Laura Glesby File Photo
Alder Troy Streater at his day job, making his signature hazelnut coffee at the 180 Center's warming center.
After spending 23 years in prison, Newhallville Alder Troy Streater traveled to Hartford to make a case that his pardon is enough of a testament to his innocence to warrant a nearly $12 million award from the state.
Streater and his lawyer, Alexander Tiva Taubes, are seeking compensation from the state for Streater’s decades of incarceration due to a murder conviction for which he received a pardon in 2022. Streater has long claimed he did not commit the crime. (Streater is separately suing the city and the detectives who allegedly framed him.)
On Monday, State Claims Commissioner Robert Shea convened a hearing in Hartford where Streater and Taubes got to make their case. Assistant Attorneys General Matthew Beizer and Lisamaria Proscino pushed back by arguing that Streater’s pardon isn’t a sufficient enough validation of his innocence to justify redress from the state.
At a time when the state is grappling with how best to compensate a number of Black men from New Haven who spent decades behind bars for crimes they maintain they didn’t commit, Monday’s hearing raised the question about whether or not the particular circumstances of Streater’s pardon rise to the level of indicating a wrongful conviction eligible for state compensation.
“I spent 23 years behind bars for a crime I didn’t commit,” Streater said in an interview this week. “That time I can never get back, but with the time I still have left, I fight for my community and for justice … This is about making sure nobody goes through what I went through again.”
Ultimately, Commissioner Shea decided to pause the hearing and reconvene at a later date, planning to more deeply research and consider the role of pardons in the state’s wrongful conviction compensation system.
Streater was convicted in 1990 of the murder of 19-year-old Terrance Gamble, which took place when Streater himself was 23.
He underwent two criminal trials. The first resulted in a hung jury, and the second in a murder conviction with a 35-year-prison sentence.
Streater served 23 of those years behind bars. He continued to claim his innocence of the crime after pursuing four unsuccessful legal challenges.
Streater maintains his claim that city police Detectives Joseph Greene and Anthony DiLullo framed him for the crime by coercing the four witnesses who led to his conviction, all of whom eventually recanted their testimony. Streater’s brother, as well as Rev. Boise Kimber, testified that Streater was in church at the time of the shooting. Prosecutors did not present physical evidence tying Streater to the crime.
Streater was released from prison in 2017. He continued to insist on his innocence when he appeared before the state Board of Pardons and Paroles on April 6, 2022 — an unusual move that is considered to be risky before a board that tends to value accountability.
Yet the board granted him an absolute pardon. Streater received a certificate indicating that the board “does hereby forever acquit, release and discharge” him from the conviction.
A year and a half later, in 2023, he was elected as the alder of Ward 21, representing parts of Dixwell, Newhallville, and Prospect Hill.
There is “more than substantial” evidence that Streater was framed for the crime, Taubes said. Streater’s case was added to the National Registry of Exonerations in 2023.
Assistant Attorney General Beizer noted on Monday that Streater, before he was pardoned, pursued multiple unsuccessful habeas corpus challenges to his incarceration.
“There has been no court, no prosecuting authority, no tribunal, no one ever has cast any doubt on the fact that he’s guilty,” Beizer told the commissioner. “He was convicted by a jury, and that’s not to be minimized. Mr. Taubes is asking you to undo the verdict of a jury.”
He argued that if anyone with a pardon were deemed eligible for state compensation, “You’d have a line down the street saying, ‘I got a pardon… Give me 10 million of the state’s money.’”
Meanwhile, Taubes argued that the state statute’s standard for compensation indicates that Streater’s conviction had to be “dismissed on grounds of innocence or grounds consistent with innocence.”
He argued that Streater’s insistence on his innocence was part of the basis for his pardon, since it played a substantial role in his application for the pardon.
Taubes noted that a pardon is a critical means for people who have finished serving prison sentences for wrongful convictions to clear their names once they are no longer incarcerated.
He also spoke to the basis for Streater’s claims of police misconduct.
“We do know that these same officers were accused of the same misconduct in other cases — including with documentation that was withheld from Mr. Streater,” said Taubes.
Both Greene and DiLullo have faced allegations of witness coercion or otherwise tampering evidence in multiple other convictions.
They were the two detectives responsible for arresting and investigating Daryl Valentine, who spent 32 years behind bars for a 1991 double murder he has always said he did not commit. Two witnesses have attested that the detectives bribed and coerced them to implicate Valentine.
DiLullo helped convict Adam Carmon, who was exonerated in part due to suppressed evidence in 2022 after spending 28 years in prison.
And Greene was implicated in the wrongful arrest of Eric Ham, who received a $1.4 million award from a 1996 jury as compensation. As the Ham case unfolded, an undated memo authored by then-prosecutor David Gold to his colleague Michael Dearington called Greene’s detective work into question.
“The Ham situation obviously raises other issues surrounding the nature of the investigative techniques employed by detectives,” wrote Gold, who is now a judge.
This background evidence, among others, “makes the recantations of the witnesses all the more credible,” Taubes argued to the commissioner.