Name: Derrick Hamilton Spent Over 20 Years in Jail Over False Murder Conviction
Uploaded: 2022-08-17T17:37:59.000Z
Description: Watch the stand-up comedy video 'Derrick Hamilton Spent Over 20 Years in Jail Over False Murder Conviction' from PowerfulJRE on Comedy Buff. Published 2022-08-17. Transcript available.

Watch the stand-up comedy video 'Derrick Hamilton Spent Over 20 Years in Jail Over False Murder Conviction' from PowerfulJRE on Comedy Buff. Published 2022-08-17. Transcript available.

The Joe Rogan Experience.
Well, it's an honor to meet you, Derek, especially after such high praise.
So tell me your story.
Like, what happened to you?
Well, thanks for having me, and Josh, thanks for the accolades.
You know, I was a 17-year-old kid running around Brooklyn at a time when
Brooklyn was terrible.
And I was a product of my environment.
I was doing little robberies and, you know, little stump stuff that adolescents
do.
And I got on the radar of the police department.
They used to search me all the time, pat me down, you know, throw me up on the
car.
Regular stuff that happened in that community.
One day, a man was killed about 5 a.m. by some older guys in the neighborhood.
The police had an identification of their car.
They called the guy in, and he somehow told them he rented me the car
and that I was the one that bought the car back and told him that I had
committed the crime
and that I had shot the guy by accident.
And that was my first real experience with the criminal justice system because
it was a murder.
I'm like, murder?
You know, I did a couple of robberies.
You know, I did some petty stuff, but murder?
That's not me.
So, you know, what was amazing to me is, number one, nobody would have gave me
their car at 17 years old.
Any cop would have known that this guy wouldn't have gave me his car.
But they arrested me, and they charged me with murder.
And I was convicted by a jury because they admitted grand jury testimony of a
witness who came before the court and said,
I've never seen this guy at all.
The police made me lie in the grand jury and say that I've seen this guy.
I'm not testifying.
I refuse to testify.
I'm not going to get up there and purge myself.
The judge told the prosecutor that day that they were dismissing the case,
that if they don't get another witness, this case is going out of here.
Judge's name was Lombardo back then.
This was 1983.
I went back to Rikers Island that day.
We came back the next day, and the judge said that he thought about this all
night,
and he felt that the only person would benefit from this witness not testifying
would be me.
Therefore, he was going to allow the prosecutor to admit their grand jury
testimony as evidence-in-chief at my trial,
and I would forfeit my right to confront the witness and let the jury hear the
truth that she never saw the crime.
So that was my first real experience.
I was a young knucklehead.
The lawyer that I had at the time, Candace Curse, said,
Look, young man, get your head out your ass, and you better read these cases,
and you better see what's going on like they railroad you.
She took the stand and told the judge what the witness told her, and I was
convicted.
I was sentenced to 25 years of life, and it was at that moment that I knew that
I had to study law,
that I had to really dig deep in the books, and I did it.
New York State, thank God, had a law library.
They had all the books in the world.
How long you had to do was apply yourself.
And I spent the next five and six years working on my case.
In 1987, the appellal division in that case found that the judge had no
evidence whatsoever
that me or anybody acting on my behalf had threatened this witness did anything
improper,
and that the judge was right.
There was no evidence that can prove that.
So they reversed the conviction, and I was able to get out of prison after six
and a half years.
Unbeknownst to me, there was a rogue cop by the name of Louis Garcella who felt
that I didn't do enough time for this conviction.
He didn't like the appellal division decision.
Eight months later, I was in New Haven, Connecticut at a unisex line that I had
on at the time.
He came in that store and arrested me, told me I was going back to Brooklyn for
a murder.
And I'm like, a murder?
Like, this can't be true.
Like, again?
Like, how many times has this happened?
I went to New York.
I was processed.
About a year later, I went to trial.
I was convicted.
They brought a witness in by the name of Jew Smith, who said that she was
present at the murder when her boyfriend was killed,
that I was a gunman, had a gun in my hand, and I shot this individual several
times with this gun.
