Man Wrongly Jailed 19 Yrs For Shooting At Crown Heights Cops: DA

CROWN HEIGHTS, BROOKLYN — A man convicted of shooting at police officers in Crown Heights two decades ago will have his conviction overturned by prosecutors this week, according to the district attorney.

Brooklyn District Attorney Eric Gonzalez announced Wednesday that he will move to vacate the conviction of Phillip Almeda, who spent almost 19 years in prison, after an investigation by his Conviction Review Unit found problems with the 2001 case that put him behind bars, according to prosecutors.

Almeda, known as Kadafi Ala, was convicted of shooting toward officers during an incident on Eastern Parkway, but investigators found that the forensic evidence from the gun recovered from the shooting didn't match the police officers' account of what happened that night, prosecutors said.

“A reinvestigation of this case showed how confirmation bias can lead to a wrongful conviction," Gonzalez said. "Despite witness testimony that contradicted the ballistic evidence, this crime was presented to a jury as a ‘simple case’ and a man unjustly spent nearly two decades in prison. We are moving to vacate this conviction because our review of all the available evidence, including an expert’s reexamination of the ballistics, has demonstrated that the defendant could not have committed the shooting as described at trial."

Cops, whose accounts varied, claimed that they saw Almeda firing in their direction before emerging from a courtyard on Eastern Parkway just after midnight on January 1, 2000, according to prosecutors.

The plain-clothes officers had been on the street responding to a teenager who shot a revolver into the air, prosecutors said. The teen was charged separately and adjudicated as a youthful offender.

Almeda, who was 20 at the time, was arrested immediately after being spotted by police and, according to some of the cops, made "inculpatory statements" when he was taken into custody, prosecuters said. Nine shell casings were recovered from the sidewalk and a gun was found in the neighboring courtyard.

At trial, witnesses said that a group of people had been watching fireworks that night when the 16-year-old fired a revolver and a different person fired a gun into the air, paused, and fired again, before police responded and fired in his direction, according to prosecutors.

They said nobody returned fire toward the cops and that Almeda, who they knew, didn't even possess a gun, according to prosectors.

Almeda was convicted of three counts of attempted aggravated assault on a police officer and sentenced to three terms of seven years in prison. He was paroled in 2018, officials said.

In the re-investigation, an expert hired by the Conviction Review Unit determined the forensic evidence was more consistent with what witnesses said happened, than the cops, according to the DA's office.

There was no explanation for how Almeda could have placed the gun in the left-side courtyard before cops spotted him in the right-side courtyard and, with all the shell casings found on the sidewalk, it was more likely the shooter was standing there than in the courtyard where police saw Almeda, according to the officials.

"For all nine casings to end up on the sidewalk and none in the courtyard, all the casings would have had to bounce through shrubbery, a chain-link fence, and over a two-foot high brick wall, making it virtually impossible for the defendant to commit the shooting as described at trial," the office said.

The review unit also found inconsistencies with cops' pre-trial accounts that suggested what Almeda said while being arrested were "not accurately described to the jury," prosecutors said.

There was also no evidence presented at trial that linked Almeda to the recovered gun, prosecutors said.

Almeda is set to appear in court on Wednesday.

His conviction is the 30th exonerated by the Conviction Review Unit, which was established in 2014.