Paul Bass Photo
Mom Ruth Toms with son Scott Lewis after court hearing: Judges “did their homework.”
Eight months after a judge ordered him freed from jail, Scott Lewis returned to a courtroom— this time in a suit and tie — to watch lawyers and a visiting federal appeals panel debate his fate.
Lewis joined a standing room-only crowd of spectators inside an ornately refurbished second-floor U.S. District courtroom on Church Street Wednesday for a special New Haven session of the Second Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals.
The court heard four cases Wednesday — including a state appeal of a federal judge’s decision to release him from prison after 19 years serving a murder conviction that the FBI, among others, found had resulted from an investigation by an allegedly crooked detective deeply involved in the narcotics trade.
(Click here to read an interview with him upon his release. Click here to read the judge’s decision, a scathing attack on the state judges who had denied Lewis’s earlier appeals.)
Assistant State’s Attorney Michael Proto Wednesday asked the three-judge panel to overturn another federal judge’s ruling last December granting Lewis’s habeus corpus petition. Proto alleged both a minor procedural flaw as well as a broader philosophical deficiency in that ruling. Lewis’s attorney, Columbia Law School (and former Yale Law School) Professor Brett Dignam, responded that the judge had been right to find that the state had withheld crucial exculpatory evidence in its case against Lewis: an account by a veteran cop that the detective had coached the state’s key witness to make up his story.
Lewis’s friends and family were among those packing the rows of spectators during the argument.
“Usually I [was] coming into court with the handcuffs on” and a “big yellow jumpsuit,” Lewis said outside the courtroom. “Today I’m able to wear clothing that makes me look like the person I am.” Lewis wore a charcoal-grey suit, white shirt, and Florsheim loafers to court Wednesday. That’s his new work outfit: Since his release he has obtained his real estate license and begun working as a Century 21 agent.
Hard Line By State
The state could have decided not to appeal the habeus decision. But in Connecticut prosecutors have a history of fighting efforts to free convicts when damaging new information emerges (as in this case).
Lewis (pictured outside the courtroom Wednesday) was one of two local drug dealers convicted of shooting to death former Hill alderman-turned-drug courier Ricardo Turner and his lover Lamont Fields in their bed at 4 a.m. on Oct. 11, 1990. A former New Haven detective named Vincent Raucci made the arrest, and the case. In 1995 Lewis received a 120-year sentence. He was sent to the state-run MacDougall-Walker Correctional Institution in Suffield, where he methodically pressed his appeals for freedom. (Eventually Professor Dignam and her students took up his federal appeal.)
The FBI subsequently looked into the case and concluded that Detective Raucci, who had a cocaine habit and was allegedly involved with local drug dealers on an extracurricular basis, had fabricated evidence and framed Lewis. But state prosecutors insisted they had the right killer, even while acknowledging Raucci’s problems. The prosecutors successfully fought Lewis’s efforts to have the verdict overturned in seven separate state proceedings. Raucci repeatedly insisted, meanwhile, that he never fabricated evidence or framed Lewis.
In ordering Lewis freed after 19 years, Senior U.S. District Court Judge Charles S. Haight Jr. found that the state had failed to provide Lewis with crucial evidence to make his case: Testimony by now-retired police Lt. Michael Sweeney. Sweeney had been present at Raucci’s questioning of the state’s key witness, Ovil Ruiz. He testified that Ruiz told him three times he knew nothing about the murder. He testified that Raucci continued to feed him facts about what happened in the murder, then led him to prepare a statement that pinned the murder on Lewis and fellow defendant Stefon Morant. Ruiz ended up providing what was by all accounts the central testimony on which Lewis and Morant were convicted. Lewis argued in his appeal that had he had access to Sweeney’s testimony, he would have been able to convince a jury of his innocence because it destroyed the credibility of both the only key witness as well as the detective who put together the investigation.
Judge Haight agreed with Lewis’s argument and wrote that previously state ruling denying Lewis’s appeals “passeth all understanding.” He concluded the state violated Lewis’s rights under the 14th amendment of the U.S. Constitution to have access to exculpatory evidence to make his defense. (That’s called a “Brady” claim under the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision in the case Brady v. Maryland.)
Proto: They Knew
In his procedural argument in court Wednesday, Attorney Proto told the judges that Lewis — when he was representing in earlier unsuccessful appeals to state courts — had failed to provide all the required transcripts in the case. Attorney Dignam responded that Lewis’s filing had clearly referenced all previous transcripts in the case. The judges questioned Proto extensively, and at times skeptically, about both state and federal court precedents that would make this new allegation relevant. Judge Ralph K. Winter, for instance, suggested that appellate courts don’t always consider it “normal practice” for appellants to order transcripts.
The more substantive discussion took place on Proto’s second major argument: That federal Judge Haight had erred in finding that Sweeney’s testimony would have altered the outcome of the case.
Lewis already knew that Ovil Ruiz had originally denied having been present at the murder scene, that Ruiz had changed his story, Proto argued. Lewis therefore had had access to that most important information that Sweeney had separately revealed, Proto argued.
“They did have knowledge of the three-time denial” by Ruiz, Proto remarked.
He argued that access to Sweeney’s testimony would have not introduced new information that would have changed the verdict. “As far as the denials go, Ruiz essentially told the jury himself” that he had changed his story.
“You have to convince us that the state court’s ‘not exculpatory’” take on Sweeney’s testimony was incorrect, “is that right?” Judge Jose A. Cabranes, seated in front of a wooden replica of the U.S. District Court seal and below an archway marked “Justice,” asked Dignam, Lewis’s attorney.
Yes, responded Dignam, Sweeney’s testimony was “central” to the case.
Ovil Ruiz’s testimony against Lewis in the murder “was the only evidence by the state to impeach Mr. Lewis,” Dignam noted. She recalled that Lt. Sweeney spent two days on the stand in a separate court proceeding (involving Stefon Morant, not Scott Lewis) detailing how he watched Detective Raucci feed Ruiz a new version of the story to repeat, detailing how he had taken Raucci out of the room to admonish him.
“What is so exculpatory about a witness changing his mind and deciding to cooperate” with police? Cabranes asked Dignam at another point.
Ruiz was 16 years old at the time, with a history of criminal activity and psychological problems, Dignam responded. But the more important point here, she said, was that Sweeney’s version of the events would have changed the outcome of the trial. She argued that Sweeney’s standing as a “veteran police officer” made his story more compelling than any information that came from Ovil Ruiz, including information from Ruiz that he had changed his story.
Then Cabranes lobbed a softball to Dignam, asking her about “trouble” that Detective Raucci had “gotten into.” That gave her an opening to refer to to FBI investigation detailing extensive drug-related criminal activity on Raucci’s part, as well as domestic-violence charges brought against him..
“That Was Happiness”
Outside the courthouse after the proceeding, Lewis hugged family and friends. They celebrated what they considered focused, informed, and seemingly sympathetic questioning by the three judges.
The three judges — Cabranes, fellow former Yale Law Professor Winter, and John M. Walker, Jr. — demonstrated a command on the case, referencing details from briefs and different witnesses’ testimony during their questioning of the two attorneys.
“They did their homework!” exclaimed Ruth Toms, Lewis’s mother. She has attended court proceedings at every turn of Lewis’s case for over 20 years.
“That was happiness — they were interested,” she said of Wednesday’s session. “Not like the state court [where judges] already had their minds made up.”
Click here for a detailed account of the FBI revelations and the specifics of this case, from a 1998 expose in the now-defunct New Haven Advocate. And click here to read the full FBI report, which covered wide ground about New Haven’s drug trade.