But her original statement to the police said she wasn't there, that she never
saw this crime.
She was around the corner at a store.
When she came back, her boyfriend was dead.
The jury never heard that statement.
But in any event, the ballistics evidence proved that this guy was shot with
two different guns,
that he wasn't shot in the building where she said he was shot at, but he was
shot outside in the street.
Despite this evidence, I was convicted.
After I was convicted was when I learned that she had first told the cops at
the crime scene.
She never saw the crime, but she had told it to a different detective.
So I made a pro se motion to set aside the verdict.
And in the motion, I argued that this detective that never came in that she
gave the statement to could prove my innocence.
And the judge ordered a hearing for a year.
He said, I can't give this guy a day in jail, let alone 15 years, which was the
minimum.
I want this witness to come back.
The prosecutor said, I'm not calling him.
And the judge said, if you don't call her back, this case is going to a new
trial, right?
They called her back, and she admitted that she never saw the crime, that the
detective Lewis Garcella told her what happened
and told her that if she didn't get up here and say that I committed the crime,
she was going to jail.
She was on parole.
Her boyfriend was a felon that just got out.
She had kids.
They said, you're going to jail.
She said, what was I supposed to do?
Here's the system telling me this, that if I don't come in and say this, I'm
going to jail.
And I came in and said it.
The judge ruled a year later that, again, he felt that I was, he said there was
a common thread of string.
I manipulated this evidence.
Again, I called the detective.
The detective came in and said exactly what the witness said, that she told him
she didn't see the crime,
that she was beat up and took to the priest and then told her she was going to
jail.
And had that jury heard that, there'd have been different results.
At the trial, they told the jury that her first statement was the most
important statement in this case.
And that when the police arrived on the scene, she didn't hesitate.
She said, Derek Hamilton, somebody I know my entire life committed the crime,
which wasn't true.
In fact, she said the truth, which she didn't see the crime, that she was
somewhere else.
I was sentenced to 25 years of life.
I filed numerous post-conviction motions after post-conviction motions.
Every time the judge gave me a hearing, every time he said he can throw the
case out,
every time he said he was troubled by this conviction,
the prosecutor would come in and tell him I'm a bad guy,
that this is not somebody you want to release, that, you know, they put
imagined harms,
they'd make a judge think that I was the most terrible person in the world.
And he would deny the motion every single time.
You know, I filed numerous motions, numerous post-convictions.
I did everything you could imagine to prove my innocence, but to no avail.
I began going to parole board around 2009.
It was a very traumatic experience for me because at that time,
the parole board wanted me to admit guilt, and I wasn't going to do that.
I'm not going to come in and say I killed somebody I didn't kill.
I'm not doing that.
I don't care what you say.
And I had to challenge them and fight them for two years.
And then my family went out in protest, and we got a Daily News article put out
that said that I would be free if the court would just basically give me
justice.
If they just give this guy a fair shot, he'd be home.
So it changed the mentality of the parole board.
They look at all of my evidence, and they said, you know, based on the evidence
that you presented here, we believe in your innocence.
Like, this evidence speaks for itself.
Even the judge said you was innocent.
I don't know what you're doing here all these years.
And they released me.
And at that point, I began a crusade.
Because when I was in prison, there were several guys.
We built something called the Act Your Innocence Team, guys who I was working
in the law library.
So I would read guys' case and check them out.
So what I had to do was get families together, get people to come together and
bring their families and say, look, let's send these people to City Hall.
Let them know there's a lot of us in here.
It's not just me.
It's white.
There's black.
There's a bunch of us in here that got the same issue, that they're procedurally
barring us.
They're not looking at our case.
They're just kicking it into the garbage.
We don't want to hear it.
Get out of here.
Right?
Because they can.
They had the power.
So when we start bringing attention to these cases, it changed the whole
dynamic.
So when I got out, I joined that group, family and friends of the Romans'
convictions.
We had a PR guy by the name of Lonnie Suri, who was helping us keep it together.
And we just began blasting the prosecutors.
