and went to buy a stove for his mother at Big Daddy Appliance Store in Brownsville. In the parking lot, Windley was approached by two men he knew from the neighborhood. They told him they would cover the tax for the stove if he gave them his cash and used their money order instead. Accompanied by the two men, Windley entered the store, presented his driver’s license and used the larger money order to purchase a $379 stove, which was delivered to his home in Queens. The store manager later testified that the defendant was with two men.
More than a month after the incident, Ross was informed that one money order had been cashed at an electronics store. Ross used the same post office to obtain money orders every month, and while the money orders were virtually untraceable, a teller who knew Ross agreed to search for the tracking numbers. Ross identified Windley as one of the robbers in a lineup on June 7, 2005.
Despite his claims of innocence, Windley was convicted of second-degree robbery in March 2007 and sentenced to 20 years to life because of prior felony convictions that led to his adjudication as a persistent felony offender, increasing the mandatory term of incarceration. All subsequent appeals were denied.
Windley later tracked down the two alleged suspects, who were imprisoned for committing a pattern of similar robberies, and they attested that he was not involved. His lawyer asked CRY to investigate the case, asserting that the two men who sold him the money order were the same individuals he had tracked down and that they were the ones who robbed the victim. He provided statements from both men attesting to those facts.
Windley’s release from custody followed a reinvestigation by the Brooklyn District Attorney’s Conviction Review Unit, headed by Special Counsel Julio Cuevas, with assistance from editor in chief Lori Glachman.
The unit interviewed nearly everyone involved in the case, including the two suspects, and discovered that both had extensive criminal histories and had been convicted of committing seven robberies together from April 4, 2005 — three days after Ross’s robbery — through Feb. 1, 2006. The robberies took place in the same neighborhood and followed a similar pattern: elderly men were followed from banks to their homes and then robbed. Both men, who were sentenced to prison for those and other crimes, confirmed Windley’s version of events in interviews, and their accounts were corroborated by recorded prison phone calls and emails reviewed by the unit.
Investigators found the account plausible and concluded that if the jury had known about the similar robbery pattern committed by the two other suspects, it likely would have raised reasonable doubt about Windley’s guilt.
Based on the findings, Gonzalez recommended that Windley’s conviction be vacated and moved to dismiss the indictment because the victim had died and the case could not be retried. Windley appeared in court March 16 before Brooklyn Supreme Court Justice Matthew D’Emic, who vacated the conviction.
“After a complicated and thorough reinvestigation, our CRU was able to confirm evidence that was developed after trial, which showed that Mr. Windley’s repeated claims that he did not commit this robbery were supported by the facts. It has taken many years, but today we are able to validate his account, release him from prison and exonerate his name. We have the most active conviction integrity unit in the country, and we intend to continue leading the way by overturning any miscarriage of justice we discover in Brooklyn,” Gonzalez said in a statement.
The Conviction Review Unit is currently working on approximately 40 open investigations. Since 2014, its work has resulted in 42 convictions being vacated, according to the district attorney’s office.
