Court Vacates Murder Conviction of Pro Bono Client

As reported in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, the Daily News, the New York Post and the New York Law Journal, on March 10, a Brooklyn Criminal Court judge vacated the murder conviction of Paul, Weiss pro bono client Andre Hatchett. Mr. Hatchett left the courtroom a free man after wrongly serving 25 years in prison.

The Paul, Weiss team, working closely with lawyers from the Innocence Project, began representing Mr. Hatchett in 2011 after an effort to prove his innocence through DNA testing proved unsuccessful. In 2015, the team sought a reinvestigation of Mr. Hartchett's 1991 murder case with the Brooklyn District Attorney's Conviction Integrity Unit (CIU). That reinvestigation, jointly conducted by CIU and the defense, uncovered evidence that the main witness in the case initially identified another person as the assailant, but the records documenting that fact were never turned over to the defense, as the DA's office conceded they should have been. The team also found evidence suggesting that the main witness had received an undisclosed deal in exchange for his testimony. The reinvestigation of the case showed a prosecution plagued by bad judgment and errors from beginning to end, which led the head of the CIU to tell the court that Mr. Hatchett "was failed by almost every institution he came into contact with during the course of his prosecution."

The Paul, Weiss team was led by litigation partner James Brochin.