NEW YORK (AP) — Years before Las Vegas Raiders defensive end Malcolm Koonce was born, his father spent time in prison for an armed robbery conviction that prosecutors now say was tainted by questionable police tactics and a witness identification that was later recanted.
On Friday, a suburban New York judge agreed, erasing 67-year-old Jeffrey Koonce’s conviction and dismissing his indictment more than four decades after a 1981 robbery at Vernon Stars Rod and Gun Club in Mount Vernon.
Koonce, who spent nearly eight years in prison, has always maintained his innocence and insisted that he was nowhere near the club, where three people were struck by shotgun pellets as patrons were looted of cash and jewelry.
Westchester County District Attorney Mimi Rocah backed his request to erase the conviction after her office uncovered problems with the case.
“I feel like a burden has been lifted off my shoulder," Koonce said as a judge cleared his name.
Rocah’s Conviction Review Unit investigated the 1983 conviction and found evidence that Mount Vernon police pressured the lone victim-witness to implicate Koonce, made Koonce’s picture larger than others in a photo array and failed to interview alibi witnesses who corroborated his claim that he was elsewhere.
A Mount Vernon detective later lied about the composition of the photo arrays when he testified at pretrial hearings and Koonce’s trial, and a court subsequently ordered the department to change its unduly suggestive photo identification practices, Rocah said. One of the detectives involved in Koonce’s case later went to prison after a federal corruption sting.
Rocah’s office also found that detectives harmed Koonce by failing to interview all his alibi witnesses. They include a now-retired New York City police detective who said Koonce was with him in the city the night of the robbery.
In a statement, Rocah said Koonce’s conviction “was tainted by such questionable investigatory processes and procedures” that her office can no longer stand by it.
“Today marks the end of a 41-year injustice, as Mr. Koonce is finally vindicated in court. DA Mimi Rocah and her team should be commended for their commitment to seeing justice done for Mr. Koonce," Koonce’s lawyer, Karen Newirth, said.
At a hearing Friday, Westchester County Judge James McCarty ordered that Koonce’s robbery and weapons possession convictions be vacated and that his indictment be dismissed, citing deficiencies with the witness identification and the “totality of the unique circumstances presented by this case.”
But McCarty refused to entertain claims of police misconduct, noting in a written opinion released with his ruling that they “are exclusively the product of conjecture and supposition.” The judge also said that the police department's failure to interview some alibi witnesses was of little weight because Koonce had an opportunity to call his own alibi witnesses at his trial.
Koonce absconded from court during jury deliberations and was found about seven months later, sleeping on his girlfriend’s couch in the Bronx, according to newspaper reports from the time.
He was sentenced to 7½ to 15 years in prison for the robbery and served a shorter, simultaneous sentence for bail jumping. He was released on parole in August 1992. His brother, Paul, a high school sophomore at the time, also was charged in the robbery. He was acquitted.
Malcolm Koonce was born in 1998. The NFL's Raiders drafted him in 2021. Another son, Dejuan Koonce, is a retired New York state trooper who was assigned to protective details for Gov. Kathy Hochul and former Gov. Andrew Cuomo.
“I have some wonderful kids and they had to suffer whatever it was that society thought of me, which was not true at all, for their whole entire lives,” Koonce said at Friday's hearing. “This right here is vindication of everything, for them.”
Police accused Jeffrey and Paul Koonce of being among the three men who held up the Vernon Stars club on June 20, 1981. Patrons were forced to lie face down on the floor and hand over about $500 in cash, jewelry and other valuables, police said.
One of the perpetrators had a sawed-off shotgun and fired off at least two rounds, striking a 15-year-old and two other patrons, police said.
Rocah’s office found that detectives used dubious tactics to compel a victim to identify Koonce as the shooter. He was the only person to do so. Others told investigators that it was too dark in the club to identify the perpetrators by their faces.
The witness, a high school freshman at the time, picked Koonce out of a photo array that featured Koonce’s enlarged photo and smaller images of men who didn’t look like him.
The witness later told Rocah’s office that he didn’t remember seeing any faces in the dark club and that other patrons immediately covered him after the shooting, obscuring his view.
Detectives then brought Koonce to the hospital where the witness was being treated so he could identify him in person. The witness told a pretrial hearing that he felt pressured to quickly identify Koonce. The trial judge called the tactic “impermissibly suggestive.”
In his written opinion, McCarty said he “is not suggesting that the single eyewitness in this case did not testify truthfully," nor does he “discount the possibility that the eyewitness' identification of (Koonce) was accurate.”
"Nevertheless, chance is not tantamount to proof beyond a reasonable doubt,” the judge wrote.
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Associated Press writer Anthony Izaguirre contributed to this report.