| At around 2:30 a.m. on August 11, 2013, a person fired a gun at a group of teenagers in the Morrisania section of the Bronx, New York. No one was hit or injured.
Officers Stephen Lopez and Christopher Lopez with the New York Police Department had been patrolling the neighborhood at the time of the incident. The officers would later testify that they saw a man raise a weapon and fire, then drop the gun and run. (Records don’t indicate whether the Lopezes are related.)
The officers said they gave chase, initially lost the man, then located him a few minutes, and made an arrest.
A 911 call about the shooting described the gunman as a Black man about 25 years old and clean-shaven. The man the police arrested, Clarence Rouse, was 38 years old with a beard.
Rouse was charged with attempted murder, weapons possession, and illegal use of a firearm. Police had recovered the weapon before Rouse’s arrest, but they didn’t test the gun for fingerprints or DNA. In addition, Rouse’s hands were never tested for the presence of gunshot residue.
Rouse went to trial in Bronx County Supreme Court in April 2015.
Prior to trial, prosecutors moved to limit the cross-examination of the two officers regarding past allegations of misconduct and untruthfulness. Stephen Lopez had been disciplined for his involvement in a ticket-fixing scandal in the Bronx, and the credibility of the two officers had also come under scrutiny in a federal gun case in 2011 that began with a questionable traffic stop. The judge in that case had suppressed much of the state’s evidence after ruling that Stephen Lopez dissembled in his hearing testimony about his involvement in the ticket-fixing scandal and that Christopher Lopez’s testimony at the same hearing about the events that led to the traffic stop was not credible.
At Rouse’s trial, Justice Hubert James ruled that his attorney could question Stephen Lopez about the ticket-fixing scandal but not about his testimony at the federal hearing. Justice James also ruled that Christopher Lopez could not be cross-examined about the federal judge’s findings regarding his credibility.
Both officers testified at the trial about the shooting and Rouse’s arrest. The jury convicted Rouse of the charges on April 23, 2015. He was later sentenced to 18 years in prison.
Rouse appealed, arguing there was insufficient evidence to convict and that Justice James had improperly narrowed his ability to cross-examine the police witnesses. The Supreme Court’s Appellate Division affirmed the conviction on March 20, 2018.
Rouse appealed to the New York Court of Appeals. On November 25, 2019, the Court of Appeals ordered a new trial, agreeing that Justice James’s rulings had harmed Rouse’s right to a fair trial.
“In this case we recognize that, much as a lay witness may be subject to cross-examination with respect to acts of dishonesty not proven at trial, so too may a law enforcement witness be impeached through such questioning,” the court wrote.
The appeals court noted that the state’s case relied on the testimony of the officers. Nothing tied Rouse to the recovered weapon.
“Given the nature of this case—in which defendant is linked to the crimes only through the testimony of the subject officers—the court’s evidentiary error in precluding cross-examination of areas of dishonesty that have material relevance with respect to a witness's credibility is not harmless,” the court wrote.
Rouse was released from prison on February 3, 2020. The state dismissed the case on February 18, 2022.
On January 17, 2023, Rouse filed a federal civil-rights lawsuit against the two officers and the City of New York, seeking compensation for his wrongful conviction. The lawsuit said the officers pistol-whipped Rouse after his arrest, an injury that required surgical staples and a trip to the hospital. After the beating, the lawsuit said, the officers framed Rouse for the shooting and failed to follow proper evidentiary protocols in processing the recovered weapon.
“As a result, exculpatory evidence was effectively destroyed due to the Defendants’ actions and inactions, and such actions and inactions were intended to, and did in fact, cover up the severe beating and illegal arrest of an innocent man,” the lawsuit said.
Rouse settled the lawsuit in December 2023 for $1,680,000.
– Ken Otterbourg
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