Samuel Brownridge in late 2019. Photo courtesy of Donna Aldea.

Sitting in his home on Tuesday, as his video image was shown as part of a remote court hearing that would declare him innocent of an execution-style murder that he was convicted of 25 years ago, Samuel Brownridge wiped away tears and began to speak.

"First, I would thank my mother, who is no longer here with us and was not able to see me get exonerated," said Brownridge to those attending the Queens Supreme Court hearing, as he thought about the 25 years he had spent in prison wrongly and about what had occurred in a case that, by all accounts—from the statements made at the hearing by Queens District Attorney Melinda Katz, to the emotional words spoken by presiding Justice Joseph Zayas, to the miscarriage of justice detailed by Brownridge's appellate counsel, Donna Aldea—had failed him at every level.

"It felt like the law enforcement denied me that chance to make this right years ago," Brownridge, 45, said. "They lied to my face," he said.

And then, he said, while crying more openly, "I sit sometimes, and I say to myself, 'Why me?' My twenties and my thirties and half my forties are gone."

"To many of you this may look like a victory," he said of his exoneration Tuesday, which included the dismissal of the murder indictment brought against him in Queens in March 1994, "but as I am here before you today, I also see loss."

"But I also see hope," he said, "hope for a better system."

The hearing, based on a New York Criminal Procedure Article 440 motion to vacate, was an extraordinary one at several levels.

Brownridge's case is the first one taken up by Katz's newly created Conviction Integrity Unit to result in a recommendation that a criminal conviction be reversed, the office said in an email on Tuesday.

Aldea and some other veteran defense lawyers and judges believe, she said, that Brownridge's case is one of the rare times that a prosecutor's office has agreed to exoneration in a case in which no innocence-proving DNA evidence exists. Instead, in Brownridge's case, the declaring of his "actual innocence" during the hearing, pursuant to his granted motion, was based entirely on factors such as misidentification by witnesses in the mid-1990s of the supposed murderer, withheld exculpatory Brady evidence by the Queens DA's Office during the same time period such as the excluding of a key witness' identification of another man as the murderer, and the rejection of Brownridge's multiple alibi witnesses at trial because of technical errors made by his inexperienced, court-appointed attorney.

In addition, Aldea and her team at the law firm of Barket Epstein Kearon Aldea & LoTurco took up Brownridge's case in 2016 and spent several years reinvestigating it from top to bottom, said Aldea to the court during Tuesday's hearing and in a phone interview with the New York Law Journal.

Her team of lawyers at the criminal defense Long Island-based firm, working pro bono, she told the court, "pored through boxes of case documents," including reams of exhibits, "unearthed new exculpatory evidence, spoke to every witness we could find," and "we developed and established new leads, and established that this murder was actually committed" by a different man, named Garfield Brown, "beyond any shadow of a doubt."

Then after first approaching the Queens D.A.'s Office in 2018 with the case, before Katz took over the office, Aldea and her team worked, she said, to try to convince the office to agree to an exoneration because the wrong man had been convicted and served 25 years for a street murder in St. Albans, Queens, that he didn't commit.

After Katz was installed as Queens' district attorney on Jan. 1, 2020, and her Conviction Integrity Unit was formed, the D.A.'s Office ultimately came to the position that Brownridge should be exonerated, said Aldea. It came, she noted, nearly a year after Brownridge was released from prison in March 2019, after having served the 25-year sentence.

Justice Zayas, the administrative judge of the Queens Supreme Court Criminal Term, himself teared up over the case as he began to speak during the hearing. "It seems to me that almost everyone in the criminal justice system failed you," he said to Brownridge, referring not only to those who played a role in Brownridge's 1995 trial and conviction, but also to those who played parts in, and presided over, his early 2000s unsuccessful 440 motion and a federal court that looked at the matter, too.

In listing the people and stages of the process that had failed Brownridge, the judge pointed to "police officers who investigated" and "somehow failed to disclose in the police report that the main witness ID'd another person"—"a person that we all know does not resemble you [Brownridge] in the slightest," the judge noted—to a jury not being allowed to hear important evidence, to Brownridge's then-defense lawyer "fail[ing] to properly present [at trial] your alibi" witnesses, to the later post-conviction motion process, to the federal review.

"Mr. Brownridge," the judge said, "the miscarriage of justice in your case was monumental," and "the obvious injustice [of the case] delegitimizes our system of justice in the minds and the eyes of many communities.

"It is therefore no surprise," Zayas continued, "that large segments of our city and our country have grave doubts about our criminal justice system and its ability to delver equal and fair justice to all.

"Cases like yours demonstrate that their anger is justified, and their anger is legitimate."

Then the judge, as had Aldea in her own statements to the court Tuesday, said that he hopes all the key "stakeholders" in the system—from the police to defense lawyers to prosecutor's offices to the judiciary and others—"are self-reflect[ing] and are willing to look inward, so that we can more quickly correct these … injustices when they occur."

Katz, in her own statement, apologized to Brownridge for her office's past failures and said that her unit is trying to improve things, and she noted some evidentiary law changes that have been made in the state in recent years.

Brownridge, in a phone interview late Tuesday with the Law Journal, said that he will try to press for reforms if asked. It's extremely important to him, he said from his Maryland home where he lives with his wife and other family, and he will do the best with it he can, he said.

"A lot of people are still" battling wrongful actions taken against them by the criminal justice system, he said. "Anything I can do to help anybody with reform, I'm willing to help out however I can."