A man who spent nearly 10 years in prison after a jury convicted him of helping to set a 1978 fire that killed six firefighters in Brooklyn was acquitted last night in a retrial.
The second trial for the defendant, Eric Jackson-Knight, was ordered in 1988 when a judge threw out the original conviction, ruling that prosecutors had improperly withheld information from the defense.
The prosecutors at both trials maintained that Mr. Jackson-Knight had confessed to setting the fire, at a Waldbaum's supermarket in Sheepshead Bay. The defense at the first trial in 1980 held that he had confessed to having helped set another supermarket fire two years earlier in which nobody was injured. The defense at the second trial insisted that a detective had pressured Mr. Jackson-Knight into falsely incriminating himself.
The judge, in dismissing the conviction, said that the information withheld included a statement from a police arson detective to the prosecutors in the Brooklyn District Attorney's office that the Waldbaum's fire might not have been arson at all. And a fire marshal said that his statement to prosecutors that they had the wrong man also had not been given to the defense and thus had not been heard by the jury at the 1980 trial.
As the not-guilty verdicts on six murder counts were announced just before 10 last night -- after a two-week trial and seven hours of deliberations -- Mr. Jackson-Knight, a slender, sharp-featured 37-year-old, folded his hands prayerfully and appeared to be fighting back tears at the defense table in State
Supreme Court in Brooklyn.
"It feels like I'm being born again," he said minutes later, after Justice Gerald J. Beldock said he was free to go. He left the downtown Brooklyn courthouse clutching a red Bible.
"Right now I feel that the district attorney was vindictive in this prosecution," said Mr. Jackson-Knight, who is also known as Eric Jackson and Eric Knight. "I feel they had known from the beginning I was innocent."
12 Missing Years
He was free again for the first time in a year, since being arrested last summer for assault and attempted car theft, to which he pleaded guilty. In 1993 he was acquitted of charges that he raped and murdered a woman two years earlier.
"The Brooklyn District Attorney's office put this man in jail wrongfully for 12 years," Mr. Jackson-Knight's lawyer, Robert Sullivan, said, counting the time he spent in jail in the rape-murder case before that acquittal.
Mr. Sullivan said Mr. Jackson-Knight would now press a multimillion-dollar civil suit for wrongful prosecution in the Waldbaum's case.
The Waldbaum's case retrial was delayed six years by legal battles over the conviction's dismissal, creating one of the oldest unresolved cases in the city's courts. Mr. Jackson-Knight was 21 at the time of the Waldbaum's fire.
James Kohler, the Brooklyn deputy district attorney who headed the prosecution team in the retrial -- different prosecutors had handled the first trial -- said he was "disappointed but can't quarrel" with the verdict. "The jury had a tough question," he said.
Louise O'Connor, the wife of William O'Connor, one of the firefighters killed when a collapsing roof sent them tumbling into the inferno, held her head in her hands as the verdict was delivered. She was the only relative of the victims in the courtroom at the time and later she declined to comment.
Investigators Bicker
Most of the seven women and five men on the jury also did not comment later, but one said there had been "just too many negatives," in the prosecution's case.
The deadly blaze that spawned the protracted legal battle was discovered at 8:30 A.M. on Aug. 2, 1978, in the sprawling, hangar-like brick building at 2892 Ocean Avenue in Sheepshead Bay.
Those killed were Lieut. James Cutillo and Firefighters O'Connor, Charles Bouton, Harold Hastings, James McManus and George Rice.
The early investigation of the blaze was marked by public feuding between fire marshals and police arson investigators, who accused one another of incompetence and tampering with evidence.
The bickering caused the Brooklyn District Attorney at the time, Eugene Gold, to take over the inquiry. An informant eventually led investigators to Mr. Jackson-Knight, a resident of nearby Coney Island known to the police as a minor criminal.
Mr. Jackson-Knight was indicted on arson and murder charges in May 1979 while in jail for a burglary conviction. The authorities said he confessed that he had set the blaze on the Waldbaum's roof with two accomplices and that they had been paid $500 each by a middleman.
A Maximum Sentence
No one else was ever arrested in the case because there was insufficient evidence against those Mr. Jackson-Knight named, officials said at the time.
At his 1980 trial, Mr. Jackson-Knight's lawyer, John Corbett, argued that the confession was not to the Waldbaum's fire but to an arson-for-pay fire at a different store two years earlier, where there had been no injuries.
But after deliberating for only four hours, the jury convicted Mr. Jackson-Knight, and Justice Joseph Slavin sentenced him to the maximum of 25 years to life in prison.
But in 1988, after the current defense lawyer, Mr. Sullivan, persuaded the judge to reopen the case, Justice Slavin threw out the conviction and ordered the retrial, ruling that the prosecutors had improperly withheld from Mr. Corbett the material that could have helped bolster the defense.
Among that material were statements made to prosecutors before the trial by a police arson detective, who told them he believed the fire could have resulted from an electrical accident. The district attorney's office denied that the detective, Harold Dugan, had made such statements before the trial.
Witnesses Switch Sides
Testifying for the defense at the retrial, Mr. Dugan, now retired, said he did not tell the jury his theory at the 1980 trial, at which he testified for the prosecution. He said he was not given the opportunity.
The prosecution at the retrial sought to convince the jury that if Mr. Dugan had believed the fire was accidental, he would have conveyed this to the first jury.
Also appearing for the defense at the retrial, after testifying for the prosecution in 1980, was Charles King, supervising fire marshal in the inquiry. He said he had told prosecutors before the first trial that he thought Mr. Jackson-Knight was the wrong man but, similarly, had not been given a chance to tell this to the first jury.
Lawyer Becomes Convinced
Mr. Sullivan had taken on Mr. Jackson-Knight's case through an unusual route. He had represented firefighters injured in the Waldbaum's blaze and the families of those killed in a civil suit in which they won $13.5 million from Waldbaum's, the city and contractors who were working to expand the store at the time of the fire.
"In preparing for the civil trial I read the entire criminal transcript," he said, and became convinced that Mr. Jackson-Knight was not guilty.
Although Justice Slavin ordered Mr. Jackson-Knight freed in 1988 pending the retrial, the defendant has since been in and out of jail in other cases.
The cases included an arrest in January 1992 on charges of raping and murdering a homeless woman on Coney Island. He was acquitted of these charges in May 1993 and released. But within a few months, he tried to steal a car and stole property from another car, and he recently finished serving most of a one-year sentence for his guilty plea to those crimes. He was unable to post newly set bail of $50,000 in the Waldbaum's case and stayed in jail after his auto-crimes sentence ended.
