Earl Walters Exonerated

On August 24, 2023, EXI client Earl Walters was fully exonerated of two 1992 carjacking robberies for which he served 20 years in prison. At the time of his arrest, Earl was 17 years old.  His conviction was based solely on a false confession, obtained after more than fifteen hours of custody and interrogation, which contained numerous and substantial inconsistencies with the objective evidence.

Earl’s exoneration was based on forensic evidence which conclusively proved that Earl did not commit these crimes.  At the time of the robberies in 1992, there were a number of other carjacking robberies with the same modus operandi committed in Queens by three other individuals who were apprehended based on forensic evidence and ultimately pled guilty to those crimes.  In 2020, The Exoneration Initiative brought Earl’s case to the Conviction Integrity Unit of the Queens District Attorney’s Office (CIU) and asked them to compare the fingerprint evidence from the September 1992 crimes with the prints of those other individuals.  The CIU had the NYPD run the prints through the state database, and it was determined that they belonged to two of the men who had committed the other, similar crimes. (No fingerprint comparison with these other suspects was done during the the original police investigation in 1992, even though the police paperwork shows that they recognized the striking similarities between the other robberies and the ones Earl was accused of having committed).

Earl was exonerated based on a joint motion between EXI and the Queens County District Attorney’s office, in an emotionally charged proceeding where the judge apologized to Earl for the failures of police and prosecutors which led to his wrongful conviction and his decades behind bars.