It was one of the most racially charged murder cases in New York City history: A mob of white teenagers armed with baseball bats and a gun set upon Yusuf Hawkins, a Black 16-year-old, one summer night in 1989 in Bensonhurst, Brooklyn, touching off months of furious protests.
Joseph Fama, who was convicted of fatally shooting Mr. Hawkins, has long insisted that the authorities, squirming under pressure for a conviction, wrongfully pinned the murder on him.
Now, after 35 years behind bars, Mr. Fama has persuaded a Brooklyn judge to grant his request for a new hearing to present evidence that he hopes will establish his innocence.
“This guy got framed,” Mr. Fama’s lawyer, Justin Bonus, said on Wednesday, adding that his client had not even been part of the mob that attacked Mr. Hawkins. He said that someone else involved in the attack had shot the teen.
While the decision is a victory for Mr. Fama’s legal team, his road to exoneration is still a steep one. Brooklyn prosecutors disparaged the appeal largely as a rehash of failed legal claims. A conference will be held on Nov. 21 to set parameters and a date for the hearing.
Mr. Bonus said a dozen people had provided sworn statements or testimony to back up the innocence claim of Mr. Fama, 53, who has already had two appeals and two attempts at parole denied.
“There was tremendous racial tension at the time, and there’s no denying he was killed because he was Black,” Mr. Bonus said in an interview. “But law enforcement was under tremendous pressure to make an arrest, and they suffered tunnel vision and relied on completely incredible people.”
The Brooklyn district attorney’s office has stood firm on Mr. Fama’s conviction, saying that the totality of the evidence overwhelmingly established his guilt.
In court papers filed in opposition to Mr. Fama’s motion for the hearing, prosecutors said that five witnesses had identified Mr. Fama as the gunman and four others had placed him at the scene.
Prosecutors wrote that after his arrest, Mr. Fama had “confessed without remorse” to two jailhouse informants that he had killed Mr. Hawkins simply for being Black.
Mr. Fama’s motion “presented no new, credible evidence that he is actually innocent” compared with the “overwhelming evidence” that he had killed Mr. Hawkins, prosecutors wrote in their filing.
Mr. Hawkins’s murder embodied a brutal period of division and violence in a city roiled by racial strife and intolerance.
The Central Park jogger case, in which five teenagers of color were wrongfully convicted of assaulting and raping a female jogger, occurred months earlier in 1989.
In 1984, Bernhard Goetz became a vigilante figure for shooting four Black youths who he said were about to rob him in a subway car in Manhattan. And in 1986, a Black man in Howard Beach, Queens, was fatally struck by a driver after being chased onto a highway by white teenagers.
The Hawkins case swiftly entered the culture. It spawned rap lyrics and led Spike Lee to dedicate his 1991 film “Jungle Fever” to Mr. Hawkins. It also set off months of protests led by the Rev. Al Sharpton and helped boost David N. Dinkins in his run to become New York’s first Black mayor.
The fatal night for Mr. Hawkins began when he and three friends traveled from their neighborhood in East New York to check out a used car for sale in a largely Italian American section of Bensonhurst.
They were attacked by a bat-wielding mob of white teens who the authorities said mistakenly believed Mr. Hawkins had been dating a local girl, who was the ex-girlfriend of a teenager named Keith Mondello.
The authorities said Mr. Fama and Mr. Mondello led the mob, which followed the four Black interlopers and then surrounded them, hurling racial slurs. Mr. Fama shot Mr. Hawkins fatally in the chest, prosecutors said.
Mr. Sharpton and other public figures led numerous protests in Bensonhurst, where they confronted jeering white residents yelling epithets.
Of the eight people charged in connection with the attack, the attention centered on Mr. Fama, who was sentenced to 32 years to life in prison, and on Mr. Mondello, who was convicted of menacing and other charges and served eight years.
Mr. Bonus said the investigation into Mr. Fama was also tainted by the involvement of Louis Scarcella, a retired Police Department homicide detective whose dishonest work on murder cases in the 1980s and 1990s was cited in numerous exonerations that have cost the city and state millions of dollars.
Mr. Bonus said Mr. Scarcella had helped steer the investigation toward charging Mr. Fama with the killing, despite evidence that the shooter was another local teenager.
Mr. Scarcella declined to comment.
Mr. Bonus also called for more lab tests of bullet casings and the bats used by the mob, and said that a main eyewitness against Mr. Fama, Frankie Tighe, had recanted his trial testimony shortly after taking the stand.
But prosecutors said in their filing that the recantation and some other claims by Mr. Bonus were known during Mr. Fama’s trial and did not change the outcome.
Also, they said, five witnesses all told the authorities shortly after the murder that they had heard Mr. Tighe say he had just seen Mr. Fama shoot a “Black kid.”
While not all of the witnesses present at the attack testified at Mr. Fama’s 1990 trial, their accounts may be solicited during the actual innocence hearing, a spokesman for the district attorney’s office said on Wednesday.
Regarding Mr. Scarcella, prosecutors said police records showed that he had played only a minor role in the investigation and had not interviewed any of the suspects or the identifying witnesses.
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