“I was prejudiced during the trial. I realized I made a terrible mistake and there was a man in jail because of my mistake.”
Donald Kagan
Retired Brooklyn Supreme Court Judge Frank Barbaro wants a white man he convicted in 1999 of killing a black man to be freed — claiming Wednesday he based the verdict on his own reverse racism. The 86-year-old former jurist convicted Donald Kagan, now 39, of fatally shooting Wavell Wint, 22, during a struggle over Kagan’s chain outside an East New York movie theater in 1998.
But Barbaro told a court that, because of his viewpoint as a civil-rights activist, he didn’t consider a justification defense by Kagan in the nonjury trial.
“Mr. Kagan had no intent to kill that man . . . I believe now that I was seeing this young white fellow as a bigot, as someone who assassinated an African-American,” Barbaro, a former longshoreman who also served 23 years in the state Assembly, told Brooklyn Supreme Court Justice ShawnDya Simpson.
Barbaro said he contacted Kagan’s attorneys after some deep soul-searching led him to realize he had denied Kagan a fair trial.
“I never took it out of my mind. I started reading in the papers that lots of defendants were sent to death or life in prison but were subsequently exonerated. Reading those stories began to affect me,” Barbaro said.
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