By Zachary Margulis-Ohnuma
I woke up this morning to the tenth anniversary of the most important day of my legal career and an even more important day in the life of my treasured client, Antonio Yarbough.
On February 6, 2014, Antonio and his co-defendant Sharrif Wilson walked out of Supreme Court in Brooklyn as free men.
They had been locked away for 7,903 days for a horrific triple homicide committed by someone else.
The killer struck again seven years later, leaving his semen inside the body of his victim, just as he left his skin cells under the fingernails of Tony’s mother, Annie Yarbough, as she struggled to fight him off. Tony was 18 the day he discovered his mother’s body at their Coney Island apartment.
The killer was able to kill again because New York City police failed to do their jobs. Instead of chasing down the murderer, detectives from the 60th Precinct framed Tony and Sharrif. The police pressured Sharrif—who was just 15 years old, Black, gay, homeless, and vulnerable—into making a false videotaped confession implicating Tony in the stabbings of Annie, Tony’s sister Chavonn Barnes, and their friend Latasha Knox. Both girls were just 12 years old.
The framing had to be deliberate. Medical reports from early that morning showed rigor mortis proving the murders happened hours before Tony discovered the bodies and had a neighbor call 911 (our irrasciable intern, now fearless defense attorney, Martha Lineberger figured that out). Crime scene and detective reports, taken together, showed that the police planted a knife theorized to be a murder weapon: the Crime Scene Unit missed the weapon when they meticulously cartalogued every detail of the scene, but detectives claimed to have found it out of the blue hours later (another law student intern, current ZMO Law Partner Tes Cohen, figured that out). Witnesses had seen a stranger, a man with “pretty eyes,” using drugs with Annie and threatening her with a knife hours before Tony reported the crime.
I got the case in 2008 when Tony’s friend Eric Barden came to see me. I chased down every lead to a dead end until I filed a motion demanding Tony’s release or, in the alternative, DNA testing of items from the crime scene. Judge Raymond Guzman of Brooklyn Supreme Court agreed to order DNA testing. I continued working the case with Brooklyn attorney Philip Smallman, coming into court month after month to press the prosecutors to complete the testing.
In the summer of 2013, as the Brooklyn District Attorney was running a tough race for re-election, I got a call from the assistant assigned to the Tony’s case. DNA results came back. Tony’s DNA was found on the outside of one of the girls’ jeans. Big deal, he lived with them. But there was something else, the ADA told me: DNA from under Annie’s fingernails matched DNA in a database taken from a woman’s body found in a stairwell in Sunset Park in 1999. Tony and Sharrif were in prison at that time (Tony was serving 75-to-life after losing a re-trial). So another person must have slaughtered Tony’s family, fought with Annie, and survived to kill again seen years later in Sunset Park. Tony was absolutely, unquestionably, undeniably, unequivcably inncocent.
It still took the Brooklyn DA’s office almost eight months and a regime change to get their heads around the new evidence. Ken Thompson defeated Charles “Joe” Hynes in November and took office in January 2014. ADA Thompson (who died tragically less than three years later) was swamped with claims of innocence—a couple of dozen lawyers with clients claiming innocence formed a committee and made a concerted effort to have their cases re-examined. We pressed our case and recruited Adam Perlmutter, now a Supreme Court judge in Brooklyn himself, to represent Sharrif. The judge overseeing the DNA testing scheduled an appearance for February 6, 2014. A few days before Phil and I got a call from the DA’s office advising us they were going to transport Tony down from Attica. They would not say why, but we thought we knew.
Tony showed up in his prison khakis, escorted by a bevy of cheerful officers, miserable from the seven-hour drive and terrified about what would happen next.
Judge Guzman called the case.
The assistant district attorney announced the People were withdrawing their opposition to our motion to vacate the conviction on the grounds that, if the DNA evidence had been available at the time of the trial, the case might have come out differently. Judge Guzman ordered the officers to remove Tony and Sharrif’s shackles.
Tony turned and gave me a big, warm bear hug as the audience in the courtroom broke into applause. And tears.
Ten years ago today, after court, we all walked down to Junior’s for a slice of cheesecake.