 Keith Graves and his mother, Ponchita DuPree.
The men herded the 16 customers and employees into the basement, ordered them to strip, and to hand over cash and other valuables. One of these men placed many of the victims in a cage-like area. Several people heard this man apologize for his actions; he said he had a wife and four children and “this is what crack does to you.”
One of the other men came to the basement and grabbed one of the women. She would later say he took her upstairs where she was raped and sexually assaulted by him and another man.
The men left the bar at about 2:30 a.m., with several thousand dollars in cash and jewelry.
Officers with the Philadelphia Police Department investigated the crime. Most of the victims said there had been three perpetrators, including the man near the entrance, although a few said there were four. Several customers quickly identified a regular at the bar named Todd White as the inside man. He was arrested on July 31, 2001.
Several victims also identified Takay Taylor, who had been in the bar earlier that night and on prior occasions, as one of the robbers. A woman known in court papers as L.V. identified Takay Taylor and White as the men who sexually assaulted her.
Taylor had an older brother, 32-year-old David Taylor, and the two men had been investigated a week earlier regarding an unrelated assault. Although no charges were filed in that case, the police prepared photo arrays that included David Taylor and showed them to seven of the victims of the Ten Spot robbery. Two of the victims, Joseph DeJesus and Vincent Rizzo, identified Taylor as one of the assailants. The other five victims shown the array did not make an identification.
The police issued arrest warrants for the Taylor brothers on August 1, 2001. David Taylor went to the police station and gave a statement. He said that on the night of the robbery, he was at a bar near his home, about two miles west of the Ten Spot. He gave the police the names of friends and family who could attest to his whereabouts and said he had never been to the Ten Spot. Asked if he had anything else to add to his statement, Taylor said, “Only that I didn’t do anything. I came here to clear my name.”
The police arrested Taylor that day, charging him with a wide range of crimes, including rape, involuntary deviate sexual intercourse, possessing an instrument of crime, criminal conspiracy, robbery and theft. Takay Taylor was arrested in January 2002.
The identity of the fourth man—the one with the wife and kids—remained a mystery.
During the initial investigation, a bartender named Dana DeLucia said that one of the robbers had a deep voice and sounded like a customer she knew as “Tino.” She said her confidence level was about 7 out of 10.
Tino was the nickname of 36-year-old Keith Graves, who lived in southern New Jersey but frequented the Ten Spot.
Separately, police interviewed William Fiorillo, who lived across the street from the bar and saw some men congregating outside the Ten Spot before the robbery. He said he saw White with this group. The police asked him if he knew any of the others. Fiorillo said he didn’t, but he had heard from several of the victims, including DeLucia, that Tino was one of the male voices. Later, Fiorillo told police that Tino was with White at the nearby bus stop.
A detective asked Fiorillo to describe Tino. Fiorillo said Tino was a light-skinned Black man with hazel eyes, about 6’2” and 250 pounds, with caramel color hair, no facial hair, and a tattoo on his right forearm. (At the time, Graves had brown eyes, brown hair, medium complexion, a mustache and a goatee, but no tattoos.)
In the hours after the robbery, the police also interviewed Micheline Medica and William DeJesus. Medica, an employee, had met Graves a month earlier, when she threw him out of the bar. DeJesus was one of the managers and had known Graves for about 15 years. In these first interviews, neither Medica nor DeJesus mentioned Graves or gave a description of the fourth man that resembled Graves.
The police interviewed Medica three days later, on July 31. She identified two of the suspects but gave no indication that Graves was present.
DeJesus gave similar statements to the police. He had been seated near the front door and saw the men enter the bar. He identified two of the suspects on July 31 but also made no mention of Graves. The fourth man, he said, weighed about 200 pounds, far less than Graves.
On August 10, the police asked Medica and DeJesus to look at an array of eight photos, which included a photo of Graves, in a supposed effort to confirm that “Tino” was Graves. They each confirmed that fact and then made a tentative voice identification of Graves as one of the robbers. Medica also now said that she had seen Graves outside the bar, with White and Takay Taylor, about 20 minutes prior to the robbery.
Police arrested Graves on August 12, 2001, charging him with numerous counts of robbery, along with charges of rape, sexual assault, and weapons possession.
Takay Taylor pleaded guilty to his charges, but he did not agree to testify against his three co-defendants, who were tried together in the Philadelphia County Court of Common Pleas in September 2002.
There was no physical or forensic evidence connecting Graves, White, or David Taylor to the robbery or sexual assault. DNA test results showed that Takay Taylor was a contributor to the genetic material found on L.V.’s stomach and shirt. Graves, White, and David Taylor were excluded as contributors to that genetic material.
