It has become fashionable of late to attack criminal convictions, regardless of the evidence, using “alleged” process errors.
The conviction of Chanel Lewis for the brutal 2016 sexual abuse and murder of Howard Beach jogger Karina Vetrano is just such a case.
In a 65-page court brief filed on Monday, Lewis’ defense attorney, Ron Kuby, fired yet another meaningless salvo at the conviction.
Some journalists immediately took up the claims in Kuby’s papers, calling the DNA lab that did some of the testing an “outside, unlicensed” lab, decrying the police tactics as a “racial dragnet” and calling into question the conviction reached by a Queens jury in 2019.
The Queens District Attorney’s Office, given just a few hours to comment on the 65-page filing, declined to “comment on pending litigation,” and the DNA lab had not been heard from “at press time.”
Let’s start with the basics: Chanel Lewis murdered Karina Vetrano.
His DNA was found on her neck (she was strangled), under her fingernails (she fought her attacker), and on her cellphone (which had been tossed into the weeds by her killer).
Lewis confessed on videotape to an African American detective and the deputy bureau chief of the Queens DA’s Homicide Bureau.
The day after the murder, he went to the hospital after a wound on his fist — which a doctor testified was a classic “boxer’s injury” — became infected. (Karina’s face had been beaten and her front tooth cracked.)
Kuby talks about a “racial dragnet” resulting in Lewis’ capture, a catchy phrase many news articles repeated. It is nonsense.
The Vetrano case remained unsolved from August 2016 through January 2017. In early 2017, an off-duty police lieutenant recalled seeing a suspicious individual in Howard Beach acting as if he were casing stores for a robbery a few months before the murder.
The lieutenant had called the incident in to the police, who stopped the individual, questioned him, and took down identifying information.
A later search of police reports revealed that the individual stopped was Chanel Lewis. The police questioned Lewis and eventually got his consent to take a DNA sample, which matched the DNA found on Karina.
There is no “mystery” surrounding how the police focused on Lewis, and it was all testified to at the trial.
But we are expected to ignore these facts and accept the dramatic, made-for-headline claims in Kuby’s papers as gospel.
One of them is a rather pointless claim that a DNA lab used by the police was an “outside,” “unlicensed” lab, as if it were a mom-and-pop shop.
In fact, it was a well-respected DNA lab in Virginia that had previously solved scores of cold cases for police departments all around the country.
The analysis it did showed that the killer was a black male. Kuby complains that caused the police to spread a “racial dragnet” looking for black men as the killer. Really? I suppose they could have continued looking for Asian women, but that would seem rather foolish.
But it really doesn’t matter because none of the Virginia lab’s work was used during the trial, and all the relevant DNA work done on the Vetrano case was performed by the NYC Medical Examiner’s Office — and it all showed Lewis was the killer.
The “racial dragnet” claim predictably made for great headlines, especially for a murder that occurred in Howard Beach, but Kuby conveniently ignores the fact that in the initial stages of the investigation, many of Karina’s (white) family and friends gave DNA samples.
He bemoans the fact that many of the blacks whose DNA was tested had no felony convictions, again ignoring the fact that Chanel Lewis himself had no prior convictions and thus his DNA was not in the NYPD database.
If the police had limited their DNA searches to convicted criminals, Chanel Lewis would never have been brought to justice for this murder.
But this is where we are on criminal justice issues in New York these days.
Cross-racial crime, which is actually a rarity in New York, brings out the worst in defense advocacy. But it makes for great headlines.
Guilt or innocence? Doesn’t matter. What angle can we use to attack the police, the prosecution, or the “system”? It’s shameful.
Jim Quinn was executive district attorney in the Queens DA’s Office, where he served for 42 years.