A search for vindication

After he served 34 years in prison, James Haley's murder conviction was overturned. But questions remain.

James Haley's 34 years behind bars ended with little fanfare and no publicity in January 2008, when a state judge quietly overturned his 1972 murder conviction and set him free.

The judge found that two Boston police detectives had withheld critical evidence at trial that may have helped Haley prove his innocence, and prosecutors have decided not to retry him for the decades-old slaying.

Now, the 62-year-old Haley is looking for compensation for his years of hard time. On Wednesday, he filed a federal lawsuit against the city and the detectives, who have long since died, alleging wrongful imprisonment, malicious prosecution, and other violations.

"I'm not a murderer," Haley, a slender man with wire-rimmed glasses, said yesterday as he sat in his lawyer's Boston office, talking about his wasted years. "More than anything in my life right now, other than proving once and for all I didn't kill David [Myers], I just want peace of mind, quietness in my life."

But prosecutors say the dismissal of Haley's conviction and the decision not to retry him do not amount to an exoneration. A witness who helped put him in prison insists that he is guilty.

"I think he should be happy that he's on the street," said Haley's former sister-in-law, Gloria Custis, who was the key witness at his trial. "He should have just stayed out there and left things alone, because he knows that he's not innocent."

When he was 25, Haley was convicted of first-degree murder and sentenced to life without parole in the stabbing and shooting of Myers, 25, Custis's boyfriend, , after breaking into the couple's Roxbury apartment on July 11, 1971. Prosecutors alleged that Haley was looking for his wife, Brenda, who had left him two months earlier and was visiting from Delaware.

During the five-day trial, court records show, Custis testified that Myers went to investigate when they heard someone in their apartment. Then, she said, she heard him say: "James stabbed me" and "Why did you stab me, man? Brenda's not here."

Custis said she saw Haley struggling with Myers, then fled when she heard gunshots.

Boston lawyer James Sultan, who represented Haley in getting his conviction overturned, said no physical evidence linked Haley to the killing and the case hinged on the credibility of Custis and Haley's wife.

Both women testified that, on the afternoon before the slaying, they saw Haley on the street where Custis and Myers lived, so he knew his wife was back in town and suspected she was staying with her sister.

"I knew they were lying," said Haley, who insisted that he was working at MIT the afternoon before the slaying and that he later visited his mother in the hospital.

Haley's lawyer advised him not to testify. If he had, jurors probably would have learned that when Haley was 16, he fatally stabbed a 17-year-old boy during a fight in Roxbury. He pleaded guilty to manslaughter and served 52 months.

Yesterday, Haley said he was defending a younger cousin, who had been beaten by the older boy, and accidentally stabbed the other youth when he fell on him.

After his conviction in Myers's killing, Haley won a victory in 1990 when a state judge ordered a new trial, ruling that his lawyer had been ineffective. But after 26 months, Haley was returned to prison after the Supreme Judicial Court reinstated his conviction.

"It was kind of hard when I went back the second time," said Haley, who had undergone a kidney transplant while released.

But Haley said he was proud that he had worked two jobs and gotten his own apartment while on release and was determined to keep fighting his conviction.

His legal work was rewarded on Valentine's Day 2006, when a package containing 60 documents came from the Boston Police Department in response to his public records request for his criminal case file.

It contained police interviews that had never been turned over to the defense, indicating that the day after Myers's slaying, Brenda Haley and Custis told Boston police detectives Joseph Kelley and John B. Harrington, that they had last seen him a month before the killing.

Suffolk District Attorney Daniel F. Conley's office agreed that the new evidence should have been turned over at trial and filed a motion in December 2007 to vacate the conviction.

Superior Court Judge Margaret Hinkle dismissed the conviction and freed Haley on Jan. 18, 2008, ruling that the police interviews could have affected the outcome of his trial.

In an interview yesterday, Custis said she saw Haley kill her boyfriend, so she doesn't understand why his conviction was overturned. She said she saw Haley the day before Myers was killed and attributed the discrepancies in the police report to confusion over the way police asked questions.

Elaine Driscoll, a spokeswoman for Boston police, declined to comment on Haley's case, saying that the city has yet to receive a copy of the lawsuit.

"This is not an exoneration," said Jake Wark, a spokesman for Conley's office, but he added that too much time had passed to retry the case. "Lost documents, fading memories, deceased investigators and other missing pieces make it almost impossible for us to try this case according to our current high standards."

But, Haley, who is scheduled to undergo surgery today for a hernia, says he hopes his federal lawsuit will bring exoneration.

"They had evidence I didn't do this and just sat on it," he said.

Correction: Because of a reporting error, a Page One story Friday on James Haley's release from prison after 34 years incorrectly summarized a judge's decision that overturned Haley's 1972 murder conviction. Superior Court Judge Margaret Hinkle found that Haley did not receive a fair trial because the Commonwealth withheld critical evidence from the defense. She did not make a finding as to whether prosecutors or Boston Police withheld the police interviews of contradictory statements made by two key witnesses.