Man's fight for exoneration in 1981 murder case reveals systemic failures, lawyer says
Carmella Bowers and her son Johnnie Boykins are fighting to exonerate Boyers' son Darren Boykins, who was convicted for the 1981 murder of Milton Laufer in Newark. (Dana DiFilippo | New Jersey Monitor)
The day police said Darren Boykins killed somebody, his mother told everyone they were wrong.
Carmella Bowers graduated from Rutgers University in Newark that day in 1981, about 25 years after she dropped out of high school. She said Darren was there, applauding at her commencement ceremony — not, as police claimed, murdering a carpet salesman a mile away.
While four other witnesses backed up that alibi at Boykins' trial, jurors convicted him, largely on the word of a prisoner who testified Boykins had confessed the crime. No one mentioned at the trial that the jailhouse informant had reason to rat out Boykins; after the informant testified, prosecutors dropped charges against him for an unrelated murder and the sexual assaults of two toddlers.
'When we was in the courtroom after the trial was over and they found my son guilty, I couldn't believe it. I fell out,' said Bowers, now 85. 'I just couldn't understand why he was guilty because I knew where he was that day.'
Now, Bowers has a powerful ally on her side: a retired attorney who spent seven months investigating Boykins' case and has launched a crusade to exonerate him.
Attorney John Crayton said Boykins' case has all the hallmarks of a wrongful conviction: authorities rushing an arrest in response to public panic over rising crime, detectives intent on locking away a trouble-making teen despite flimsy evidence, authorities hiding exculpatory facts from jurors, and a witness secretly incentivized to testify in exchange for leniency.
'The wrongfully convicted are victims of institutional failures and the callous indifference, and sometimes corruption, of those in authority positions. I strongly believe that a caring society should admit what can result from this combination,' Crayton told the New Jersey Monitor.
New Jersey lags behind other states in securing justice for people who have been wrongfully convicted. Lesley C. and D. Michael Risinger, a couple who head the Last Resort Exoneration Project at Seton Hall University School of Law, laid out New Jersey's problems with ensuring conviction integrity in a study published this year.
'Prosecutors resist claims based on fresh exculpatory evidence with all the zeal of Spartan warriors defending the pass at Thermopylae. Judges, made weary by repeated applications for relief, find refuge in notions of finality and the sanctity of the jury verdict,' they wrote.
'Our study of New Jersey cases shows that unjustifiable obstacles to relief for the innocent cast a shadow over our criminal justice system,' they added.
Despite the obstacles, Crayton remains undeterred. He filed a clemency petition with the state on Boykins' behalf, asked the state attorney general's conviction review unit to consider the case, and sent an inch-thick report on his findings to the state public defender's office, the Essex County Prosecutor's Office, the New Jersey Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers, state and federal lawmakers, and various other authorities he hopes will champion his cause.
None have committed to do so.
Boykins came of age during a turbulent time in Newark's history. He was a kid when race riots rocked the city in 1967, leaving years of rising crime, white flight, poor police-community relations, and high unemployment and school dropout rates in their wake.
By 1981, when two robbers gunned down Milton Laufer, 71, at the carpet company he ran with his brother on Shipman Street, Boykins was 19 and had already been in cops' crosshairs for years.
'The police didn't like him, because he hung around with the bad group, you know, they was always getting into trouble,' said his older brother, Johnnie Boykins. 'We grew up in the projects, so everybody was on the cops' radar.'
His neighborhood clashes also drew unwanted police attention to Boykins, who goes by the nicknames 'Scoopie' and 'Scoobie,' his mother said.
'Scoopie could fight, and he wasn't scared of nobody,' Bowers said. 'He would protect himself.'
Years of court records compiled by Crayton lay out what happened before and after Boykins' conviction.
The year of Laufer's murder, Newark had its most homicides ever, 161, a record that still stands today.
