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In an announcement on Thursday, Sept. 26, Westchester District Attorney Miriam Rocah said that a Bronx judge vacated the 1999 murder conviction of Antonio Mallet, who had been accused of fatally shooting a man in the parking lot of a Bronx supermarket in September 1996.
Rocah said that the decision to vacate the conviction followed an "exhaustive" investigation conducted by her office's Conviction Review Unit. This effort began in March 2022 when the Westchester DA's Office was appointed special prosecutor by the Bronx County Supreme Court because of the Bronx DA's previous involvement in Mallet's post-conviction proceedings as a presiding judge.
According to officials, Mallet had been convicted of the murder of 19-year-old Micheal Ledeatte on Sept. 24, 1996. On the day of his death, at around 2:30 a.m., Ledeatte was delivering a stolen Lexus to a buyer at the Waldbaum's supermarket chain on Gun Hill Road in the Bronx.
Ledeatte's friend, who had been in his own car waiting nearby, saw two men walk up to the Lexus with Ledeatte in the driver's seat. The friend then heard a gunshot and saw the men leave the scene in their vehicle. Soon after, he found Ledeatte slumped over with a gunshot wound to the head.
After being interrogated by New York City Police Department detectives Joseph Nieves and Kevin Tracy for nearly 19 hours, the friend ultimately identified Mallet as the shooter. Mallet was then arrested on Sept. 26, 1996, and was eventually found guilty on March 18, 1999.
He was sentenced to 20 years in prison, despite maintaining his innocence the whole time. He was finally released on parole in January 2019.
Since being convicted, Mallet filed an appeal and several motions to overturn it. The sixth such motion to vacate his conviction was filed in October 2019.
According to Rocah, the Conviction Review Unit's investigation into the case found that the single eyewitness made a "credible recantation" that his statements implicating Mallet had been the result of "physical and psychological coercion during a nearly 19-hour interrogation."
Officials found new evidence supporting these claims and discovered more information and records of reported misconduct by Nieves and Tracy, including some that pre-dated Mallet's 1999 trial, according to Rocah.
Based on these results, Mallet's conviction was vacated on Thursday by New York Supreme Court Justice Alvin Yearwood, who also dismissed his underlying indictment.
Despite this, Rocah said that this is "not proof of actual innocence."
"The credible witness recantation and the new evidence uncovered by the CRU’s more than two-year investigation provided a strong case that the integrity of the conviction was compromised," Rocah said, adding, "We believe the defendant did not receive a fair trial, which is why we supported vacating this conviction.”
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