Brooklyn district attorney clears 7th convict
A judge agreed on Tuesday to toss out a conviction in a 1997 fatal shooting, making it the seventh time this year a defendant has been cleared in an exhaustive reexamination of old homicide cases.
Brooklyn District Attorney Kenneth Thompson asked Brooklyn Supreme Court Justice Matthew D’Emic to release Roger Logan based on new evidence turned up by prosecutors’ conviction review unit that weakened the credibility of a purported eyewitness. Logan, 53, walked out of court a free man on Tuesday after serving nearly 17 years of a 25-years-to-life sentence.
Since taking office in January, Thompson has intensified the work of the review unit, agreeing to re-examine 90 cases from the 1980s and 1990s to determine if there were wrongful convictions. Most of them stem from concerns about the investigative tactics of now-retired police detective Louis Scarcella.