Wrongly convicted Bozella gets a bout at age 52

Walking down the street in Poughkeepsie, N.Y., on an otherwise nondescript summer day in 1977, 18-year-old Dewey Bozella was about to be robbed. What was taken from him was far greater than the value of the personal effects he was carrying.

Bozella was robbed of his freedom, of his chance to have a family, of the opportunity to fulfill a dream. He would be robbed of his life as he knew it.

He was, in his own words “no angel” 34 years ago, but he blanched when he heard the words the police officers who arrested him spoke. Bozella was charged with the murder of 92-year-old Emma Crapser, beginning a decades-long ordeal that resulted in him spending 26 years imprisoned for a crime he did not commit.

“I was not,” he said firmly, “a goodie goodie. No way. I’ll admit that. I had my issues. I was no angel. I got high, did some things on the street I’m not proud of today. But I was no murderer. Murder? No. No way. That made me sick just to hear it.”

As sick as it made him, however, Bozella steadfastly refused to speak the one word that could have gotten him released from prison and allowed him to resume his life: Guilty.

Now 52, Bozella is about to embark on a professional boxing career, fighting a four-round cruiserweight bout against Larry Hopkins on Saturday at Staples Center in Los Angeles on the undercard of the HBO Pay-Per-View show featuring a light heavyweight title fight between Bernard Hopkins and Chad Dawson.

Bozella harbors no illusions of becoming a full-time boxer, though he insists he would have been a world champion had he not spent his prime years at Sing Sing Correctional Facility in Ossining, N.Y. He’s fighting because it’s one of those bucket list things he wanted to do while he is still physically capable.

Bozella was released in the fall of 1977 four months after he was arrested when a grand jury failed to indict him for Crapser’s murder because of a lack of evidence. The only evidence then was the testimony of brothers Lamar and Stanley Smith, who said they saw Bozella and Wayne Moseley break into Crapser’s apartment.

But in April 1983, a second grand jury heard evidence in the case and indicted him on two counts of second-degree murder. The 1983 indictment was secured when the Dutchess County, N.Y., district attorney agreed in writing not to prosecute Wayne Moseley for the murder and to secure Moseley’s release from prison on an unrelated charge in exchange for his testimony against Bozella in the Crapser case.

Bozella was arrested again and, later that year, was convicted. With his immunity deal secure, Moseley testified that he went to Crapser’s home and watched Bozella commit the murder.

There was evidence pointing toward a man named Donald Wise. In 1978, Wise and his brother, Anthony, were convicted of murdering an elderly woman who lived three blocks from where Crapser did. That woman, Estelle Dobler, died when someone shoved cloth down her throat while burglarizing her home.

Another woman in the area, Mary King, was murdered in the same fashion.

Donald Wise’s fingerprint was found on the bathroom mirror inside Crapser’s home. Madeline Dixon South testified that Wise had confessed to killing Crapser, but the jury instead convicted Bozella.

“To hear that jury say ‘guilty!’ was maybe the toughest part of all of this,” he said. “I just felt like when the jury came back, they were going to see this for what it was, say ‘not guilty,’ and I’d be right out of there. When they found me guilty, it was hard to believe this was happening to me.”

Bozella insisted he was innocent, but he soon discovered what most convicted felons discover: Few believed him. He proclaimed his innocence to anyone who would listen, but the world tuned him out.

He nearly got a break in 1990 when attorneys Mickey Steiman and David Steinberg were granted a new trial because prosecutors in the case had committed what is known as a Batson violation. Batson vs. Kentucky is a 1986 U.S. Supreme Court case that determined prosecutors can’t exclude jurors on a peremptory challenge based solely upon their race.

There were no African Americans on Bozella’s 1983 jury. So, after successfully getting the 1983 conviction overturned and winning a new trial, Steiman and Steinberg came to Bozella with an enticing deal. Prosecutors were willing to release him from prison with credit for time served if he agreed to a guilty plea.

Bozella wouldn’t hear of it. The pluses were obvious: He’d be out of jail and free to resume his life. The one negative – copping to a murder of a 92-year-old woman – was enough to make him emphatically say no.

“There was no way I could ever do that,” he said of admitting guilt. “I’m not that kind of a man. I could never murder anybody. Ever. And no matter what they were saying, I didn’t murder that lady and I wasn’t going to say I did no matter what they promised me. Even if it meant spending the rest of my life in prison, then that was what I was going to have to do.

“I was willing to die first rather than to admit that, because I hadn’t done it. I’m no murderer and never have been. I couldn’t have lived with myself if I said had done it just to get out. I wanted to walk out the front door a free man, but I would rather have died in prison and left in a box than to admit to something like that which I did not do.”

Murder and tragedy have long been a part of Bozella’s life. When he was nine, he witnessed his father murder his pregnant mother.

“I can’t even begin to tell you what that was like,” he said.

Earlier in 1977, before the Crapser murder, his brother, Ernie, was murdered. He had another brother who was shot and another who died of AIDS.

“There’s been a lot of pain and a lot of heartache,” he says, his deep voice reduced to a whisper.

Years after Ernie’s murder, Bozella happened upon Ernie’s killer in the prison chapel at Sing Sing.

“I had no anger toward him, but I wanted to know why,” Bozella said. “Why did he stab him? Why did he take my brother?”

There’s never a good reason for a murder and this one was no different. He said, “I was 15, young and stupid,” Bozella recalls.

There was no rage, no outburst, nothing that one might expect in such a situation, particularly from men who had been convicted of violent crimes.