DeLucia testified about telling the police that one of the robbers “sounded like” Graves. She also said that she wasn’t sure whether it was Graves or Takay Taylor who was “rambling on” about having a wife and kids. DeLucia also said that she saw Graves at the bar at 9 p.m., a few hours before the robbery. None of the other persons at the bar mentioned seeing Graves then.
DeJesus testified that he placed himself at the bar so he could see everyone who entered the Ten Spot. On cross-examination, he said he never saw Graves enter the bar. He said that he failed to identify Graves twice to the police because, “I didn’t recognize him at first.”
Medica testified that she heard Graves’s voice from the back of the bar, while she was in the front, lying on the floor. She said there was a lot of “noise and screaming,” and it was “difficult at that point in time to figure out exactly what was going on and who was saying what.”
She testified on cross-examination that she did not think the voice from the back of the bar was Tino’s when she first heard it, but on redirect said she recognized the voice right away.
Medica testified consistent with her statement that she saw Graves and the others outside the bar about 20 minutes before the robbery. But other witnesses undercut that account, testifying that Medica was already inside the bar. Medica then testified that she actually saw the men three hours before the robbery, when she arrived at the bar.
Medica also testified that her failure to initially identify Graves was an honest mistake. She said that if “[she] screwed up on descriptions a little bit, it’s because we were traumatized.”
During their testimony, DeJesus and Medica each acknowledged that they had made false identifications in this case, selecting persons from the lineups who were indisputably innocent.
Fiorillo worked occasionally at the bar, and he testified that he had met Graves three or four times previously. He said that just before the robbery, he had looked out his apartment window and had seen White and the three other defendants on the street below. (At a preliminary hearing, Fiorillo did not identify David Taylor as being in the group.) He also testified that he saw Graves in the entryway of a nearby store.
Vincent Rizzo, the bar’s owner, testified that he did not identify Graves as one of the robbers either by sight or by voice.
Similarly, L.V. and a bartender named Michelle Martines testified that they didn’t see Graves or recognize his voice.
White testified, claiming that he was also a victim. He also said that neither Graves nor David Taylor was present.
Graves did not testify. His attorney had filed an alibi defense prior to trial, based on statements from Graves’s sister and mother that he was home with them in New Jersey at the time of the robbery. But neither witness testified.
Four witnesses testified either to seeing David Taylor take part in the robbery or to being near the bar prior to the robbery.
Although Fiorillo said he saw David Taylor outside the bar before the robbery, he also said it was so dark that he couldn’t tell what the men were wearing. He was also unable to make a courtroom identification. In addition, at a preliminary hearing, Fiorillo failed to identify David Taylor as one of the men outside the bar and also mistakenly confused him with his brother.
Rizzo testified that he saw David Taylor before the robbery and that he was wearing a gray outfit. At the preliminary hearing, Rizzo had said Taylor was wearing black. He would later acknowledge that he did not know what Taylor was wearing. Rizzo had been hit in the head with a shotgun several times during the robbery, and during a photo lineup he had picked a filler as one of the gunmen.
DeJesus testified that he saw David Taylor at the bar and handed him a beer. He also testified that he previously told detectives that he had seen Taylor before the robbery. That wasn’t correct, and the state had to stipulate that DeJesus testified incorrectly. DeJesus had identified both Taylor brothers from photo arrays three days after the robbery. Two months later, during a live lineup, DeJesus failed to identify David Taylor and chose a filler.
DeJesus also testified that he had been hit several times with a shotgun and had suffered a mild concussion that left him “woozy.”
L.V. testified that Taylor had been next to her at the bar prior to the robbery. She had not looked at a photo array, and during the live lineup, she picked a filler, rather than Taylor. In her statement, L.V. had described the man next to her at the bar as 5’6” and 140 pounds, with “medium brown skin.” Taylor was 5’11”, 150 pounds, with a dark complexion.
Judge Teresa Sarmina told the jury members during her instructions that they should view the witness identifications against Taylor with caution.
Taylor did not testify, and his attorney, Edward Meehan, presented no evidence.
During closing arguments, the prosecutor urged jurors to look past the gaps in the witness identifications, including the selection of the filler during the lineup. He said nothing about Taylor’s role in the crime but said the jury should find him guilty because he was the “brother of the known rapist.”
The jury convicted Graves, White, and David Taylor on September 24, 2002. Graves and Taylor were each convicted of 13 robbery counts, along with rape, involuntary deviate sexual intercourse, conspiracy, and weapons possession. White was convicted on similar charges.
At a sentencing hearing on November 13, 2002, Graves received a sentence of 41 to 105 years in prison. Taylor received a sentence of 11 to 30 years in prison. At the hearing, White again asserted that David Taylor and Graves weren’t present. Takay Taylor said at the hearing that his brother and Graves weren’t involved; he said a man named James Lewis had taken part in the robbery.