An Essex County homicide investigator charged Boykins in a prior slaying that year, but Boykins denied involvement, saying he was at work when the murder occurred. Bowers went to the detective — the same one who'd later arrest Boykins in Laufer's death — and told him so.
'He told me, 'I'm going to prove that he's guilty.' And I said, 'Well, I'm going to prove he's not!'' she said. 'I wanted to fight him, really, because he made me so mad, because you could tell it was personal with him with my son.'
A judge dismissed the charges against Boykins, and several other men ultimately were convicted.
There's a system failure. And it can't be the only time this has happened.
– Attorney John Crayton
Laufer's last day came on May 22, 1981. Two robbers entered his carpet company office and one shot him in the stomach. He died hours later.
On June 28, 1981 — with no one yet arrested in Laufer's killing — police picked Boykins up for an unrelated aggravated assault.
He had a .22-caliber revolver on him, but investigators determined it wasn't the murder weapon, Crayton said.
Four days later, police charged him with Laufer's murder. Their evidence was scant, with a missing murder weapon, a fuzzy description of the robbers, and no forensic clues, Crayton found.
Investigators also had a lead pointing them in another direction. An anonymous tipster identified another teenager with a violent history — who fit the description of the robbers — as one of those involved, and a polygraph indicated he lied when denying any knowledge of the robbery or murder, according to testimony from a 1989 post-conviction relief hearing for Boykins.
But Milton Laufer's brother Harry had identified Boykins out of a lineup as one of the robbers, and the prosecution proceeded. Boykins' attorney was not told about the other teen who failed the polygraph.
Prosecutors bolstered their case with the jailhouse informant, Alvis Holt, who told jurors Boykins confessed to him that he'd killed Laufer.
After a four-day trial, jurors convicted Boykins. He was sentenced to life in prison and has repeatedly been denied parole since he became eligible for release in 2006.
Boykins has raised multiple issues to allege he was wrongfully convicted.
He has claimed that detectives, while he was in custody for the unrelated assault, directed him to stand in front of a mirror a day before the photo lineup. Crayton suspects that unusual direction served to give Harry Laufer an improper early peek at Boykins so that he'd be sure to identify Boykins as the culprit during the lineup the next day. Harry Laufer died in 2005.
As for Holt's testimony, jurors never learned he had been charged in the sexual assaults of his girlfriend's daughters, ages 2 and 3, as well as the Aug. 10, 1981, murder of John McCall, a former Marine gunned down during a robbery outside Beth Israel Hospital. Prosecutors did not inform Boykins' trial attorney of either Holt's criminal troubles or his cooperation in the McCall case.
Disclosure obligations require prosecutors to disclose any information to defense attorneys that could taint the credibility of a witness — such as prosecutors' cooperation deals with informants — to ensure defendants get a fair trial by allowing jurors to judge a witness' credibility.
After Holt testified in Boykins' trial, prosecutors dropped charges against Holt in the sexual assault case. Holt's murder and robbery charges also were dismissed.
Bowers said she watched Holt's testimony with growing fury.
'I said: 'He's a liar! He's a liar!'' she said. 'They told me they'd put me out if I don't shut up. So I shut up after that because I didn't want to make it bad for my son.'
At Boykins' 1989 post-conviction relief hearing, Holt explained how he came to be a crucial witness in the case against Boykins, who he said he had never met until they landed on the same jail tier.
Authorities initially asked him to sign a statement implicating another man in McCall's murder. When an Essex County homicide investigator learned Holt was housed with Boykins, Holt was asked to sign a statement implicating Boykins in Laufer's murder, Holt testified during that 1989 hearing.
According to a transcript of the hearing, Holt testified that the detective referred to Boykins as 'that bastard.'
'He said, 'I want that bastard. That bastard got away from me, but he won't get away from me again,'' Holt said then.
Boykins did not prevail in that hearing.
