Kindle: When he went to bed on the night of 6 September 1988, seventeen-year-old Marty Tankleff was a typical kid in the upscale Long Island community of Belle Terre. He was looking forward to starting his senior year at Earl L Vandermeulen High School the next day. But instead, Marty woke in the morning to find his parents brutally bludgeoned, their throats slashed.
His mother, Arlene, was dead. His father, Seymour, was barely alive and would die a month later.
With remarkable self-possession, Marty called 911 to summon help. And when homicide detective James McCready arrived on the scene an hour later, Marty told him he believed he knew who was responsible: Jerry Steuerman, his father's business partner. Steuerman owed Seymour more than half a million dollars, had recently threatened him, and had been the last to leave a high-stakes poker game at the Tankleffs' home the night before.
However, McCready inexplicably dismissed Steuerman as a suspect. Instead, he fastened on Marty as the prime suspect - indeed, his only one.
Before the day was out, the police announced that Marty had confessed the crimes. But Marty insisted the confession was fabricated by the police. And a week later, Steuerman faked his own death and fled to California under an alias. Yet police and and prosecutors remained fixated on Marty and two years later, he was convicted on murder charges and sentenced to fifty years in prison.
"Patently, he didn't do it. I couldn't understand the jury's decision. This was the walking definition of reasonable doubt, and the sheer magnitude of the injustice was staggering. Meeting Marty, I was struck by the ordinariness of him. He could have been any nineteen-year-old kid. As a lawyer, you rarely see such a stark and profoundly disturbing human drama." (Mark Pomerantz, appeals attorney, 1991-1994).
But Marty's unbelievable odyssey was just beginning. With the support of his family, he set out to prove his innocence and gain his freedom. For ten years, disappointment followed disappointment as appeals to state and federal courts were denied. Still, Marty never gave up.
He persuaded Jay Salpeter, a retired NYPD detective turned private eye, to look into his case. At first, it was just another job for Salpeter. As he dug into the evidence, though, he began to see signs of gross ineptitude or worse: leads ignored and conflicts of interest swept under the rug.
A shocking betrayal of public trust by Suffolk County law enforcement that went well beyond a simple miscarriage of justice.
After Salpeter's discoveries brought national media attention to the case, Marty's conviction was finally vacated in 2007, and New York's governor appointed a special prosecutor to reopen the twenty-year-old case. At the same time, the State Investigation Commission announced an inquiry into Suffolk County's handling of what has come to be widely viewed as one of America's most disturbing wrongful conviction cases.
As gripping as a Grisham novel, A Criminal Injustice (2008) is the story of an innocent man's tenacious fight for freedom and an investigator's dogged search for the truth. It is also a searing indictment of justice in America.
On 7 January 2014, Tankleff was awarded $3.375 million from the state after settling his wrongful conviction lawsuit.
About the authors: Richard Firstman is an award-winning journalist, author and editor and a former reporter and editor at Newsday. Firstman has written eight books. Among his other previous books is The Death of Innocents (1997, co-authored with his wife, Jamie Talan), which was named a New York Times Notable Book of the Year and won a coveted Edgar Award. He has written for numerous publications and his work as a producer has appeared on 60 Minutes.
Jay Salpeter is a top New York State Licensed Private Investigator and former highly-decorated New York City Police Detective and Hostage Negotiator. His work has led to frequent appearances on Dateline, 48 Hours, MSNBC, Fox News and Court TV (now truTV). In 2008, he co-founded the Fortress Innocence Group, the nation's first private investigations firm devoted to overturning wrongful convictions.
A Criminal Injustice is available in both hardback and Kindle forms.
No comments:
Post a Comment