New York Man Freed After 19 Years in Prison for Crime He Didn’t Commit

A man from New York has been exonerated after spending 19 years in prison for being wrongly accused of a $550 robbery. The man spent nearly two decades behind bars before finally being exonerated and freed on March 16.

“It cost me 20 years, but they said they corrected it now. So that’s all that matters. So I am good with that,” Kenneth Windley, 61, said as he left the Brooklyn courthouse at liberty for the first time since 2007.

Windley was wrongly accused of a $550 robbery and has spent 19 years in prison for a crime he did not commit. A judge threw out his conviction and dismissed his case entirely after both the prosecution and Windley’s lawyers requested it. The prosecution stated that new evidence, including confessions from two other men who were convicted in similar cases, was received, supporting Windley’s longstanding claim of innocence.

“This case is really a cautionary tale of how things can seem one way but, without careful analysis, not be what it purports to be,” Brooklyn District Attorney Reic Gonzalez, a Democrat, said after shaking Windley’s hand outside court.

“Had we known what the evidence was, this case should have never happened,” Gonzalez said, adding that he apologized privately to Windley.

Windley was arrested in 2005 after he bought a stove for his mother with a money order that turned out to be stolen. The money order was actually stolen from Gerald Ross, 70, who had been followed back home from a bank or post office by two thieves. The thieves put Ross in a chokehold and took the money orders, cash, and a bank book from him, the prosecutor said in a report released on March 16.

Ross regularly obtained money orders for his rent and life insurance payments at the post office. The money orders helped him and the authorities to follow a paper trail, which eventually led to Windley after he provided his name, driver's license, and address while purchasing the stove at an appliance store.

Windley had claimed from the very beginning to be innocent and said he had nothing to do with the robbery. He said he had simply bought a $542.77 money order at a discount from a couple of acquaintances, who insisted it was valid but couldn’t use it for bureaucratic reasons.

“He was duped,” one of Windley’s lawyers told the court during the hearing held on March 16. Ross identified Windley in a lineup as one of the thieves, and a jury convicted him in 2007 for robbery.