'He had a good lawyer. She put all kinds of people on the stand and proved that Alvis Holt was a liar. Alvis Holt took the stand and said he was a liar. She showed all these Brady violations, one after another after another,' Crayton said. 'But the judge downplayed them in his opinion, and even more shocking was that two years later, the appellate court just rubber-stamped that opinion. So there's a system failure. And it can't be the only time this has happened.'
He added: 'It takes courage to admit that kind of wrong, and I think that's lacking.'
The Essex County Prosecutor's Office didn't respond to a request for comment.
In the decades since Boykins was convicted, New Jersey has implemented a series of changes to make criminal investigations and prosecutions fairer for defendants.
The state has added new restrictions on photo lineups, recognizing that eyewitness identifications often are wrong, especially when they're cross-racial. Mistaken witness identifications factored into 27% of nearly 3,700 exonerations across the country since 1989, according to the National Registry of Exonerations.
State officials have also changed the rules on jailhouse informants, who can be unreliable because they generally lack firsthand knowledge of a crime and have an incentive to lie.
The courts also strengthened prosecutors' disclosure obligations on jailhouse informants under rules adopted in 2022, said Peter McAleer, a Judiciary spokesman. At the courts' direction, the state Attorney General's Office created an inventory of jailhouse informants in every county to track how many times they offer information or testify in cases, McAleer added. Jailhouse informants were involved in 15% of exonerations in murder cases, according to the National Registry of Exonerations.
The Attorney General's Office also reminded prosecutors of their disclosure obligations in a directive issued in 2019, the same year it created a conviction review unit.
Meanwhile, Murphy formed a clemency advisory board last year to recommend worthy candidates for clemency.
But exoneration work can be challenging.
'Procedural rules and time bars are routinely invoked to defeat the post-trial claims of persons with compelling evidence of actual innocence,' the Risingers of Seton Hall wrote in their study. 'Strong evidence of actual innocence is brushed aside and given no worth by our courts. Post-conviction discovery is highly restricted.'
Because many of the challenges in getting exonerated stem from court hurdles, they added, 'the work of reviewing cases for innocence and other fundamental injustice should not be simply offloaded by our judiciary onto a conviction review unit.'
McAleer said New Jersey trial courts received 356 post-conviction relief petitions last year, and time-related restrictions keep courts from being besieged by such filings.
'The court system cannot reasonably function without time limits on cases, but relevant court rules allow for relaxing limitations that 'would result in an injustice,'' he said.
Even so, New Jersey has a dismal record on exonerations.
Six years since its inception, the attorney general's conviction review unit has just two victories despite accepting 618 eligible cases to review. (Cases that remain on direct appeal or weren't felonies in state court are ineligible.)
And Murphy, now in his eighth year in office, didn't exercise his clemency powers until December when he pardoned 33 people and commuted the sentences of three more. More than 3,000 people have applied for clemency consideration, said Tyler Jones, a Murphy spokeswoman. His office is expected to announce more clemency actions this week.
Several groups outside government do exoneration work too, including the Risinger project, Princeton-based Centurion Ministries, the American Civil Liberties Union of New Jersey, and the New Jersey Innocence Project at Rutgers University.
Still, New Jersey averaged just 1.6 exonerations a year between 2014 and 2023, according to the National Registry of Exonerations. Illinois, the national leader, had an annual average of 34.6 over the same decade. Illinois, with 12 million residents, is larger than New Jersey, but Michigan, which is more comparable in size to the Garden State, averaged 9.7 exonerations a year, according to the registry.
The work is time-consuming because it requires a full reinvestigation of a case, using both new technology and traditional investigative methods, said Attorney General's Office spokesman Dan Prochilo. The unit's standard for exoneration is clear and convincing evidence of actual innocence, he added.
'These investigations take substantial resources and time, as cases and evidence are often decades old,' he said.
Estimates of how many people in prison were wrongfully convicted range from 1 to 10%. Using those metrics, at least 130 people of the nearly 13,000 people now in state prisons may have been wrongfully convicted.
Boykins, now 63, has been behind bars for 44 years.