We began protesting outside their offices and getting rid of them.
The first one we was able to get rid of was Charles Hines in Brooklyn, the
prosecutor that sent me to prison.
We was able to remove him and put a progressive prosecutor in that agreed that
he would look at these convictions if he was elected.
So he got in.
And in two years, he has honorated 22 people.
And he found that it was a systemic racist problem in Brooklyn that was convicting
the wrong people.
Fortunately for me, the New York Times reporter called me in, I believe, 2012.
And they said, why are people afraid of the police?
I just thought, are you kidding me?
Why are they afraid of the police?
And I told them names of guys that I knew that was in prison that this cop set
up.
And a lawyer had contacted me and said that he was working on a case which this
cop framed, another guy, by the name of David Ranter.
And he said, in two weeks, there's going to be an article in New York Times
that exposed this cop.
And I told the New York Times reporter that.
And I said, look, in two weeks, if it comes out, you come back to me and I take
you to these guys.
And she came back, Frances Robert.
She came back and I took her to these guys.
She got the prosecutor to agree to look at 50 of these cop's cases, 50 of them.
And, you know, 20 was exonerated so far, those guys.
And I was exonerated in 2015.
In 2014, for the first time in New York history, the appellate division's
second department ruled in my case that a free standing act of innocence claim
can be recognized under post-conviction motion.
And they said that anybody that's innocent, the courts could no longer procedurally
bar you.
They got to reach the merits of your contentions.
They just can't say, well, you should have raised this before or your lawyer
failed to do this before or you should have did.
You got to reach the merits of it.
Get to the bottom line.
Is this guy innocent or not?
And when they gave me that opinion, it kind of like in itself exonerated me
because the prosecutor now had to hear my witnesses.
I had alibis.
I had police officers who said, look, this guy was in New Haven, Connecticut,
not Brooklyn when this murder happened.
We know because we've seen him there.
We was at a party with him.
I had a hotel receipts.
I had many witnesses that could verify where I was at on a date in the time you
cast was murdered.
The courts were just throwing evidence in the garbage.
We, in fact, proved who committed the crime.
The real murder was present when the cops arrived.
He was on parole for manslaughter.
They took his name down but never even investigated who he was.
So we had a lot of evidence.
We had a witness who was there who identified who was there, identified why the
guy was shot.
There was a 911 caller that said three male blacks leaned in the red car.
He admitted they was in a red car.
So they were just overwhelming evidence of my innocence.
But courts was just throwing it in the garbage because the prosecutor lied to
them and said he's a bad guy.
So my experiences taught me that, you know, there's a lot of innocent people.
I was in prison, man.
Look, one thing about prison that I tell people, they say, hey, everybody says
they're innocent.
That's not true.
Right?
They may tell a lawyer that, but they're not going to tell a guy in the
neighborhood with them that.
I know you're guilty.
You know, I was with you.
I know what you did.
You told me.
Everybody tells me.
You're from the same neighborhoods.
So it's a small minority of people that's in the law library every single day.
If you go to the yard, guys are working out in the weight pile.
Right?
They're playing basketball.
But the innocent guys are in that law library every single day trying to find a
way out.
And that was me.
Every single day.
And I studied every book in there.
I taught law classes.
And I became very good at it.
I mean, I was surprised.
I mean, I know them in the college.
Right?
When the lawyer gave me the first two cases and I read them, I was surprised
how well I knew the cases.
I was surprised how I comprehended them.
And it was because of that that I kept going.
And I found a civilian who liked me.
He was working in the law library.
And the first test I got was a 44.
And he said, look, man, I'm not going to waste my time.
You got to explain what that is.
What a 44?
A 44 was my grade on the test.
I took a test.
The first test he gave me was on the Constitution of the United States.
I had to learn the 4th, 5th, 6th, 8th, and 14th Amendment.
And I failed.
I was playing.
And he said, look, you're not going to waste my time.
You're smarter than that.
He challenged me.
Next time I came back, I got a 97.
So from that point on, I just started studying.
