CLEVELAND — More than 30 years after he was convicted of murder, Dwayne Brooks is hoping the discovery of recently-uncovered police reports are his ticket to freedom.
Brooks was convicted of the August 1987 shooting in Cleveland's Luke Easter Park that killed Clinton Arnold and wounded two other men.
Brooks was sentenced to 25 years to life prison.
Now, attorneys for Brooks want a new trial, arguing that potentially exculpatory evidence was withheld from defense attorneys when the case went to trial in 1988.
According to court filings in the case, that evidence includes police reports revealing a witness put two other men in the van used in the shooting and that a witness who identified Brooks as the shooter was, himself, under FBI investigation.
On Friday, defense attorney Gordon Friedman who represented Brooks at trial said he did not see those police reports until last year.
Friedman testified in a hearing on Brooks' motion for a new trial.
"It was exculpatory and very useful to the defense," said Friedman. "It was also information that we did not have."
Today, that information likely would have been shared with defense attorneys as part of the discovery process.
But the lead prosecutor on the case at the time described the discovery in 1988 as archaic and said he was just following office policy by not turning over the reports.
"The defendants were not permitted to receive the written discovery and we were to go through the file and basically read the reports to the defense council," said John Ricotta.
Ricotta testified he couldn't recall specifics about sharing the information with Brooks' defense team at the time.
Judge William McGinty said a decision as to whether to grant Brooks a new trial likely will not come until January 2023.
