Chanel Lewis, who was convicted in 2019 after his first trial ended in a hung jury and sentenced to life in prison for murdering Vetrano while she was out for a run in Howard Beach, will have his case reviewed by an appellate court after those judges agreed that there were “questions of law” they should review regarding the way the Queens district attorney’s office obtained DNA evidence it eventually used to convict him. Lewis’ attorneys further argued that his civil rights had been violated as a result.
The Queens DA’s office said the decision to allow Lewis to appeal “provides a means for the defendant to get full review of his claims” in a statement to amNewYork. District Attorney Melinda Katz has previously said she stands by the conviction.
At the time of the Vetrano murder and ensuing trial, the Queens DA’s office was under the direction of the late Richard A. Brown, who died a month after Lewis’ conviction.
Ron Kuby, Lewis’ attorney, told amNewYork Law that he believes prosecutors only obtained Lewis’ DNA — which ultimately matched that which had been found at the crime scene — because Lewis was caught up in what he referred to as the NYPD’s “racial dragnet.” He says the department began DNA testing large swaths of Black men around the time of Vetrano’s killing, something that violates people’s Fourth Amendment right to be free from unreasonable search and seizure.
That’s something Kuby knows, he said, because near the end of Lewis’ second trial, an anonymous police source wrote a letter informing Lewis’ defense team that the NYPD had created “a massive racial dragnet, targeting hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of African Americans in the area for DNA testing.”
Kuby called into question the testimony provided by NYPD Lt. John Russo, who, months after the case went cold, said that he saw a Black man exhibiting “odd behavior” walking around Howard Beach around the time of Vetrano’s death, then remembered seeing Lewis months earlier.
“The letter said the DNA testing is what led them to Chanel Lewis,” Kuby said. “Not the testimony at trial, where the detective lieutenant, sitting in his office, months after the murder, suddenly remembered a stop he had made of Chanel Lewis six months earlier, which in itself is kind of an unbelievable story.”
“This is one of the most intense manhunts in New York City’s history,” Kuby continued. “After months and months and months of intense investigation, turning over every possible clue, it was more than odd that this detective lieutenant suddenly was struck by a bolt of memory out of the blue of something that had happened far earlier at sort of a random stop. It was unbelievable at the time and it’s unbelievable now, but that was the explanation the DA’s office fostered at trial to explain how it got to Chanel Lewis.”
He said that, because the defense team believes it now knows that the way prosecutors found their way to Lewis was via DNA testing they carried out by swabbing “hundreds” of Black and Hispanic men after an unapproved lab conducted racial phenotyping on Vetrano’s body, which suggested DNA left behind was African or European in nature. Kuby said the police then used a lab that wasn’t actually licensed to test the DNA found on her body and the DNA of those they tested, one of whom was Lewis.
Lewis didn’t become a suspect in the case until a month after the DNA testing occurred.
“[Prosecutors] concealed the fact that they did this,” Kuby said. “So, the defense never had an opportunity to challenge the science behind this so-called racial profiling and never had the opportunity to have a hearing about the racial dragnet and whether that was a constitutional matter.”
The DNA evidence the testing found should not have been used in trial without a hearing to demonstrate it had been obtained in a constitutional fashion, Kuby said.
“If somebody says, ‘I think the perpetrator was a black male,’ the police are not entitled to go round up every black male in New York City,” he said. “The DA’s office has consistently opposed every time we have asked for the documents relevant to that, and as for a hearing about this, the DA’s office has consistently opposed any inquiry into the racial dragnet, and ironically, have never denied it.”
Moreover, Kurby said the reliability of that DNA testing itself should be called into question because it was done by a then-unlicensed vendor and no one who actually performed the DNA testing testified at trial, something the U.S. Supreme Court has since held is necessary.
The Queens judge on Lewis’s case, State Supreme Court Judge Michael Aloise, had previously rejected Lewis’s requests to appeal the conviction.
Reporting from Hell Gate shows that he had been found to issue excessive sentences and that higher courts have ruled in favor of seven out of 59 defendants (now, eight, counting Lewis) who have filed appeals arguing that Aloise allowed evidence that should have been excluded at trial – a rate that’s higher than 87% of judges across the state.
Judges from the Appellate Division, Second Department, will review Lewis’s case in the coming months. They will decide whether Lewis’s conviction should be flat-out dismissed or upheld, or whether there should be a new trial or hearing regarding the evidence that could lead to his conviction being dismissed or upheld.
Isabella Gallo
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