I started gravitating to the older guys that knew more than me.
Because I was young, they were willing to teach me.
And I was like a young sponge.
And I just loved what I did.
I became passionate about it.
And that's why I'm here now.
Derek, what kind of repercussions are there for cops that do things like this?
None.
I mean, in our case, the statute of limitations had ran out on this cop.
And let me just tell you about this cop.
He didn't just do it in the police department.
He left the police department, went into the DOE, the Department of Education,
and he did it there.
He framed the guy in the DOE.
They later found out the guy did nothing wrong.
They had to reinstate him.
This is just his nature and his character.
And he just gets away with it?
He gets away.
What's his name?
Lewis Scarcella.
And he's out there still?
He's out there.
He's still getting a pension.
The city is still paying this guy.
We still got cases today that we are fighting in court for him.
James Jenkins, Nelson Cruz.
Are they still actual cases that we're litigating?
How many people do you think that got wrongfully put in prison?
You know, I'll tell you something that I didn't even tell you, Josh, about this
one.
And it's going to...
This guy worked on over 200 cases.
My father was killed in 1988.
He was the detective on that case.
And I'll tell you something about that.
He said that one of the guys snatched a confession out of his hand and ate it.
I didn't believe that.
I said, as much as I want people who may be responsible for my father's death,
I can't trust this guy.
I can't take nothing he say to be true.
Right?
Just recently, that case was overturned.
Samuel Edmondson case because of his sloppy police work.
So, he says 200 cases he work on.
I would like to believe at least half of those guys are innocent.
Well, a lot of them have been exonerated.
How many Scarcella exonerations have there been?
20 to date.
20 to date.
How does a guy not just get locked up immediately for that?
And when he testifies, he has two lawyers with him now.
I've never seen a witness come to court and have two lawyers standing with him.
We object to it all the time.
But, I mean, this is how much of a criminal he is.
He had two lawyers standing with him all the time trying to protect his rights.
And he don't remember anything now.
Like, he don't remember, you know, of course, he don't recall nothing.
You got to bring the police reports to him and say, that's your signature.
Did you do this?
But he don't remember anything, of course.
Selectively, he don't remember anything.

Derrick Hamilton Spent Over 20 Years in Jail Over False Murder Conviction

The Joe Rogan Experience.
Well, it's an honor to meet you, Derek, especially after such high praise.
So tell me your story.
Like, what happened to you?
Well, thanks for having me, and Josh, thanks for the accolades.
You know, I was a 17-year-old kid running around Brooklyn at a time when
Brooklyn was terrible.
And I was a product of my environment.
I was doing little robberies and, you know, little stump stuff that adolescents
do.
And I got on the radar of the police department.
They used to search me all the time, pat me down, you know, throw me up on the
car.
Regular stuff that happened in that community.
One day, a man was killed about 5 a.m. by some older guys in the neighborhood.
The police had an identification of their car.
They called the guy in, and he somehow told them he rented me the car
and that I was the one that bought the car back and told him that I had
committed the crime
and that I had shot the guy by accident.
And that was my first real experience with the criminal justice system because
it was a murder.
I'm like, murder?
You know, I did a couple of robberies.
You know, I did some petty stuff, but murder?
That's not me.
So, you know, what was amazing to me is, number one, nobody would have gave me
their car at 17 years old.
Any cop would have known that this guy wouldn't have gave me his car.
But they arrested me, and they charged me with murder.
And I was convicted by a jury because they admitted grand jury testimony of a
witness who came before the court and said,
I've never seen this guy at all.
The police made me lie in the grand jury and say that I've seen this guy.
I'm not testifying.
I refuse to testify.
I'm not going to get up there and purge myself.
The judge told the prosecutor that day that they were dismissing the case,
that if they don't get another witness, this case is going out of here.
Judge's name was Lombardo back then.
This was 1983.
I went back to Rikers Island that day.
We came back the next day, and the judge said that he thought about this all
night,
and he felt that the only person would benefit from this witness not testifying
would be me.
