For almost 20 years, Marty Tankleff’s conviction for the murder of his parents has been cause celebre.  Marty was the poster boy for false confessions, obtained when a tough detective deceived and manipulated a teenager whose parents were just murdered into giving a false confession.  Back then, the notion of a false confession was considered laughable.  Just another defense lawyer scam.

Over the years, a handful of lawyers contributed their time and effort pro bono to help Marty, who is no longer a kid but has somehow maintained a remarkably even keel about his life in prison for a crime few believe he committed.   His primary lawyer, Bruce Barkett, is one of the most tenacious guys I know.  He is a true zealot for lost causes, some of which I find abhorrent (he defends killers of abortion docs, as a matter of principal).  But that same blind faith made him stick by Marty Tankleff.

With the help of an investigator, Jay Salpeter, who also refused to give up, they developed evidence showing that Marty’s parents were killed by a business partner with the help of a couple of local mutts.  But mutts being what they are, later started talking about how they helped Jerard Steuerman, who faked his own death and fled to California a week after the killings, kill Arlene and Seymour Tankleff.  Steuerman owed Seymour about half a million dollars.  Naturally, detectives put their best efforts into thinking this through and decided that all the evidence points to the Tankleff son, Marty.

As related by Newsday,

Homicide Det. K. James McCready faked a phone call to himself while interrogating Tankleff, then told him — falsely — that his father had awoken from a coma and implicated him in the attack. Tankleff asked if it was possible that he did it while he was blacked out, and police told him that was possible. He then confessed, police said, but recanted right away and never signed a written confession.

Why bother with investigations when you can nail down a confession from a grieving kid, right?

After many years, Barkett was able to get a hearing before Suffolk County Judge Stephen Braslow.  With the prosecution fighting tooth and nail, including refusing to grant immunity to one of the mutts who admitted that he did Steuerman’s dirty work (why not grant immunity for the murder, if you say the witness is a liar), the judge denied the post-trial motion with a scathing decision.

In a March 2006 ruling, Braslow dismissed the new witnesses as a group of “nefarious scoundrels,” many with extensive criminal histories.

This decision shocked the public and legal community alike; It wasn’t a slam dunk that the defense had put together proof that Marty was innocent, but they had made every aspect of the case that put Marty Tankleff in jail smell so bad that no reasonable person could have faith in this conviction.  By definition, this doesn’t put Judge Braslow into the “reasonable person” column.

Finally, someone who matters agreed.  The Appellate Division, Second Department, not one of those pushover courts inclined to let the defense run wild, reversed Judge Braslow and granted team Tankleff a new trial.

“It is abhorrent to our sense of justice and fair play to countenance the possibility that someone innocent of a crime may be incarcerated or otherwise punished for a crime which he or she did not commit,” four appellate justices — Reinaldo E. Rivera, Gabriel M. Krausman, Anita R. Florio and Mark C. Dillon — wrote in a unanimous, 21-page decision.

Full decision can be found here.  In reversing Braslow’s remarkably harsh and overly doctrinaire denial, the Appellate Division recognized for the defense what is so often employed for the prosecution.  They held that Braslow wrongfully

“in effect, applied a blanket disqualification of all of the defendant’s proffered evidence. … dismissed, outright, the possibility that witnesses with criminal records, drug addictions, and/or psychiatric issues may nevertheless be capable of testifying truthfully.”

That’s the problem when the defense gathers evidence against the real murderers.  They are rarely candidates for sainthood.  Neither are prosecution witnesses at times, but they have access to much better robes to wrap their witnesses in to conceal that they are really scum.  The defense finds its witnesses wherever it can, and they stand before the court in all their prison orange jumpsuits.  When it’s the defense, there’s no choice in the matter.

The game isn’t over for Marty Tankleff.  He now gets a new trial, and it will be up to a jury to decide whether all of these facts require a different outcome.  Bruce Barkett, for all his tenacity, tends to try a “scorched earth” case, a by-product of his zeal.  It’s open warfare, take no prisoners, with Bruce at the helm, and this may have been a reason why the prosecution and court took such firm positions against Marty Tankleff.  But you have to take the good with the bad when it comes to a fight that lasts this long.

Having paid careful attention to the evidence presented, and knowing a little of the inside evidence of this case that never saw the neon lights of the courtroom because of games played by the prosecution, I feel certain that Marty Tankleff should be acquitted.  Let’s hope the right result happens for a kid who didn’t deserve to spend the last 20 years in prison.  And Kudos to the defense team for keeping up the fight.