Judge tosses conviction in infamous '90 NYC tourist killing

NEW YORK (AP) — A man who maintains he was wrongly convicted in a notorious 1990 tourist killing deserves a new trial, a judge said Tuesday, throwing out a verdict in a case that helped crystallize an era of crime and fear in the nation's biggest city.

Manhattan state Supreme Court Justice Eduardo Padro overturned Johnny Hincapie's conviction after a hearing that spanned months and delved into the 1990 death of Brian Watkins of Provo, Utah. Padro stopped short of declaring Hincapie innocent, as he and his lawyers had hoped the judge might, but agreed to release him while awaiting trial.

Watkins was killed defending his parents from a subway-platform mugging while the family was in town for the U.S. Open tennis tournament.

Hincapie said he was a bystander who was wrongfully swept up in the case and then was coerced into a false confession. Prosecutors said his claims aren't credible.

Hincapie's lawyer, Ron Kuby, said his client had always maintained hope. He said Hincapie earned a high school equivalency diploma and associate's, bachelor's and master's degrees while in prison.

"He never gave in to despair, although surely despair was his cellmate every single day of this long quarter-century," Kuby said. "He always maintained an optimism and a certain hope that this day was going to come for him."

The killing became a symbol of random violence in a city that was reeling from it, after the 1989 rape and beating of a woman known as the Central Park jogger and a spate of bloodshed in the summer of 1990. Watkins' death — one of a record-setting 2,245 in 1990, compared to 333 last year — brought a public plea from Watkins' family for better subway safety and helped prompt then-Mayor David Dinkins to propose a program designed to increase police protection.

Watkins, 22, and his parents were heading to dinner when they were jumped by a group of youths looking to rob people to get money to go to a nearby dance hall, police said. After his father was slashed and robbed of $200 and his mother was punched and kicked, Watkins was stabbed in the chest yet chased the attackers up two stairways before collapsing under a turnstile.

"Why did they do this to me?" he said, according to his father's testimony at the trial of Hincapie and several co-defendants. "We're just here to have a good time."

Hincapie, whose name is pronounced hihn-CAHP'-ee-ay, was one of seven young men convicted in the case. Another defendant was accused of actually stabbing Watkins, but authorities said the whole group bore responsibility for his death.

Hincapie, now 43, has long maintained he was in a different part of the subway station when the stabbing happened.

"I had nothing to do with this," he wrote in a 1990 letter to his lawyer at the time. "I am innocent."

After unsuccessfully appealing his conviction, Hincapie brought another challenge in 2013. It relied partly on a sworn statement from an exonerated co-defendant saying Hincapie played no part in the attack. A man who was convicted, and a witness who came forward only in the last two years, also said during the hearing that Hincapie wasn't involved, according to news reports.

Meanwhile, Hincapie testified that a detective beat him to get him to sign a confession.

The Manhattan district attorney's office said there was "no credible newly discovered evidence" in the case.

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Reach Jennifer Peltz on Twitter @ jennpeltz.

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