During a post-sentence motion for a new trial, Graves’s attorney, Marit Anderson, told Judge Sarmina that she had heard from several sources about Lewis’s involvement. In addition, the attorney said that records from the Philadelphia Housing Authority showed that Lewis lived about three miles away with his wife and four children. This appeared to match the statements made by one of the robbers. (Graves and Taylor each had two children but had never been married.)
Anderson also said she had told prosecutors about Lewis prior to the trial. Because the evidence was hearsay, it was not presented to the jury. After the trial, Anderson interviewed Takay Taylor and White. Both implicated Lewis. She and a colleague then wrote to prosecutors and asked them to investigate further.
Prosecutors then told Graves’s attorney that they had found a handwritten note in police files referring to Lewis and Takay Taylor. The note listed Lewis’s address and its proximity to the residences of the Taylors and White. Police had considered Lewis a suspect and submitted his fingerprints for testing against prints lifted from the crime scene. The results were inconclusive, as they were for the other four men, and there was no further investigation.
Later, after Graves’s trial, investigators interviewed Lewis in jail, where he was awaiting trial on drug charges. He confirmed the address for his family but said he wasn’t involved in the robbery. He also said at the time of the crime he was living with a friend named John White.
Based on this information, Graves moved for a new trial, which was denied by Judge Sarmina in 2003.
Graves appealed. On May 11, 2005, the Pennsylvania Superior Court affirmed the convictions for the robbery and related charges but threw out the convictions for rape and sexual assault. The case was remanded for resentencing, and on May 19, 2006, Judge Sarmina resentenced Graves to between 23½ to 65 years in prison.
Taylor’s convictions for the sexual assault crimes were also thrown out in 2006, but his prison sentence did not change.
On January 5, 2007, Graves filed a motion for a new trial under Pennsylvania’s Post-Conviction Relief Act (PCRA). The motion said Anderson had been ineffective for not trying to suppress the identifications made by DeJesus and Medica. It also said that Anderson should have called Takay Taylor to testify and didn’t adequately cross-examine Fiorillo to highlight the discrepancies between his description of Graves and Graves’s actual appearance. The motion also said that the state had withheld exculpatory evidence regarding its investigation into Lewis as an alternate suspect.
In an affidavit accompanying the petition, Anderson said that she should have tried to suppress the identifications. She also said, “I realized at trial that the description Mr. Fiorillo had given at a lineup was useful for impeachment, but I forgot to question him about it when he was on the stand and was not permitted to bring it out later.”
Judge Sarmina denied the motion on November 9, 2007. The Pennsylvania Superior Court affirmed the ruling on May 14, 2009.
A year later, on April 8, 2010, Graves raised these same issues in a petition for a writ of habeas corpus filed in U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania.
On February 28, 2013, Magistrate Judge Carol Wells recommended the petition be denied. She said that federal standards required deference to the state court rulings unless there was clear and convincing evidence that they were in error.
She agreed with Judge Sarmina’s ruling that the police information about Lewis wasn’t exculpatory. “The police concluded that Lewis was not a perpetrator; hence, the undisclosed information could not have been used to exculpate [Graves] or to impeach any witness,” she wrote. A federal judge adopted Wells’s recommendations on June 9, 2014.
In 2015, Graves told his attorneys that he had been approached by John White when they were at State Correctional Institution (SCI) Frackville. According to Graves, White said that he was supposed to rob the Ten Spot with Takay Taylor, Todd White, and Lewis, but he ended up taking a Xanax and falling asleep. Leonard Sosnov, one of Graves’s attorneys, interviewed White, who repeated his information.
Sosnov then filed a new PCRA petition, asserting that White’s statements were new evidence of innocence. Prior to an evidentiary hearing, White said he was concerned about possible exposure to new charges and retaliation from Lewis or his associates. At the hearing, White confirmed that he and Lewis were roommates in 2001 but said the rest of his interview with Sosnov was false.
On June 16, 2017, Judge Sarmina dismissed the petition as untimely, because Graves had known about Lewis and White for years. (Affirming Judge Sarmina’s ruling, the Pennsylvania Superior Court said, “The burden was on Graves to establish his due diligence in discovering this information, and there is simply no evidence of any diligence whatsoever from 2003 until 2015, when White approached Graves in prison.”)
Two weeks after her ruling, Judge Sarmina emailed the Conviction Integrity (CIU) of the Philadelphia County District Attorney’s Office and urged it to reinvestigate the case. She stood by her decision, she wrote, “but that does not mean that perhaps [Graves] is not guilty.”
