'Egregious' Constitutional Violations: Queens Man Sues NYPD, City

FLUSHING, QUEENS — On the morning of May 10, 1997, Robert Majors agreed to drive his brother-in-law, Aaron Boone, to the train station, a decision that resulted in 22 years of incarceration for a crime he did not commit.

After getting to Boone’s house, Majors put his brother-in-law’s duffel bag in the back of his car, and, noticing that it was unusually heavy, unzipped the bag to find that it was full of guns.

“I didn’t know he [Boone] would give me a bag of guns,” Majors told WNBC years later from behind the walls of Green Haven Correctional Facility, a maximum security prison in New York where he was incarcerated at the time. “I didn’t knowingly possess those guns,” he said.

As the men were driving to the train station, police had already used forensic evidence to connect Boone with a bloody armed robbery, which — unbeknownst to Majors — he and two other men carried out the day before in Flushing, a new lawsuit contends.

Police, who were following the car and arrested both men after Majors tried to get rid of the gun-filled duffel bag, used the weapons to falsely connect Majors with the armed robbery — prompting his decades-long incarceration, despite an alibi and credible, written evidence that he wasn’t involved in the crime, which police and prosecutors suppressed, according to the suit recently filed against the city and a group of NYPD detectives.

In May 2020, Judge John Latella, who found Majors guilty for murder, robbery, and weapons charges in 2001, dropped his murder and robbery convictions when Majors shared a handwritten note from a police informant who named someone else as the crime’s third suspect, records show.

Police and Queens prosecutors had known about, and concealed, the note for 21 years, according to the lawsuit.

The judge found that failing to disclose evidence showing that Majors wasn’t involved in the 1997 attack violated his constitutional rights under the U.S. Supreme Court case Brady v. Maryland, which requires the prosecution to give the defense all evidence that could prove a defendant’s innocence — known as Brady information.

“My name wasn’t on it,” Majors told WNBC of the letter that eventually gained him his freedom. “It’s hard to believe that I would even be in here for this amount of time for something I didn’t do.”

The NYPD told Patch that they wouldn’t comment on pending litigation.

The crime and investigation

Around 10:30 a.m. on May 9, 1997, a day before Majors’ fateful car ride with Boone, his brother-in-law and two other men, later identified as Bernard Johnson and a third undetermined member of the SpeedStick gang, ambushed a pair of payroll shipment guards in Flushing, stealing about $80,000 and leaving the guards — a retired police officer and an off-duty detective — with more than a dozen bullet wounds, reports show.

Rudy Giuliani, who was the city’s mayor at the time, told reporters that “given the brutality and viciousness of the attack… it’s remarkable that [the guards] have a chance to survive” — which both did.

After the violent robbery, the three men drove away through the northeast Queens streets in a van, which promptly got a flat tire about a mile away. The trio jumped on a New York City bus, abandoning the van in front of an apartment building, and completed their escape, records show.

Hours later police identified Boone’s fingerprints in the getaway van, which led to his arrest the following day, according to the suit.

When he and his brother-in-law were taken into the 109 police precinct, however, Boone admitted that he was guilty of the attack and that Majors wasn’t involved.

“I asked him if his brother-in-law was involved yesterday. He stated ‘no’ and had not done anything other than to do him a favor by taking his bag,” the suit reads, quoting what Boone told detectives John Gillen and Michael Sapraicone — the latter who is named as a defendant in Majors’ suit against the NYPD.

This confession did not deter police detectives, however, who spent about a half hour repeatedly hitting Majors in the ribs, while he was handcuffed to a chair, trying to get him to confess to the shooting, according to the lawsuit.

When Major gave a statement that he didn’t have anything to do with the crime, adding that he was at a chiropractor appointment during the shooting, detective Paul Heider, another NYPD defendant named in the suit, told him “you’re going upstate anyways,” according to the lawsuit.

Investigative detectives found Majors’ appointment card, which showed that he was at Dr. Carol Schuster’s chiropractic office 6.3 miles away from the shooting at the time of the attack, but did not take a “single step” to investigate his alibi or speak with the doctor, records show.

The lawsuit contends that prosecutors used faulty evidence in their case against Majors, including “inconsistent” eyewitness testimony and unrelated phone calls between Major and Boone’s homes.

Police also “fabricated” a confession of Majors’ involvement in the crime, according to the suit, by subjecting Johnson, one of the crime’s perpetrators, to 30 hours of “unlawful” interrogation, including threats and sleep deprivation, after which he reversed his initial statement of Majors’ innocence.

The bulk of the suit, however, centers on police and prosecutors’ attempt to conceal evidence of Majors’ innocence.

A violation of Majors’ constitutional rights

11 days after Majors’ arrest, Kevin McKinney, a police informant who was possibly involved in the shooting, gave a detailed, handwritten affidavit, which said that Johnson, and another man known as “Rasheed” committed the crime, records show. He also named Ammon Boone, Aaron Boone’s brother, as a member of the SpeedStick gang.

McKinney did not name Majors as involved in the crime, according to the suit.

McKinney’s affidavit, which included a detailed account of the attack — down to the amount of money that was stolen, which the media incorrectly reported — was what the Police Department and Queens DA used to justify arresting Johnson, records show.

Prosecutors, however, did not disclose the affidavit to Majors’ counsel, and the affidavit did not prompt detectives to investigate Rasheed or Ammon’s involvement in the case — even though Ammon’s fingerprints were found in the getaway van, according to the suit.

Suppressing the McKinney statement, the lawsuit contends, amounts to prosecutorial and police misconduct.

In 2019 the Queens DA office turned the affidavit over to Majors, after a change in the law required them to give him the statement even though it wasn’t entered as evidence at trial — since detective Heider referred to it as a “conversation” he had with McKinney as a means of concealing the written affidavit, according to the suit.

At that time, the DA’s office insisted that prospectors turned the document over freely, even though the office previously denied Majors’ ten Freedom of Information requests and appeals to access the statement, WNBC reported.

The Queens DA’s omission of Brady information in Majors’ case, however, is not out of the ordinary at the office, according to the suit.

‘Win at all costs’ culture

Throughout the 1990s and 2000s the DA’s office fostered a “win at all costs” culture that led to “egregious” prosecutorial misconduct and violated the rights of criminal defendants — including Majors, according to the suit.

In the 10 years before Majors’ conviction, New York State and federal courts reversed convictions at least 52 times because Queens trial prosecutors suppressed Brady information, the suit claims.

The suit also cites a survey compiled by the DA’s office in 1996, which found nearly 40 other instances where the office committed misconduct.

Barry Schwartz, who was the Chief Assistant District Attorney at the time of the survey, testified that he has no memory of the agency “taking any kind of action in response” to the misconduct findings, according to the suit.

Similarly, none of the prosecutors mentioned in the suit, who committed Brady-related violations, were disciplined in any way, records show.

By contrast they were rewarded with promotions and salary increases, according to the lawsuit.

The Queens DA’s office did not immediately respond to Patch’s request for comment.