Sheldon Thomas, who was wrongly convicted of a fatal shooting in 2004, is set to have his case vacated after 18 years of appeals. The photo used to identify Thomas as a suspect was pulled erroneously; detectives showed a witness a photo of an unrelated man with the same name, Mark Morales reports for CNN. The mistake came up in a pretrial hearing in 2016, but the trial judge in the case decided to move forward anyway, in part arguing that Thomas resembled the other Sheldon Thomas in the photo anyway.
The Brooklyn DA’s Conviction Review Unit revisited the case, and determined that Thomas was denied due process at every stage of the case against him. The unit also reported that Thomas was harassed multiple times by NYPD detectives connected to the case following a previous arrest, contradicting testimony they gave that they had never met him before the fatal shooting case. “Together the errors undermined the integrity of the entire judicial process and defendant’s resulting conviction,” the report determined.