A state inmate serving a minimum of 25 years in prison for murder is entitled to a new trial because the law on depraved indifference murder had evolved between the time of his 2003 conviction and the exhaustion of his appeals three years later, a federal judge in Brooklyn ruled last week.
As New York law had evolved by 2006, Judge Kiyo A. Matsumoto ruled in Johnson v. Bellnier, 09-cv-00381, that “no reasonable trier of fact could find petitioner guilty of depraved indifference murder, and thus his conviction cannot constitutionally stand.”
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