Five years later, the CIU began a reinvestigation, combing through police and prosecutorial records. It concluded there was strong evidence supporting Lewis’s role in the robbery and little to suggest Grave’s involvement.
The CIU noted that Lewis lived near White and the Taylors, while Graves lived in New Jersey. It also said there was no evidence that Graves had ever associated with his co-defendants. There were also the statements of White and Takay Taylor, along with the problems with the witness identifications.
On January 4, 2024, CIU prosecutors interviewed Lewis at SCI Dallas. Asked whether he knew Graves, Lewis said he had met Graves once at a prison in Philadelphia. Lewis said he knew about the robbery at the Ten Spot. According to the CIU, Lewis was asked whether Graves was present during the robbery. Lewis hesitated, concerned about incriminating himself. The CIU attorneys gave him a letter that said he would not be prosecuted for any statements he made. Without looking at or signing the letter, Lewis stated, “I know Tino wasn’t there because I was there.”
Lewis, whom the prosecutors noted had a deep voice, then gave a detailed account of the robbery, and the roles that he, Todd White and Takay Taylor played. His account also included no mention of David Taylor. Lewis said he was sorry for the time Graves had spent in prison, and he asked the prosecutors to apologize to Graves on his behalf.
The CIU gave this information to Graves’s attorneys, including David Rudovsky, who filed a new PCRA petition on January 23, 2024. In its response on April 4, 2024, prosecutors asked the court to vacate Graves’s convictions and then to dismiss his charges. The response said that Lewis’s confession was new evidence of innocence and that the state “would not rely on the evidence used at trial to convict Graves today.”
Judge Scott DiClaudio granted the motion on May 22, 2024, and Graves was freed.
Nehemiah Young-Graves had only ever seen his father in prison. He told the Philadelphia Inquirer: “Seeing my dad in the facility my entire life, and only really being able to hug him when I was little, it’s like a faint memory in my head. So this is something big.”
Taylor had also fought his conviction for more than 20 years. His initial appeal, filed by his trial attorney, was dismissed over a docketing error. Taylor then filed a pro se petition for post-conviction relief. He was appointed an attorney who filed a letter with the courts saying that he could not find any issues of merit to raise.
Taylor received a copy of the letter and wrote to Judge Sarmina, raising the issue of ineffective assistance, based in part on the failure of his trial attorney to call his alibi witnesses.
Judge Sarmina did not accept the appellate attorney’s letter. At an evidentiary hearing, five of Taylor’s alibi witnesses testified that Taylor was with them at the R&R Lounge. His trial attorney also testified and said that although he believed Taylor was innocent and dragged into the case because of his brother, Taylor had never provided him with the names of his alibi witnesses.
Judge Sarmina asked Taylor why he had not told her at the end of his trial that he wanted his attorney to call his alibi witnesses.
Taylor said, “Because Mr. Meehan told me that we [were] going to win the case on identification.”
“So that was your strategy, then?” Sarmina asked.
“That was his strategy, yes. He’s a paid lawyer. My family paid [their] hard-earned money to let him have the case, and that’s what he was going on. And I had my faith in him.”
In 2010, 2011, and 2014, Taylor filed petitions for relief that asserted his innocence, but the courts denied his motions. He was hampered in part by the number of defendants and the vagueness of the witness statements, which appeared to lead to mistakes in the state’s responses. At trial, for example, the state’s theory was that Takay Taylor and Graves forced the victims to disrobe, but in a post-conviction brief, the state said it was David Taylor.
Two days after Graves’s exoneration, Taylor’s attorney, Jennifer Merrigan, with the Phillips Black law firm, filed a new motion to vacate Taylor’s conviction. The motion said that Lewis’s statements, the basis of Graves’s exoneration, had made clear that only three people were involved: Lewis, Todd White, and Takay Taylor.
David Taylor’s wrongful conviction, the motion said, was a result of “wavering and tenuous cross-racial eyewitness identifications.” All the witnesses who identified Taylor were white. Several of the robbery victims were Black, and none of them identified Taylor, the motion said.
The motion noted that the evidence against Taylor was weaker than that used to convict Graves, who was known to several victims of the robbery.
In its response, filed September 24, 2024, the state agreed that Taylor should receive a new trial. It said the evidence against Taylor had been thin. The response noted that Judge Sarmina had instructed the jury on the problems with the witness identifications, and none of the witnesses could say what Taylor was actually doing during the robbery and related assault.
On October 16, 2024, Judge Scott DiClaudio granted the motion to vacate the convictions and a separate motion to dismiss the charges against Taylor. He was released from prison that day.
Merrigan said in a statement: “David’s children, mother, aunts, uncles and cousins were thrilled to welcome him home. They have stood by his side for decades, maintaining his innocence, at trial and through post-conviction.”
– Ken Otterbourg
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