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Dion Miller, 54, was released on Thursday, July 27, after 16 years behind bars thanks to a re-investigation that he requested from one of the nation’s first statewide conviction review units.
Jurors in Jersey City had convicted Miller in 2007 of felony murder, robbery and weapons offenses in the death of 74-year-old Romeo Cavero outside a Van Nostrand Avenue senior citizens’ building in January 2003.
Cavero was struck in the head several times while being robbed of cash. He died four days later at Jersey City Medical Center.
Miller was sentenced to 30 years without parole at from East Jersey State Prison in Rahway. He wouldn’t have become eligible for release until 2034.
On Thursday, lawyers for the state and for Miller went before Superior Court Judge Mitzy Galis-Menendez in Jersey City to jointly request a new trial.
Family members of the victim were notified prior to the proceeding, Platkin said Friday.
The judge granted the request, after which state authorities dismissed the indictment with prejudice – meaning the case against Miller is over and done with and can’t ever be brought back to court.
In other words: State authorities are convinced that Miller didn't do it.
A new investigation into the case has already been launched by Platkin's Cold Case Network, made up of regional task forces to investigate cold cases and those generated by Platkin’s Conviction Review Unit (CRU), which gave Miller his freedom.
The CRU, established in 2019, “conducts an extensive vetting process to identify credible claims of innocence among the hundreds of eligible applications,” the attorney general said.
Miller was cleared, he said, as a result of “a re-investigation of the facts and review of new evidence” that wasn’t available to the jury at the time.
The unit “concluded that there was clear and convincing evidence that Mr. Miller should not have been convicted,” Platkin said.
The work included a “re-evaluation of statements” that Miller and the victim made to police, among other factors, said CRU Director Carolyn Murray, a former judge who’s also been a prosecutor at the state and federal levels.
The information assembled by the unit “had never been previously presented to the court, prosecutor, defense, or the jury that convicted Mr. Miller,” she noted.
Cavero knew Miller, who lived with a relative in a neighboring apartment in his building – yet he never identified him as his attacker, the review found.
Cavero “was lucid immediately after the attack when he told family and a responding officer that he had been struck from the rear and robbed of cash by a male, who then returned and fled in a nearby vehicle,” Platkin said.
The review also found that the only evidence linking Miller to the crime were three false confessions that “lacked reliability for a variety of reasons.”
“The three false confessions elicited by police from Mr. Miller each contained various inconsistencies in the details and descriptions of the events,” Platkin said. “Additionally, none of the confessions matched the description of the crime provided by the victim.”
During 17 one-hour-long interrogations, he said, officers fed Miller information that he repeated back to them. The process “molded” Miller’s statement “to fit the facts as the detectives believed them,” the attorney general said.
A detective who later questioned the suspect alone told the CRU that he'd said he "did not commit this offense and he only confessed to it because he was afraid of being hurt."
“Every day throughout our country, our criminal justice system is tested,” the attorney general noted. “Many times justice prevails. When it fails, it damages the system’s effectiveness and credibility.
“It is the responsibility of each of us to acknowledge our mistakes and attempt to right the wrongs that have been done.”
Miller had support in his bid from Laura Cohen and Nyssa Taylor of the New Jersey Innocence Project at Rutgers University, a law school-based organization committed to freeing wrongly convicted people in the state.
“Mr. Miller, his family, and the New Jersey Innocence Project at Rutgers University are deeply grateful to Attorney General Platkin, Director Murray, and the entire team of the Conviction Review Unit for their vigorous, thorough, and thoughtful work on this case, and for their determination to correct this grave injustice,” said Professor Laura Cohen, who heads the group.
“We hope that the lessons learned from this matter, particularly with regard to the causes and frequency of false confessions, will lead to exonerations of other innocent people and help prevent future wrongful convictions from occurring in New Jersey,” she added.
Platkin said the review and cold case units were created for that very reason.
“While these cases are challenging, there is no limit on the pursuit of justice,” he said.
“An innocent man was able to reclaim his freedom,” the attorney general added. “Our Cold Case Network will now pursue justice for the family of a victim whose murder remains unsolved.
“Today marks a new beginning for Mr. Miller and a new phase in the investigation to identify the killer of Mr. Cavero.”
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