New evidence leads to Far Rockaway man’s release from prison
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Chad Breland was released from prison after QDA Melinda Katz’s Conviction Integrity Unit found he was wrongfully convicted after finding new evidence in his case. Photo courtesy of Breland
By Jacob Kaye
For nearly three decades, Chad Breland would occasionally wake up in the middle of the night and forget where he was. The bars on the window would remind him.
After serving 26 years in prison for two armed robberies he says he didn’t commit, Breland was released from Woodbourne Correctional Facility last week.
On Friday, Judge Michelle Johnson granted a joint motion filed by Queens District Attorney Melinda Katz, her Conviction Integrity Unit and Breland’s attorney to vacate the Far Rockaway man’s conviction and sentence related to the second of the two robberies.
The motion came after the CIU discovered new evidence that tied another man to the November 1995 crime. Fingerprints on the outside of one of the windows of the home that was robbed on Beach 29th Street were later found to match the criminal informant who first told police Breland was the perpetrator. Though the NYPD found the match, the DA’s office said the information was never passed along to prosecutors.
“Right now, it’s surreal,” Breland, 52, told the Eagle. “I’m taking one day at a time and readjusting and adapting to changing my life from being in prison all these years.”
Though an injustice had been committed against him, Breland, who was 26-years-old at the time of his arrest, said that he rarely lost faith that he would be released and his name would be cleared.
“I knew from the jump I was being set up,” he said. “I was going to keep fighting this thing but it was a lot of work, a lot of due diligence.”
“I thought I was going to get out sooner than this,” he added.
Breland studied case law in the prison law library and submitted countless Freedom of Information requests related to his case. With the help of his attorney, Justin Bonus, who came on the case in 2016, the pieces started to fall into place.
Chad Breland was 26 years old at the time of his arrest and 52 years old at the time of his release. Photos courtesy of Bonus and Breland
On Nov. 27, 1995, two men with guns stormed into Freddie Bolston and Justin Brown’s home in Far Rockaway. Bolston, who was home alone, was held at gunpoint by one of the men as the second went into Brown’s room. Bolston later told police he saw the two men leave the house with a large, black bag.
After the robbery, two men were spotted by police officers walking away from the house carrying two large bags, according to the CIU’s investigation. The two men separated, and the officers followed one of them – the man ended up tossing one bag into a garbage bin and the other over a fence.
Police stopped the man and asked him about the bags. He told them that he only had one bag and that it was filled with Nintendo games. He refused to give the officers his name but gave them an address associated with Breland.
The police let him go and, a few minutes later, they got a call about the robbery. The second bag was later recovered and found to have multiple guns inside.
A few hours after the robbery, Breland came over to Brown’s house – the two were friends – and they went out for a drive. Police officers pulled the pair over and arrested Breland, who had been identified by the criminal informant as the robber in both the Nov. 27th robbery and a robbery from two weeks earlier.
Two years later, Breland was sentenced to two consecutive 15-year sentences for the armed robberies.
The CIU’s investigation found that the criminal informant’s fingerprints were recovered from one of the outside windows of Brown’s home, a place the informant said he had never been. The work to find latent fingerprints – which began immediately after the robbery – was unknown to Breland, his attorneys and then-Assistant District Attorney Brad Leventhal, the lead trial prosecutor in the case, according to the CIU.
“When one officer indicated at trial that the November 27th crime scene may have been processed for prints, the defense asserted surprise and asked for any reports regarding the print examination,” the joint motion reads. “The trial prosecutor responded that it was his ‘understanding...nothing was ever done by the latent print unit and no reports exist, or were ever generated.’”
Leventhal quit the DA’s office in March after a previous CIU investigation led to the overturned conviction of three men sent to prison for a double murder in 1996. Then-Queens Supreme Court Judge Joseph Zayas accused Leventhal and co-prosecutor Charles Testagrossa of concealing evidence that would have exonerated Gary Johnson, George Bell and Rohan Bolt at the time of their trial.
Former prosecutor Brad Leventhal (left), who quit the DA’s office earlier this year, led the prosecution of Breland, who was found to be wrongfully convicted last week. Eagle file photo by Paul Frangipane
The CIU’s investigation into Breland’s case said that Leventhal also didn’t know that the criminal informant was facing a felony indictment at the time of the robberies and that he was looking for court consideration for helping the NYPD make gun arrests, the motion said.
The informant’s indictment was later dismissed and sealed though the CIU “found no evidence in the Court or QCDA files linking the dismissal of the indictment with [the informant’s] information leading to Breland’s arrest and the recovery of weapons.”
“In light of the new evidence, justice requires vacating Breland’s conviction,” Katz said in a statement. “Our office has also taken steps to ensure that, in the future, similar fingerprint evidence developed by the NYPD Latent Print Section after a case is closed is forwarded to our office in a timely manner.”
Bonus, Breland’s attorney, said that despite the fact that Breland spent so much time in prison, he was glad the DA’s office worked to get him out, even if that meant only addressing one of the robberies he was charged in.
“They wanted to get him out of jail as fast as possible,” Bonus said. “That's the way it ended, and I'm thankful they got him out of jail.”
Bonus and Breland are in the process of working to prove Breland’s innocence in the first robbery. But in the meantime, Breland is looking to pursue entrepreneurial ideas he had while incarcerated.
“I did the time, instead of the time doing me me, so I picked up a lot of ideas,” he said.
He’s also hoping to leave Far Rockaway, where he’s returned to, and, ultimately, New York City.
“I want to be in a whole other country but I'm definitely going to be out of New York City,” Breland said.
A week before his release, Breland was told that the CIU had found the new evidence during their investigation. Knowing he’d soon get to return to his family, he had trouble sleeping and had to find ways to keep himself occupied in an effort to quell his anxiety.
Less than 24 hours before his hearing, the prison was put on lockdown after a count of the incarcerated people was off.
“I was like, of course this would occur on the day of my release. It seemed like it just prolonged that even longer,” Breland said. “But then once it ultimately happened, and I had the hearing, it was relief.”
Breland’s case became the ninth to be vacated by Katz’s CIU since she took office in January 2020.
On Tuesday, the DA announced that her office had filed a joint motion to vacate the conviction of Lawrence Scott, who was found guilty of robbery in 1995.
A CIU investigation found that a prosecutor who resigned from the DA’s office in 1997 had improperly excluded certain minorities and women from jury service in multiple cases, including Scott’s.
Scott was sentenced to five to 10 years in prison, which he has already completed. He is currently incarcerated on a separate robbery charge.
“Counsel has been appointed to assess the impact of the reversal of this prior conviction on his current sentence,” the DA’s office said.
