‘Better late than never’: Three Queens men have convictions overturned after decades of incarceration

Armond McCloud was one of three men to have their convictions officially vacated in Queens Criminal Court on Thursday, Aug. 24, 2023. Photo via Laura Nirider

By Jacob Kaye

Altogether, Armond McCloud, Reginald Cameron and Earl Walters served well over half a century in prison for crimes they did not commit.

McCloud was 20 years old when a detective now known for soliciting false confessions got him to say that he shot a young man to death inside a LeFrak City building in 1994. Cameron, who was close friends with McCloud, was tricked by the same detective at the age of 19, confessing to the same murder. Walters was only 17 years old when detectives interrogated him for 16 hours, getting him to falsely confess to a string of robberies and abductions in 1992.

Despite their constant cries of innocence, countless legal filings and years of searching for new evidence to back up their claims, it wasn’t until Thursday that all three men were found to be wrongfully convicted.

“The wheels of justice turn slowly,” said Queens Supreme Court Justice Michelle Johnson, who oversaw the wrongful conviction proceedings on Thursday. “But they do turn.”

McCloud, Cameron and Walters each had their sentences and convictions officially vacated by Johnson this week following a review of each of their cases by the Queens district attorney’s Conviction Integrity Unit, which investigates wrongful conviction claims.

In McCloud’s and Cameron’s case, new evidence was presented to show that the detective, Carlos Gonzalez, had a history of soliciting false confessions from minors and that mistakes he had made in his own investigation of the 1994 murder of 22-year-old Japanese immigrant Kei Sunada made their way into the young men’s confessions. Gonzalez played a major role in drawing out a false confession from several suspects in the Central Park Five case – now known as the Exonerated Five. More recently, Gonzalez was found to have solicited a false confession from Johnny Hincapie, who served more than a quarter of a century in prison for the high-profile murder of a tourist visiting New York City for the U.S. Open in 1990.

In Walters' case, the DA’s office and Walters’ attorneys presented new evidence – which was available at the time of Walters’ original 1994 trial – to show that a latent fingerprint found at the scene of one of several Queens carjackings in 1992 did not belong to Walters. Like McCloud and Cameron, Walters was also fed false information by detectives and eventually gave a false confession.

“Fairness in the criminal justice system means we must re-evaluate cases when credible new evidence of actual innocence or wrongful conviction emerges,” said Queens District Attorney Melinda Katz, who created the CIU shortly after taking office in 2020. “Those who have served prison time for crimes they demonstrably did not commit deserve to have the slate wiped clean.”

Each of the men whose convictions were vacated on Thursday had already completed their prison sentences – Walters was released on parole in 2013 after having served 20 years in prison, Cameron was released in 2003 after serving over 8 years in prison and McCloud, who was incarcerated for over 29 years, was released just eight months ago.

McCloud, whose case was the first to be heard on Thursday, teared up while speaking to Johnson with dozens of his family members and friends sitting in the audience behind him. He said that he was relieved that his claims of innocence were finally being believed but noted that the failure of the criminal justice system and its effect on his life, will always remain.

“I’ll be the first to tell you guys, 29 years was not kind to me,” he said. “They were not kind.”

Toward the end of his remarks, McCloud turned to Bryce Benjet, the director of the CIU, and addressed him directly.

“Better late than never,” McCloud said.

A history of false confessions

McCloud and Cameron were hanging out with each other, taking a trip to the Bronx from Queens on the night of Aug. 4, 1994 to meet up with McCloud’s girlfriend.

Meanwhile, Sunada, who had recently moved to LeFrak City from Japan, was attacked in his new home. He was found on the landing of a fourth-floor stairwell with a gunshot wound to his head and died several days later.

Gonzalez, who at the time had just recently worked on the high-profile Central Park Five case, began investigating Sunada’s death. In some of his paperwork related to the case, Gonzalez said that Sunada had been found lying face down in a pool of blood in a hallway, and not a stairwell. Another officer on the case also filed paperwork with an error – noting Sunada had been shot twice, instead of once.

Despite the incorrect details, both McCloud and Cameron repeated the inaccurate description of the crime after being arrested without probable cause four days after the murder. Though there were no witnesses to Sunada’s murder, a teenager who himself was facing criminal charges said that he had heard rumors that someone matching McCloud’s description had been behind the shooting.