Crayton has worked as a prosecutor, defense attorney, and investigator, and he knows politics plays a part in who succeeds in their exoneration bids.
Boykins is not the kind of would-be exoneree who politicians will trot out for photo ops and press conferences. He's in poor physical and mental health, with diagnoses of schizophrenia and antisocial personality disorder, and last year suffered a brutal beatdown at the hands of his cellmate, Crayton said. If the effort to exonerate Boykins succeeds, he'll likely need to remain in a psychiatric care home or similar setting, he added.
'There's no happy ending for Darren Boykins, none, period,' he said. 'The happy ending for him, maybe, is that he gets to see his mother once in a while, wherever he is, and he's safer there than staying in prison.'
He still deserves a shot at freedom, he added.
'I don't think anybody should ignore what happened to Darren,' he said. 'Healthy societies need to acknowledge their wrongs.'
Boykins' mother and brother still visit him in Trenton, where he's incarcerated at the New Jersey State Prison, as often as they can.
'He's real quiet, like this, like he's sleeping,' Bowers said, slouching and slitting her eyes. 'He told me they give him medicine. You could look at him and tell they keep him drugged.'
Bowers, a retired special education teacher, mourns all that her son lost out on in life.
'If I was in there for something I didn't do, I don't think I could have made it this long. I probably would have been dead,' she said. 'I think God is just keeping him alive so he can have a chance, a little bit of a chance, at life. I pray to Allah every night to let my son come home before I die.'
SUPPORT: YOU MAKE OUR WORK POSSIBLE
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
Yahoo
3 days ago
- Yahoo
Cops violated man's civil rights by putting tracker on car in driveway, judges rule
Police must have judicial permission to do more than a visitor could on residential property, court rules. (Dana DiFilippo | New Jersey Monitor) The New Jersey State Police violated a suspect's constitutional rights when troopers entered his driveway to attach a GPS tracker to his car under a warrant that only allowed them access to the man's vehicle, an appellate panel ruled Tuesday. The three-judge panel found officers violated state and federal constitutional protections by entering Maurice Johnson's driveway to attach the tracker because the communications data warrant they obtained for the device did not authorize them to enter the property. 'The [warrant] did not expressly authorize entry onto the driveway. Nor did the State Police seek prior judicial authorization to enter onto defendant's residential property when they abandoned the plan to install the device on a public street or parking lot,' the court wrote. The court granted Johnson's motion to suppress evidence gleaned from the improperly placed tracker. GPS data obtained from the tracker revealed a pattern of stops consistent with drug dealing, authorities said, and eventually led police to a storage unit in Johnson's name that held drugs, guns, and 'a substantial sum of money,' the court said. A lower court judge had rejected Johnson's request to toss the fruits of the communications data warrant, finding that the driveway was not afforded Fourth Amendment protections against unreasonable searches because it was unfenced, unlike the rest of the parcel. The appeals court said the driveway, however accessible, was protected from unreasonable search and seizure. 'The fact the particular area where the subject vehicle was parked was not protected from the weather does not mean it was not protected from physical incursion under the United States and New Jersey Constitutions,' the panel wrote. The judges acknowledged that police can have an implied license to approach a home's front door — as any private citizen might — but said police officers veered away from the front door to plant the tracker, 'thus exceeding the spatial boundaries of any 'customary invitation' that might be granted to a visitor such as a delivery person.' An implied license, which allows people to, for example, knock on a front door or deliver a package without committing trespass, did not permit authorities to enter the driveway so they could put a tracker on Johnson's car, they added. 'Simply put, installing a concealed GPS device is not something a visitor or delivery person would be expected and permitted to do,' the court wrote. The state's arguments, which compared officers' actions to a private vehicle repossession, were unconvincing because the Fourth Amendment protects against state intrusion, not against private debt collectors, they added. Portions of the warrant that left the manner of the tracking device's installation to officers' discretion likewise did not allow them to enter the driveway because both state and federal constitutions require warrants to 'particularly describe' the locations they allow officers to search, the judges found. 