NEW ORLEANS (AP) - A man who had been serving life on a murder charge is free - the first person to have a conviction reversed by what is described as an unprecedented partnership between prosecutors and a group that works to free people who were wrongfully convicted.
Criminal District Judge Darryl Derbigny overturned the conviction and granted Kia Stewart a new trial Monday, and prosecutors dropped the murder charge, Christopher Bowman, spokesman for Orleans Parish District Attorney Leon Cannizzaro, said in a news release.
“It is certainly the first tangible result” of the Conviction Integrity Project, a collaboration between prosecutors and Innocence Project-New Orleans, Emily Maw, director of the local Innocence Project office, said in a telephone interview.
The joint venture was announced in August but did not get funded until January, she said.
The city is paying the salaries of an assistant district attorney, an investigator and a records clerk to work full-time on the pilot project, and a grant from Baptist Community Ministries is paying for two Innocence Project-New Orleans staffers to do the same, she said.
“A lot of what we’re doing is records review - massive records review,” Maw said.
A jury convicted Stewart in 2009 as the man who killed Bryant Craig Jr. in July 2005. A man who had been walking nearby told police that Craig was shot during an argument after his vehicle nearly hit a pedestrian.
Stewart was 17 when he was arrested three weeks before Hurricane Katrina hit the city, and he was jailed for four years before his trial, Maw said. The second-degree murder conviction carried a mandatory life sentence.
Bowman said investigators found “numerous witnesses - including multiple eyewitnesses,” who either identified a different killer or said Stewart was not the killer.
Maw said her organization was looking into Stewart’s case before August, and it “was one of the things that inspired the project.”
Another, Cannizzaro said last year, was the case of Reginald Adams, whose second-degree murder conviction was reversed in 2014 after a judge agreed with authorities that former prosecutors and detectives withheld evidence that might have acquitted him. Adams had spent 34 years in prison.
Both Maw and Cannizzaro said in August that the collaboration was the first of its kind.
Stewart’s case did not involve any misconduct by prosecutors - the judge found that Stewart’s trial attorneys did a poor job, Bowman emphasized.
“Second, and more important, it is disturbing to me that all these witnesses were available for the 2009 trial but for a myriad of reasons did not participate in it,” he said.
Maw said the joint venture is looking at about 10 other cases and had numerous other possibilities. “This is just what we’re looking into at the moment.”
Maw said Stewart, now 27, celebrated his freedom with a chicken salad lunch. That “is what he wanted for his first meal,” she said. “We said, ’Are you sure?’ He said, ’Yes.’”
He will stay at first with his mother, but may want to “explore other states, other places,” Maw said.
She said that, as a relative newcomer to the Louisiana State Penitentiary, he had limited training choices during his six years there.
“He already has his GED. He is an excellent sportsman. I think he would love to coach kids in sports,” she said.
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