David McCallum

On October 25, 2014, Kenneth Thompson, the King's County District Attorney (Brooklyn, New York), agreed to vacate the conviction of David McCallum, a man who had been incarcerated for 29 years for a murder he did not commit.

The exoneration came after a review of the case by the Office’s Conviction Integrity Unit and was the culmination of nearly a decade of work by a team of attorneys, advocates, investigators, students, and documentary filmmakers from the United States and Canada, including Steven Drizin from the Center on Wrongful Convictions, Rubin “Hurricane” Carter and Ken Klonsky from Toronto-based Innocence International, Oscar Michelen of the New York law firm of Cuomo, LLC, and Professor Laura Cohen, of the Rutgers-Newark Law School’s Criminal and Youth Justice Clinic.

David McCallum and Willie Stuckey were arrested in October 1985 and charged with abducting 20-year-old Nathan Blenner in front of his home in Queens, stealing his car, and then driving him to a secluded area of Aberdeen Park in Brooklyn where they shot him to death. The only evidence against the boys were their confessions. Their confessions were videotaped but the interrogations that preceded them were not. Both boys were convicted and sentenced to 25 years to life.

David McCallum never stopped fighting for his innocence, appealing his conviction in both state and federal courts. He also wrote to innocence organizations around the country with no luck until one of his letters landed on the desk of Innocence International and captured the attention of Dr. Carter and Mr. Klonsky. After meeting Mr. McCallum, Dr. Carter and Mr. Klonsky agreed to investigate his case and retained Mr. Michelen to represent Mr. McCallum. The legal team was later expanded to include Mr. Drizin, who in turn, brought in Ms. Cohen. With the cooperation of former King’s County DA Charles Hynes, DNA testing was performed on cigarette butts found in the stolen car’s ashtray and fingerprint comparisons were performed on other evidence recovered from the stolen car. These tests not only excluded Mr. McCallum and Mr. Stuckey, but they identified several new and previously unidentified suspects who could not be connected to Mr. McCallum and Mr. Stuckey. When the man whose DNA was found on the cigarette butts was located and interviewed, he repeatedly lied to both investigators for the DA’s Office and the defense, first telling them that it was not his DNA on the cigarette butts and then maintaining that he must have flipped the cigarettes through a window from outside the car and into the ashtray. Although this newly discovered evidence supported Mr. McCallum’s innocence and pointed towards other suspects, neither Mr. Hynes, nor the courts, were willing to vacate his conviction.

Earlier this year, Mr. McCullum’s case was the subject of a documentary entitled “David & Me.” The film, written and directed by Canadian filmmakers Ray Klonsky and Marc Lamy, chronicles the team’s investigation into Mr. McCullum’s innocence and Ray Klonsky’s budding relationship with Mr. McCallum. After Mr. Thompson was elected to replace Mr. Hynes, Dr. Carter wrote an open letter to DA Thompson, asking him to take a second look at Mr. McCallum’s case and to assign it to his newly-constructed Conviction Integrity Unit, now headed by Professor Ronald Sullivan of Harvard Law School. At the time of his letter, Dr. Carter was dying from pancreatic cancer; and he subsequently passed away on April 20, 2014. District Attorney Thompson granted Dr. Carter’s wish, and after several meetings with Mr. McCallum’s legal team and months of their own investigation, the Conviction Integrity Unit agreed to vacate Mr. McCallum’s conviction. District Attorney. Thompson was so persuaded that both men were wrongfully convicted, that he also vacated Mr. Stuckey’s conviction, even though Mr. Stuckey had died in prison more than a decade earlier at the age of 31.