Following wrongful conviction ruling, Queens DA to retry 30-year-old murder case
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Michael Robinson, a Queens man who served 26 years in prison for a murder he was wrongfully convicted of, will be retried for the murder 30 years after it happened, the Queens district attorney’s office said on Wednesday, Sept. 23, 2023. File photo via the Legal Aid Society
By Jacob Kaye
Earlier this year, a group of appellate judges said that Michael Robinson had been wrongfully convicted in the murder of his estranged wife – and that the 26 years he spent in prison had come as a result of an unjust trial.
The court kicked the 1993 case back to Queens District Attorney Melinda Katz’s office and told prosecutors to make a decision – dismiss the case altogether, or again bring the charges against Robinson, who is several years removed from the completion of his prison sentence.
After months of delays caused in part by the DA’s failed attempt to appeal the case to the state’s top court, Queens prosecutors made their decision this week.
Despite the appellate ruling, new DNA evidence, the completion of his sentence and decades come and gone, prosecutors with the Queens district attorney’s office told a Queens judge on Wednesday that they want to retry Robinson, 30 years after he was first convicted in the courthouse on Queens Boulevard.
“Mr. Robinson, this long saga continues,” Queens Supreme Court Justice Stephen Knopf said at the conclusion of the conference, which lasted less than five minutes.
Prosecutors did not give an explanation as to why they will again bring murder charges against Robinson, a former correctional officer who the Queens DA’s office still believes was behind the murder of Gwendolyn Samuels in 1993.
However, their choice to rehash the 30-year-old trial is not inconsistent with their approach to Robinson’s case over the course of the past year. The DA’s office has made every effort to fight the March ruling from the Appellate Division, Second Department, which said that newly discovered DNA evidence, which was found by Robinson himself, would have likely changed the outcome of his 1993 trial had it been presented to the jury at the time.
Found underneath Samuels’ fingernails, the DNA evidence is 78 trillion times more likely to have belonged to someone other than Robinson.
Robinson, who was advised by his attorneys with the Legal Aid Society not to speak about the case to members of the media, declined to speak with the Eagle on Wednesday.
In a statement to the Eagle, the Legal Aid Society said that they were “disappointed with the Queens County District Attorney’s decision to retry this case.”
“Mr. Robinson is presumed innocent, and we look forward to securing his full exoneration to allow him to move on with his life,” a spokesperson for the Legal Aid Society said. “We are in the early stages of collecting evidence and just beginning our investigation, and we'll have more to say about this case in the coming days, weeks, and months.”
The Queens district attorney’s office declined to comment on the case.
The trial is not expected to begin any time soon.
The Queens district attorney’s office has yet to turn over any evidence to the prosecution, and that process may take some time given the age of the case. Robinson’s attorneys will face similar hurdles collecting and going through evidence in a case that dates back 30 years.
The original prosecution against Robinson hinged on the testimony of a single eyewitness – then-88-year-old Alveina Marchon, who employed Samuels as a home health aide.
Marchon alleged that Robinson came to her home in Bayside while Samuels was working and fought with her over her new boyfriend before stabbing her to death – Robinson’s attorneys claim that it was instead the boyfriend who likely murdered Samuels.
Despite giving inconsistent accounts of the murder – and later being found to be legally blind – Marchon’s testimony led to Robinson’s conviction and his 25 years to life in prison sentence, which he received at the age of 26.
In ruling that Robinson had been wrongfully convicted, judges in the Appellate Division pointed specifically at concerns they had with Marchon’s testimony.
“No physical evidence linked the defendant to the crime,” the decision reads. “The only identity evidence offered by the People at trial was the testimony of a single eyewitness, Marchon, who was 88 years old at the time of the incident and suffered from significantly impaired vision.”
“Marchon’s description to the police of the perpetrator’s appearance was not conclusive and was, in part, more consistent with [the victim’s boyfriend at-the-time] Jermaine Robinson’s appearance,” they added. “Under the facts of the case, it would not have been unreasonable to conclude that Marchon confused Samuels’s estranged husband with her current boyfriend in making her identification to the police.”
It wasn’t until 2013 – 20 years into Robinson’s sentence – that additional evidence arose in the case.
That year, Robinson found, through a Freedom of Information Law request, a document that suggested that there was DNA evidence that had not been presented at his trial. Among the evidence was blood stains on Samuels’ sweater and scrapings from her hair and fingernails.
Acting without a lawyer, Robinson sought post-conviction DNA testing on the blood samples and scrapings. A judge rejected the motion without holding a hearing.
Robinson then obtained representation from the Legal Aid Society, which successfully appealed the case to the Appellate Division, Second Department, which sent the case back to the lower Queens court “for further proceedings to ascertain whether the subject DNA evidence exists and, if it does, for forensic DNA testing of that evidence.”
However, it would be years before the DNA was tested.
Robinson and his attorneys were told by the DA’s office that the evidence they were looking for no longer existed. According to the DA, it had been lost when the building it was being held in sustained damage during Hurricane Sandy.
What followed was a series of hearings to determine whether or not the damaged evidence could still be tested safely and produce a reliable result. In the end, a judge ruled that the testing could go forward.
That’s when the Queens district attorney’s office informed the court that the evidence was actually not in the flooded facility, but instead safely stored with the Office of the Medical Examiner.
“We wasted two years on two hearings, based on a false premise,” Harold Ferguson, a staff attorney with the Criminal Appeals Bureau at The Legal Aid Society who represented Robinson during his appeal, told the Eagle in March.
After being told they could move forward with testing, the Legal Aid Society got Cybergenetics, a private lab, to review the evidence. The lab determined that the DNA was 78 trillion times more likely to belong to someone other than Robinson, a finding the OCME, which conducted further testing, later agreed with.
But prosecutors were still not on board, and said that they believed that the male DNA didn’t necessarily come from the murderer.
Also not on board were members of Samuels’ family, several of whom were in the courtroom on Wednesday. Thirty years later, they still believe it was Robinson who killed their relative.
“He was terrible, he was always an animal,” Carol Samuels told the Eagle on Wednesday after the Queens DA’s office announced their intention to retry Robinson. “He went to her job and killed her.”
Knopf, the judge, was also unconvinced by the DNA evidence presented in July 2019 and rejected Robinson’s motion to vacate his conviction.
Robinson and his attorneys successfully appealed Knopf’s decision in March.
In June, the Queens DA’s office applied to the Court of Appeals asking that they take up their appeal to the Appellate Division’s decision to reverse Robinson’s conviction. Court of Appeals Judge Shirley Troutman denied the application in July.
At the time, Robinson told the Eagle that he wasn’t ready to celebrate the status of the case.
“I’ve been exonerated but I haven’t been fully vindicated,” Robinson said. “Until that happens, I can’t move forward with my life.”
