Wrongfully Accused 81-Year-Old Man Exonerated For The Murder He Did Not Commit 50 Years Down The Line

Paul Gatling, 81, who was wrongfully accused of the murder of a Crown Heights artist over 50 years ago, has finally been exonerated for the crime. Back in 1963, Gatling was pressured to plead guilty to the crime to avoid the death sentence.

A couple of years ago, Gatling, who is a retired landscaper in Virginia, spotted an article in the local newspaper about the Brooklyn District Attorney’s efforts to identify wrongful convictions. He then sent a letter to the District Attorney’s office to ask them to review his case.

Brooklyn DA Ken Thompson of the Conviction Review Unit investigated the case after receiving the letter from Gatling and determined he was deprived of a fair trial.

Gatling was finally headed to the Brooklyn Supreme Court on Monday afternoon to have his conviction for the shooting death of Lawrence Rothbort overturned by Justice Dineen Riviezzo.

DA corrects a wrongful murder conviction 52 years later & the Legal Aid lawyer who won his 1974 release is there. https://t.co/wrnLjH5Yht

— Tom Robbins (@tommy_robb) May 2, 2016

In court, Gatling said he couldn’t tell them of the pain he had suffered through being wrongfully accused and imprisoned. What upset him the most was the fact he could not vote, due to laws barring convicted felons from casting ballots.

Gatling fought in the Korean War and told the court, “You got to understand, I come from a family that is civically [sic] involved, and this has stopped me from voting.”

While the two shook hands, Prosecutor Mark Hale of the Conviction Review Unit apologized to Gatling for the errors made by the District Attorney’s office.

“These look like charges that should never have even been brought,” Hale said. “He was subject to some of the worst violations of due process that we have ever seen. For that reason, the people of the District Attorney’s office humbly and profoundly apologize.”

Thompson went on to explain in a statement how the wrongfully accused man had been pressured to plead guilty and said that, sadly, the 81-year-old did not receive justice in Brooklyn, a place he once called home.

81-Year-Old Man Exonerated 52 Years After His Wrongful Murder Conviction https://t.co/07myeKn2PD

— Benjamin Crump, Esq. (@AttorneyCrump) May 2, 2016

The shooting of Rothbort, 43, who was an abstract painter known as the American Van Gogh, happened in front of his wife Marlene and their two children, a 6-year-old boy and an infant daughter, in their Crown Heights home on October 15, 1963.

Reportedly, Marlene Rothbort told police at the time that an armed “negro” man had broken into their home, demanding money and shot her husband with a shotgun when he refused to hand it over. A month later, a police informant, reportedly a felon named Grady Reaves, placed Gatling outside the Rothbort’s home on Bedford Avenue on the day of the shooting.

Gatling was subsequently taken into custody and tried for the crime, despite the fact the widow was unable to pick him out of a lineup and with a lack of physical evidence. Reportedly, Gatling is 6-foot-tall and when Marlene Rothbort was viewing the lineup, detectives directed her to focus on “the tall one.”

According to the New York Times, police had also failed to inform Gatling’s defense that Rothbort’s wife had confessed to having an affair and she had been overheard to say she would kill her husband if he ever hit her again.

On top of this, and despite Gatling persistently claiming his innocence, his lawyer had convinced him to plead guilty to murder, as he otherwise would face the death penalty.

As reported by DNAInfo, at the trial, Gatling was sentenced to 30 years in prison for second-degree murder. Gatling later asked the judge to withdraw his plea, but his petition was denied.

Eventually in 1973, Malvina Nathanson, a young Legal Aid lawyer, sent a report on Gatling’s case to Governor Nelson Rockefeller, who commuted Gatling’s sentence. He was released in 1974.

Nathanson was also in court and, visibly moved, said, “It’s restored my enthusiasm.”

“It’s been a lot of years.”

Reportedly, Gatling’s case is the 20th conviction to be dropped in the last two years by the Conviction Review Unit, which has 100 more cases still pending review.

[Photo via Flickr by Penn State, cropped and resized/CC BY-NC-ND 2.0]