Therefore, he was going to allow the prosecutor to admit their grand jury
testimony as evidence-in-chief at my trial,
and I would forfeit my right to confront the witness and let the jury hear the
truth that she never saw the crime.
So that was my first real experience.
I was a young knucklehead.
The lawyer that I had at the time, Candace Curse, said,
Look, young man, get your head out your ass, and you better read these cases,
and you better see what's going on like they railroad you.
She took the stand and told the judge what the witness told her, and I was
convicted.
I was sentenced to 25 years of life, and it was at that moment that I knew that
I had to study law,
that I had to really dig deep in the books, and I did it.
New York State, thank God, had a law library.
They had all the books in the world.
How long you had to do was apply yourself.
And I spent the next five and six years working on my case.
In 1987, the appellal division in that case found that the judge had no
evidence whatsoever
that me or anybody acting on my behalf had threatened this witness did anything
improper,
and that the judge was right.
There was no evidence that can prove that.
So they reversed the conviction, and I was able to get out of prison after six
and a half years.
Unbeknownst to me, there was a rogue cop by the name of Louis Garcella who felt
that I didn't do enough time for this conviction.
He didn't like the appellal division decision.
Eight months later, I was in New Haven, Connecticut at a unisex line that I had
on at the time.
He came in that store and arrested me, told me I was going back to Brooklyn for
a murder.
And I'm like, a murder?
Like, this can't be true.
Like, again?
Like, how many times has this happened?
I went to New York.
I was processed.
About a year later, I went to trial.
I was convicted.
They brought a witness in by the name of Jew Smith, who said that she was
present at the murder when her boyfriend was killed,
that I was a gunman, had a gun in my hand, and I shot this individual several
times with this gun.
But her original statement to the police said she wasn't there, that she never
saw this crime.
She was around the corner at a store.
When she came back, her boyfriend was dead.
The jury never heard that statement.
But in any event, the ballistics evidence proved that this guy was shot with
two different guns,
that he wasn't shot in the building where she said he was shot at, but he was
shot outside in the street.
Despite this evidence, I was convicted.
After I was convicted was when I learned that she had first told the cops at
the crime scene.
She never saw the crime, but she had told it to a different detective.
So I made a pro se motion to set aside the verdict.
And in the motion, I argued that this detective that never came in that she
gave the statement to could prove my innocence.
And the judge ordered a hearing for a year.
He said, I can't give this guy a day in jail, let alone 15 years, which was the
minimum.
I want this witness to come back.
The prosecutor said, I'm not calling him.
And the judge said, if you don't call her back, this case is going to a new
trial, right?
They called her back, and she admitted that she never saw the crime, that the
detective Lewis Garcella told her what happened
and told her that if she didn't get up here and say that I committed the crime,
she was going to jail.
She was on parole.
Her boyfriend was a felon that just got out.
She had kids.
They said, you're going to jail.
She said, what was I supposed to do?
Here's the system telling me this, that if I don't come in and say this, I'm
going to jail.
And I came in and said it.
The judge ruled a year later that, again, he felt that I was, he said there was
a common thread of string.
I manipulated this evidence.
Again, I called the detective.
The detective came in and said exactly what the witness said, that she told him
she didn't see the crime,
that she was beat up and took to the priest and then told her she was going to
jail.
And had that jury heard that, there'd have been different results.
At the trial, they told the jury that her first statement was the most
important statement in this case.
And that when the police arrived on the scene, she didn't hesitate.
She said, Derek Hamilton, somebody I know my entire life committed the crime,
which wasn't true.
In fact, she said the truth, which she didn't see the crime, that she was
somewhere else.
I was sentenced to 25 years of life.
I filed numerous post-conviction motions after post-conviction motions.
Every time the judge gave me a hearing, every time he said he can throw the
case out,
every time he said he was troubled by this conviction,
the prosecutor would come in and tell him I'm a bad guy,
that this is not somebody you want to release, that, you know, they put
imagined harms,
they'd make a judge think that I was the most terrible person in the world.
And he would deny the motion every single time.
