NEW YORK — A man who served 14 years in prison for a deadly 1990s shooting was exonerated Thursday after prosecutors said they now believe the killer was an acquaintance he has implicated for decades.
“I lost 14 years of my life for a crime that I didn’t commit,” Steven Ruffin told a Brooklyn judge after sighing with emotion.
Although Ruffin was paroled in 2010 and has since built a career in sanitation in Georgia, he said that getting his manslaughter conviction dismissed and his name cleared “will help me move on.”
“If you know you’re innocent, don’t give up on your case — keep on fighting, because justice will prevail,” Ruffin, 45, said outside court. “That’s all I’ve wanted for 30 years: somebody to listen and really hear what I’m saying and look into the things I was telling them.”
Prosecutors said they were exploring whether to charge the man they now believe shot 16-year-old James Deligny on a Brooklyn street during a February 1996 confrontation over some stolen earrings. Brooklyn District Attorney Eric Gonzalez said after court that charges, if any, wouldn’t come immediately.
“You have to be able to convict someone beyond a reasonable doubt, and we have to make sure that that evidence is sufficient to do so,” said Gonzalez, who wasn’t DA when Ruffin was tried. “You have a lot of factors working against us procedurally, but also factually — unfortunately, this is 30 years ago.”
Ruffin’s conviction is the latest of more than three dozen that Brooklyn prosecutors have disavowed after reinvestigations over the last decade.
Over a dozen, including Ruffin’s, were connected to retired Detective Louis Scarcella. He was lauded in the 1980s and ‘90s for his case-closing prowess, but defendants have accused him of coercing confessions, engineering dubious witness identifications and other troubling tactics. He has denied any wrongdoing.
Prosecutors said in their report on the Ruffin case that they “did not discover any…
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