Legal Aid Society's Wrongful Conviction Unit Exonerates Wayne Gardine

Since 1989, at least 1,300 murder convictions were overturned nationwide, according to the National Registry of Exonerations.

Conviction Vacated

Wayne Gardine, 49, was convicted in a case where the only evidence against him was the word of a drug dealer who changed his story several times, described the killer as six feet tall when Mr. Gardine is only 5-foot-8 and was known for providing police with information to get his own criminal cases minimized.

Just after midnight on Sept. 3, 1994, Robert Mickens, a 22-year-old known as “Dak,” was shot nearly a dozen times in front of a townhouse on Edgecombe Avenue in Harlem. The street was an open-air drug market, according to the Legal Aid Society’s filing, which states:

The police interviewed two teenagers the night of the shooting: a 19-year-old, identified in court papers only as N.S., and his 14-year-old friend, identified as N.V. Neither claimed to know the assailant, but both said they had seen the shooting up close.

A month later, after N.S. was arrested on drug charges, detectives visited him in jail and showed him a photo of Mr. Gardine. N.S. identified Mr. Gardine by a nickname, saying he had heard that a man with that nickname had been the shooter.

The murder was investigated by an inexperienced detective, who said the case was influenced by his supervisor, Detective Willie Parson, who discouraged him from pursuing other leads.

Around this time, the 30th Precinct, where the detectives were based, was the site of a scandal that eventually led to the conviction of 30 officers. Officers at the Dirty 30, as the precinct came to be known, stole drugs and guns from dealers, extorted them, beat them up and lied in court, prosecutors said. Detective Parson was not charged at the time, but he was arrested in 2000 and later pleaded guilty to transporting cash for a cocaine and heroin ring.

Later, during the Legal Aid Society’s investigation, the younger witness, N.V., said that he and N.S. had agreed to accuse Mr. Gardine to appease their own drug boss, who was friends with the victim, and to avoid having to retaliate for the murder themselves. He said they had been at least 200 feet away when the shooting happened and could not make out the shooter.

(L-R) Joseph Janke, Wayne Gardine and Patrick Taylor are recent exonerees.  

In 2015, Joseph Janke was sentenced to 60 years in prison for a shooting in Harvey, Ill., that wounded two people. He was granted a new trial and acquitted at a retrial in June 2023 based on evidence from a shooting victim that Janke was not one of the gunmen. Patrick Taylor was convicted in 2011 of a murder near Chicago, Illinois. He was exonerated in 2023 after his attorneys obtained previously undisclosed evidence that pointed to other suspects and impeached a key state's witness. 

Legal Aid also found that the police had not acted on information about an alternate suspect who had a motive to shoot Mr. Mickens, the filing said.

Mr. Gardine, in immigration custody upstate, experienced his exoneration over Skype with Justice Kate Paek vacating his conviction. Outside the courthouse, his mother, Grace Davis, thanked the judge and Mr. Bragg “for giving my son a chance again,” adding, “I’ve been through a lot. I’ve been sick with depression, stress, everything, so I’m feeling wonderful today.”

Mr. Gardine, in a statement released by his lawyers, said, “I’m happy that the justice system finally worked.”

Mr. Gardine’s cause was taken up by the Legal Aid Society’s Wrongful Conviction Unit. A unit at the Manhattan district attorney’s office that looks into possible wrongful convictions collaborated on the investigations. He faces possible deportation because he is accused of having entered the United States illegally, which he disputes, according to his attorney.

“We’re really hoping that this official order from the judge will be like the final pressure we need to get them to release him” while the deportation case is pending, said the lawyer, Lou Fox of the Legal Aid Society.

Help for Wrongful Convictions

The Legal Aid Society can assist with wrongful convictions, applications for commutation and pardon, and the sealing of past criminal records. The Wrongful Conviction Unit was created to address the population of prisoners who have exhausted all avenues of relief and are still fighting for their freedom and to clear their names of crimes they did not commit.

 If you are innocent and have exhausted all appeals for a conviction in New York City, write to The Wrongful Conviction Unit and request our questionnaire to be considered for representation:

The Wrongful Conviction Unit
c/o The Legal Aid Society
199 Water Street
New York, NY 10038

Or email: wcu@legal-aid.org

The Innocence Project works to free the innocent, prevent wrongful convictions, and create fair, compassionate, and equitable systems of justice for everyone. Our work is guided by science and grounded in anti-racism.

The Exoneration Project is one of the best-funded, largest, and most successful innocence projects in the country. To prove clients’ innocence, they provide free forensic testing, experts, investigative services, and an experienced litigation team to get our clients home where they belong. To date, close to 200 clients have been exonerated, liberating them to live their lives and enjoy their freedom.

Center on Wrongful Convictions launched in April 1999 is dedicated to identifying and rectifying wrongful convictions and other serious miscarriages of justice. To date, the Center has exonerated more than forty innocent men, women, and children from states around the country, and it receives thousands of inquiries a year. The CWC also houses some of the nation’s leading legal experts on false confessions and police interrogations and has helped exonerate more than twenty false confessors.

The National Registry of Exonerations is a project of the Newkirk Center for Science & Society at University of California Irvine, the University of Michigan Law School and Michigan State University College of Law. It was founded in 2012 in conjunction with the Center on Wrongful Convictions at Northwestern University School of Law. The Registry provides detailed information about exoneration in the United States beginning 1989—cases in which a person was wrongly convicted of a crime and later cleared of all the charges based on new evidence of innocence. The Registry also maintains a more limited database of known exonerations prior to 1989.