An immigrant who was falsely convicted and then threatened with deportation left a Brooklyn courtroom an innocent man Thursday after prosecutors tossed his conviction for a bogus burglary.
“New dawn. New day. New beginning for me,” Michael Waithe, 52, said with a smile after his emotional exoneration.
A woman named Delores Taylor, now 69, accused him of breaking into her Brooklyn apartment in 1986, but admitted to investigators last week she had fabricated the whole thing.
“She told us in a personal interview that no burglary has ever been committed,” said assistant attorney Mark Hale of the conviction review unit. “She did not like him and thought he was responsible for the theft of her automobile.”
Supreme Court justice Neil Firetog then moved to vacate the conviction and throw out the indictment.
Prosecution sources said Taylor would have gotten into trouble for her lie if not for the five-year statute of limitations on perjury that has long passed. Reached by phone in her Georgia home, the woman told the Daily News, “I’m not talking to nobody” and hung up.
“That’s her own cross to bear,” Waithe said when asked about his feelings towards Taylor.
The father-of-four, who works as a union organizer, did a year and a half in prison after a jury convicted him in 1987.
“I’m telling myself, ‘This is a dream and I’m going to wake up,’” he recalled of the long nights behind bars.
When he returned from his native Barbados in 2011, immigration officials who scrutinized his green card flagged him for deportation because of the old felony and he’s been fighting the removal order in court.
With a June deadline looming, Waithe wrote a wrenching letter to the office of Brooklyn DA Kenneth Thompson, who had previously cleared 11 men of murder, asking that they look at his case.
A review showed there was hardly any evidence a burglary took place to begin with and Taylor’s account wasn’t supported by any physical evidence.
“This hardworking and innocent man came to our country for a better life and ended up being framed and went to prison for a crime that he didn’t commit,” Thompson said in a statement Thursday. “Wrongful convictions lead not only to wrongful imprisonment but also can impact a person’s job, housing or immigration status.”
Waithe’s and his lawyer Matthew Smalls profusely thanked the DA.
The joy was compounded by Waithe’s plans to marry fiance Karen Garrick next week.
She can now focus her worries on the reception, Garrick said. She was asked about the fear of her soon-to-be husband being forced to move back to a Caribbean island.
“With the winter we’ve had, I don’t mind,” she joked.
Then the family left court and went back to their home, which will remain here in America.
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Prosecutors toss immigrant's burglary conviction
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