You know, I filed numerous motions, numerous post-convictions.
I did everything you could imagine to prove my innocence, but to no avail.
I began going to parole board around 2009.
It was a very traumatic experience for me because at that time,
the parole board wanted me to admit guilt, and I wasn't going to do that.
I'm not going to come in and say I killed somebody I didn't kill.
I'm not doing that.
I don't care what you say.
And I had to challenge them and fight them for two years.
And then my family went out in protest, and we got a Daily News article put out
that said that I would be free if the court would just basically give me
justice.
If they just give this guy a fair shot, he'd be home.
So it changed the mentality of the parole board.
They look at all of my evidence, and they said, you know, based on the evidence
that you presented here, we believe in your innocence.
Like, this evidence speaks for itself.
Even the judge said you was innocent.
I don't know what you're doing here all these years.
And they released me.
And at that point, I began a crusade.
Because when I was in prison, there were several guys.
We built something called the Act Your Innocence Team, guys who I was working
in the law library.
So I would read guys' case and check them out.
So what I had to do was get families together, get people to come together and
bring their families and say, look, let's send these people to City Hall.
Let them know there's a lot of us in here.
It's not just me.
It's white.
There's black.
There's a bunch of us in here that got the same issue, that they're procedurally
barring us.
They're not looking at our case.
They're just kicking it into the garbage.
We don't want to hear it.
Get out of here.
Right?
Because they can.
They had the power.
So when we start bringing attention to these cases, it changed the whole
dynamic.
So when I got out, I joined that group, family and friends of the Romans'
convictions.
We had a PR guy by the name of Lonnie Suri, who was helping us keep it together.
And we just began blasting the prosecutors.
We began protesting outside their offices and getting rid of them.
The first one we was able to get rid of was Charles Hines in Brooklyn, the
prosecutor that sent me to prison.
We was able to remove him and put a progressive prosecutor in that agreed that
he would look at these convictions if he was elected.
So he got in.
And in two years, he has honorated 22 people.
And he found that it was a systemic racist problem in Brooklyn that was convicting
the wrong people.
Fortunately for me, the New York Times reporter called me in, I believe, 2012.
And they said, why are people afraid of the police?
I just thought, are you kidding me?
Why are they afraid of the police?
And I told them names of guys that I knew that was in prison that this cop set
up.
And a lawyer had contacted me and said that he was working on a case which this
cop framed, another guy, by the name of David Ranter.
And he said, in two weeks, there's going to be an article in New York Times
that exposed this cop.
And I told the New York Times reporter that.
And I said, look, in two weeks, if it comes out, you come back to me and I take
you to these guys.
And she came back, Frances Robert.
She came back and I took her to these guys.
She got the prosecutor to agree to look at 50 of these cop's cases, 50 of them.
And, you know, 20 was exonerated so far, those guys.
And I was exonerated in 2015.
In 2014, for the first time in New York history, the appellate division's
second department ruled in my case that a free standing act of innocence claim
can be recognized under post-conviction motion.
And they said that anybody that's innocent, the courts could no longer procedurally
bar you.
They got to reach the merits of your contentions.
They just can't say, well, you should have raised this before or your lawyer
failed to do this before or you should have did.
You got to reach the merits of it.
Get to the bottom line.
Is this guy innocent or not?
And when they gave me that opinion, it kind of like in itself exonerated me
because the prosecutor now had to hear my witnesses.
I had alibis.
I had police officers who said, look, this guy was in New Haven, Connecticut,
not Brooklyn when this murder happened.
We know because we've seen him there.
We was at a party with him.
I had a hotel receipts.
I had many witnesses that could verify where I was at on a date in the time you
cast was murdered.
The courts were just throwing evidence in the garbage.
We, in fact, proved who committed the crime.
The real murder was present when the cops arrived.
He was on parole for manslaughter.
They took his name down but never even investigated who he was.
So we had a lot of evidence.
We had a witness who was there who identified who was there, identified why the
guy was shot.
There was a 911 caller that said three male blacks leaned in the red car.
He admitted they was in 