'The [warrant's] reference to the need 'to minimize the chances of detection of the device by the person whose vehicle is the subject of this warrant' was not some kind of code authorizing physical entry onto unspecified private property,' the court wrote. Whether police sincerely believed the warrant allowed them to enter the driveway was irrelevant, the judges said. A lower court discarded findings from a separate search warrant that authorized officers to look through Johnson's home because officers did not knock and announce themselves before entering, as the warrant required. But the lower court declined to suppress evidence secured through the improperly applied GPS tracker. The drugs, guns, and money discovered in Johnson's storage unit formed the basis for the warrant authorizing a search of his home, according to Tuesday's ruling. SUBSCRIBE: GET THE MORNING HEADLINES DELIVERED TO YOUR INBOX
Yahoo
3 days ago
- Yahoo
Newark mayor sues feds over arrest outside ICE facility
Newark Mayor Ras Baraka speaks outside Peter Rodino Federal Courthouse while announcing a defamation suit against federal officials involved in his May arrest. (Sophie Nieto-Muñoz | New Jersey Monitor) Newark Mayor Ras Baraka is suing federal officials over his May 9 arrest outside an immigration detention center, alleging malicious prosecution and false arrest. He also accused Alina Habba, the acting U.S. Attorney of New Jersey, of defamation over a post on her personal social media account, in which she wrongly stated that Baraka trespassed and ignored multiple warnings from authorities to leave the Newark detention center property. 'To arrest me, to handcuff me, to drag me away, to take my fingerprints and a picture and mugshots for a class-C misdemeanor is egregious. For me to appear in a hearing and after the hearing, for the U.S. Marshals to rush in and basically to take my picture again is egregious and malicious in my mind,' he said Tuesday outside the federal courthouse in Newark. Baraka, one of six candidates vying to be the Democratic nominee in the race to succeed term-limited Gov. Phil Murphy, filed the federal lawsuit on the first day of early voting in the state. He said the timing is so that people are held responsible for it 'immediately.' Besides Habba, the 17-page complaint also named Ricky Patel, a supervising agent at Homeland Security Investigations, the agency that arrested Baraka. The mayor also filed a notice of his intent to sue the federal government, said Nancy Erika Smith, his attorney. 'Political prosecutions are for fascist countries, not the United States of America. Mayor Baraka was a target because he has stood up for the constitutional and human rights of all people, including immigrants,' Smith said. Baraka was arrested one week after Delaney Hall, now the largest detention center on the East Coast, opened its doors when he visited to check if its owner, Geo Group, had done the required inspections and secured a certificate of occupancy. The lawsuit details his arrest by the minute. He arrived at 1:42 p.m. and was invited eight minutes later by a Geo Group staffer inside the facility's gates, where he waited until 2:33 p.m., the complaint states. Patel ordered Baraka to leave and threatened to arrest him, and Baraka left the property at 2:38 p.m., the suit states. Three New Jersey House members on site for a facility tour joined the mayor and advocated for his entry. Five minutes later, about 20 armed, masked Department of Homeland Security agents swarmed Baraka and 'violently' arrested him without probable cause, the complaint says. He was taken to another DHS facility where agents photographed and fingerprinted him, an experience he called 'humiliating.' He spent five hours in custody. Before agents took Baraka to the DHS facility, Habba already posted on social media that Baraka 'has willingly chosen to disregard the law.' Later that evening, Habba also allegedly made false statements about his arrest on Fox News, and in public appearances with other DHS officials in the following days. The suit contends that Habba and Patel 'conspired' to promote 'false and defamatory' statements about what happened, including that Baraka stormed the facility. 'The false affidavit was made with malice, particularly seeking to assure that the evening news included videos of the Black mayor of Newark, New Jersey, being led away in handcuffs by federal officials,' the filing states. Baraka said Tuesday that race played a role in the incident. 