Eliseo Deleon and Jeffrey Deskovic first met while both incarcerated at Elmira Correctional Facility. They worked together in food service and bonded over regular chess matches over roughly a four-year span.
Now, Deleon will enlist Deskovic as his lawyer in another attempt to clear his name for a 1995 murder for which he spent more than 24 years in prison. A judge initially overturned the conviction due to the involvement of discredited NYPD detective Louis Scarcella in the investigation. But Deleon was retried and found guilty again in Sept. 2022. He filed his appeal last Tuesday, Jan. 7.
While Deleon faced up to life in prison in his resentencing, his return to custody was perfunctory with more than two decades of time served. No party seemed interested in pursuing further imprisonment and he found himself in front of a parole board shortly. While he spent unintended time in prison, he was free by early 2023.
But the reconviction derailed an otherwise successful reentry story. Suddenly, no employer wanted to hire him due to a murder and robbery on his record, even as he completed a medical technician degree.
“I lost literally everything that I earned in that three years,” said Deleon. “I just lost it. You try hard to get involved with being a productive citizen to society, and then you have to go back upstate and go through the process, especially during the holidays…they didn’t ask me one question about the crime when I went to the parole board. They just said, we see what you was doing out there [during] the three years that you was out there, continue to do what you was doing and have a good life.”
Back in 2016, Deleon filed his own CPL 440 motion, which challenges a wrongful conviction in New York state. After two years of waiting, he began pushing the courts. The judge ultimately overturned the conviction and ordered a new trial. But COVID-19 halted the courts and Deleon spent the pandemic in limbo, unsure whether he would be retried. He took advantage of the time to work and study.
Roughly 20 people had their convictions overturned due to Scarcella’s involvement. But Deleon remains the only one to be reconvicted. Newly discovered evidence about the detective’s past largely shouldered the previous challenge. Deskovic says the new appeal will focus on the weight of evidence and ineffective assistance of counsel.
“Our argument is that the conviction was against the weight of the evidence,” said Deskovic. “What that argument essentially means is that while there was a legally sufficient amount of evidence you could have, you could have convicted. But the stronger argument that the weight of the evidence flows in the other direction, it really should have led to a not guilty verdict.”
Deskovic himself is an exoneree who was released from prison in 2006 thanks to DNA evidence. He went on to complete law school and now runs his eponymous Jeffrey Deskovic Foundation of Justice, which so far exonerated six people and freed nine additional people.
Derrick Hamilton, legal director for the Families and Friends of the Wrongfully Convicted, was wrongfully imprisoned due to Scarcella and says convictions secured by the detective’s evidence are tainted. He adds that a retrial two decades after the crime is particularly difficult as memories are lost and witnesses die. But he thinks exonerees like Deskovic and himself provide those challenging a wrongful conviction their best shot.
“We know that you got to lift up that extra rock and look behind that extra page and do diligent work in order to get to the bottom line,” said Hamilton. “And we believe in the old adage that it is better to let 10 guilty people go [free] than convict an innocent man. So we make sure that we go the extra mile for somebody that we know is innocent…we know what it feels like to be convicted of something we didn’t do.”
Tandy Lau is a Report for America corps member who writes about public safety for the Amsterdam News. Your donation to match our RFA grant helps keep him writing stories like this one; please consider making a tax-deductible gift of any amount today by visiting https://bit.ly/amnews1.
Author’s Note: A previous draft was initially published here. The story has been modified to reflect our print edition. The previous version said Deleon served 23 years in prison, which has been revised to more than 24 years.
Any new information on this case.