Multiple detectives, including Gonzalez, interrogated the two friends. Cameron signed a written confession while being questioned by Gonzalez at 3:30 a.m. About an hour later, McCloud signed a similar confession after being questioned by the detective.

“These errors [in the confessions] turned out to be key evidence in assessing the wrongful conviction claims brought by McCloud and Cameron,” Benjet said during the hearing on Thursday. “Because of the track record of Detective Gonzalez…we believe that if a jury had heard this newly discovered evidence, that Mr. McCloud probably would have been acquitted at trial.”

McCloud was the first to go to trial and despite the signed confession – which he quickly recanted and described as coercive to the jury – being the only piece of evidence against him, he was convicted and sentenced to 25 years to life in prison.

Having seen the sentence his friend received, Cameron instead took a plea deal from prosecutors, pleading guilty to a robbery charge in exchange for a 3.75-year minimum sentence, of which he’d already served half. His sentence ended up being more than twice as long after he was denied release by a parole board several times because of his innocence claim.

On the day that he was arrested, Cameron, who now works as a chef, had just passed an exam for employment with the MTA. On Thursday, he lamented the things that he had lost out on.

“Although I’m happy, it doesn’t fix things,” he said. “It doesn’t fix the scar on my face. It doesn’t fix the fact that on the day that they arrested me, I had just passed the MTA exam. These are things that I can’t get back.

Johnson, who apologized on behalf of the criminal justice system to all three men, challenged Cameron, who no longer has the conviction on his record, to retake the MTA’s exam.

“It’s never too late,” she said.

‘No explanation’

Though Johnson offered her apologies and encouragement to Cameron and McCloud, she took a different tone during Walters’ hearing.

During her remarks, Johnson condemned the past prosecutors and the former DA’s office for allowing the injustice against Walters to move forward in the first place, three decades ago.

“This court can find absolutely no explanation for why the DA’s office pursued a prosecution against you,” Johnson said.

On Sept. 2, 1992, two men walked up to a 28-year-old woman in Borough Park as she was exiting a car in front of her house. They put a gun to her head and told her to lie on the floor of the car.

The men then went through the car, found an ATM card and told the woman to tell them her PIN.

They then stole the car, drove it and the woman to Jamaica and withdrew approximately $2,000 from an ATM with the stolen card.

They then told the woman to leave and ditched the car.

About a month later, two men approached a 58-year-old woman as she was exiting her car. They pushed her into the back of the car and told her to lie down.

Much like the earlier robbery, they demanded her ATM card and her PIN. Then, one of the men sexually assaulted the woman as the other drove all three people to an ATM to withdraw money. Eventually, they kicked her out of the car, urinated on her and drove off.

At the time of the robberies, police were looking into a separate carjacking and murder that Walters was considered a witness in. However, he soon became a suspect in the two robberies.

After a 16-hour interrogation, the 17-year-old falsely confessed to being an accomplice in the two carjackings. Additionally, a victim of one of the robberies identified Walters as one of the perpetrators, despite having first identified two other men in a lineup and only accusing Walters after speaking with a detective and assistant district attorney.

While being held on Rikers Island, three robberies bearing striking similarities to the first two took place. Three men – Kraigory Odom, Robert Masters and Jermaine Williams – were arrested and charged for the robberies and assaults.

Five months after Odom, Masters and Williams pleaded guilty to the three incidents, Walters was convicted of the two robberies in 1994, and went on to serve two decades in prison.

He was released in 2013, and several years later, attorneys Glen Garber and Rebecca Freedman of the Exoneration Initiative took up his case. After appealing to the CIU, they focused specifically on comparing a set of fingerprints found on one of the stolen cars to Walters’ fingerprints. Eventually, they found that the prints did not match and instead belonged to Williams and Masters.

Johnson described the DNA evidence as only being newly discovered because the DA’s office had failed to discover it in 1994. The case, she said, “shocks the conscience.”

“It saddens me that it took 20 years to get this one right, Mr. Walters,” Johnson said from the bench on Thursday. “The time you lost can’t be replaced.”

“But I am happy to inform you that your cries of innocence have finally fallen on ears that listen and minds that act,” she added.