'It's easy for people to believe that a mayor being arrested, especially a mayor that looks like me, has been arrested for something other than what just happened … When people see me in cuffs, they automatically believe I did something wrong, I was guilty,' he said. 'The reality is, I didn't do anything. I went down there for a press conference.' Habba attended a court hearing in Baraka's case, an unusual move for a U.S. attorney. But his charge was dismissed 13 days after his arrest, which he said he learned only after Habba announced on social media she planned to drop the charges. Judge André Espinosa rebuked the U.S. Attorney's Office while dismissing the charge with prejudice, urging attorneys to operate with a higher standard and avoid using their role to advance political agendas. The same day Baraka's case was dismissed, Habba charged Rep. LaMonica McIver with two felony counts of assaulting officers during the scuffle. McIver has called the move 'purely political.' Habba, Trump's personal attorney who he nominated to serve as interim U.S. attorney for New Jersey, has also said she's investigating Gov. Phil Murphy and state Attorney General Matt Platkin over the state's ban on local law enforcement assisting in civil immigration enforcement. A spokesperson for Habba did not immediately respond to a request for comment. Habba took to social media Monday night to blast Baraka for suing her and offered him 'advice' to instead prioritize violent crime and public safety. 'Far better use of time for the great citizens of New Jersey,' she said. Smith responded by touting a drop in violent crime in Newark during Baraka's term as mayor. Baraka is seeking compensatory damages for pain, suffering, stress, humiliation, mental anguish, personal physical injury, physical sickness and damage to his reputation. 'I don't know if Alina Habba and Ricky Patel have enough resources to pay me for the damages they've caused me. At the end of the day, they should at least apologize — they should at least write me a letter and apologize to me,' he said. SUBSCRIBE: GET THE MORNING HEADLINES DELIVERED TO YOUR INBOX
Yahoo
4 days ago
- Yahoo
Governor signs bill aimed at deterring pop-up parties
The bill is a legislative attempt to combat unruly gatherings of teens and young people that officials say have caused havoc, especially in Shore towns. (Lori M. Nichols for New Jersey Monitor) The Senate on Monday joined the Assembly in concurring with Gov. Phil Murphy's conditional veto of a bill that would create new criminal charges to deter disruptive pop-up parties that have harried some New Jersey towns in recent years, and the bill became law after Murphy signed it Monday afternoon. The new law will allow authorities to charge those who provoke or attempt to provoke at least four others into disorderly conduct with inciting a public brawl or who conceal their identities to instill fear or frustrate authorities' attempts to apprehend or prosecute them. 'This law makes it clear that if you incite a public brawl, you will be held accountable. We need to give law enforcement the tools to stop this kind of chaos before someone gets seriously hurt, or worse,' said bill sponsor Assemblyman Dan Hutchison (D-Gloucester). Those who wear masks or disguises for medical, demonstrative, or religious reasons will not be subject to prosecution for concealing their identities. The new law is a legislative response to pop-up parties and other large, unruly gatherings of young people that have spurred violence and chaos in some New Jersey communities in recent years. A push in favor of the law rose after Memorial Day weekend, when authorities in Seaside Heights said gangs of young people created havoc on the boardwalk. In May, a brawl at the Menlo Park Mall broke out among 300 young people, forcing seven arrests and leaving one officer injured as locals called police from neighboring towns to bring the fracas under control, authorities said. Later last month, officials were forced to shutter a carnival outside the Woodbridge Center after hundreds of teens responded to a social media post about the event. Authorities said they made no arrests at the scene to avoid an escalation. 'This bill is meant to make such incidents less frequent and to give our public safety officers more training and resources to help bring these situations under control,' said bill sponsor Sen. Paul Moriarty (D-Gloucester). Murphy conditionally vetoed the bipartisan bill in early May over First Amendment concerns. The earlier version would have criminalized engaging or promoting others to engage in disorderly conduct and lacked exemptions for medical and other mask-wearing.
