07-04-2025
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.'
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