Last week, Brooklyn District Attorney Eric Gonzalez announced his plans to vacate a convicted man who was originally found guilty in connection with a Bedford-Stuyvesant bodega murder that took place over 40 years ago.
The District Attorney says his decision to reverse the conviction of 59-year-old Detroy Livingston came following a rigorous reinvestigation by the Conviction Review Unit, which uncovered unreliable eyewitness testimony in the process.
Back on Dec. 11, 1982, four men robbed a small grocery store in Bedford-Stuyvesant of marijuana.
During the incident, one of the store’s employees, Jairam Gangaram, was fatally shot, while another worker was shot but survived his injuries.
A few years after the robbery took place, a 19-year-old woman came forward and provided a testimony, claiming that she witnessed Livingston shoot the victim and later saw his alleged accomplice holding marijuana bags bearing stamps from the store, Gonzalez says.
Following the account, Livingston would eventually be found guilty of murder and robbery, and was sentenced to 25 years to life in prison — he would later be paroled in April 2021.
According to the district attorney, the CRU initiated a reinvestigation of the case following a request from the deceased victim’s daughter, who claimed that Livingston was innocent.
During interviews with the eyewitness, the CRU reportedly uncovered significant inconsistencies, with her admitting to being heavily under the influence of crack cocaine at the time of her testimony, contradicting her initial claims of only using marijuana
According to Gonzalez, an analysis of the witness's statements revealed further discrepancies, including conflicting accounts of Livingston's involvement, her location during the crime, her view of the assailants' escape, among others.
The CRU also determined the witness’s testimony to be “physically implausible,” as she claimed to have viewed the crime outside through a window, but evidence (via a crime scene photo) showed that the window was largely blocked by objects, Gonzalez says.
“This old conviction was predicated on the testimony of a single witness who, based on a reinvestigation by my Conviction Review Unit, should have never been called to testify at trial,” said Gonzalez. “Her myriad [of] inconsistent statements and newly discovered crack habit undermine this conviction and it must be reversed.”