But Bozella, who had become the Sing Sing boxing champion, did not react violently.

“I forgive you,” he whispered to the man.

No one, though, was willing to forgive Dewey Bozella. After turning down the 1990 plea deal, he was convicted of Crapser’s murder again, despite what his appellate attorney Ross Firsenbaum says, “was a startling lack of evidence against him.”

Four times, he came up for parole. Four times, parole was denied, even though it seemed to be a given it would be granted. While in prison, Bozella earned his high school diploma equivalency by obtaining a GED. He then earned a bachelor’s degree in general studies from Mercy College and a master’s from the New York Theological Seminary.

Though it is not required by law to be paroled, Bozella had no chance because he refused to admit he committed Crapser’s murder. To be considered for parole, a person has to “appreciate the nature and seriousness” of the crime for which they’d been convicted.

“At one of his parole hearings, Dewey stood up and said ‘I appreciate how terrible this murder was and it kills me to be associated with it,’ ” Firsenbaum said. “He said it was grotesque and how badly he felt for Emma Crapser and her family. But he said, ‘I can’t stand here and admit to you that I did something I didn’t do.’ ”

His steadfast refusal to admit to the murder kept him locked up longer.

He began writing the Cardoza School of Law’s Innocence Project, first every month, then every week, asking for its assistance. The Innocence Project takes cases pro bono and uses DNA evidence to get wrongful convictions overturned.

After many letters, Bozella’s dreams came true, or at least he thought they had, when the Innocence Project had decided to take on his case.

His joy was short-lived. When Innocence Project attorneys began to look into the case, they discovered the evidence had been destroyed. As a result, there was no DNA. But they had believed in his innocence, so they forwarded the case to the New York City law firm of WilmerHale, where Firsenbaum took it on pro bono in December 2007.

Firsenbaum was appalled when he read the record. The evidence against Bozella was almost non-existent. The prosecution’s chief witnesses were all felons who kept changing their stories and who, in several cases, had admitted guilt themselves.

Firsenbaum met a former Poughkeepsie police detective named Art Regula who had been retired for about 10 years. But he had stunning news: He’d kept Bozella’s file, the only such file he kept upon retirement.

He said to Firsenbaum, “I knew that eventually someone like you would be here looking to prove he didn’t do it.”

The contents of the file were startling. They contained evidence that was withheld from the defense that could have proved Bozella’s innocence.

Included in the file was a police interview with a man named Saul Holland on Feb. 23, 1978, in connection of the murder of King. Holland told police that the Wise brothers admitted they had done such a murder before when they recruited him to participate in robbing King’s home.

That, and other evidence in the file, led to the inescapable conclusion that Bozella had not, and could not, have committed the murder. After months of legal wrangling and more than 2,500 hours of work by WilmerHale attorneys – worth over $1 million at their normal rates – Judge James T. Rooney vacated the conviction and on Oct. 28, 2008, ordered Bozella freed.

He was released into a new world, one that included iPhones and iPods and microwave ovens and HDTVs. It was something he wasn’t used to, nor could he conceive of. Upon his release, he pleaded with his wife, Trena, an elementary school teacher, to make him lasagna for dinner.

“I love lasagna, man, and I wanted to have what I loved to eat for once,” he said.

Bozella was the light heavyweight boxing champion in Sing Sing and once fought ex-world light heavyweight champion Lou Del Valle, losing a fierce bout when he suffered a cut.

He doesn’t want to box full-time now, though he wants to fight once to fulfill his dream to turn pro and to make a point to the at-risk children who someday would work out at the gym he plans to build in Newburgh, N.Y.

Bozella said his life now is about giving to others and making a difference in society. Newburgh was called “The Murder Capital of New York,” in the Sept. 25 issue of New York Magazine.

“I want to let people, young and old, know that life is what you make of it,” Bozella said. “Never give up on your dreams. Never quit. Boxing is such a good teacher and if I can help some kids stay out of trouble and become productive citizens, my life will have been worth it.

“I screwed up the first part of my life, and now I want to do it right. I don’t want to see these kids, who wouldn’t get in trouble if they had guidance and direction, go down the wrong path.”

And so, on Saturday, Bozella will box. He trained alongside Hopkins, himself a convicted felon who turned his life around upon being released from prison.

“When I went to jail, I went to jail because I did something; I wasn’t an innocent man,” Hopkins said. “He went to jail [even though] he was innocent. That’s a big difference, not a small difference. That’s a big difference. And so I respect him for having the championship courage to stick to his guns when he could have said after 10 years, ‘I did it,’ signed the paper and he’d have walked out of there.”

Hopkins helped him prepare for the fight and is optimistic about Bozella’s chances to win. Bozella laughs and says he used to be able to move well in the ring, but at 52, he’s no longer going to float like a butterfly.

“I used to stick and move real well and control the ring,” he said. “Those days are gone. I’m almost what you’d call a defensive fighter now. I’m aggressive at times, but I’m smart in there. I can’t run around and do the things that I used to do, but I’ve gained a lot of wisdom and a lot of smarts. I just had to reinvent myself.”

After the one fight, Bozella will retire and go into the boxing history books. A book may be written and a movie may be made about his life.

He’s still learning to adjust to life as a free man, and he’s eager to set an example to the youth of his area.

“This was a long and emotional process,” Bozella said. “There were a lot of difficult moments, but I stood for what I believed in. I didn’t do that murder and nothing was going to make me say I did. I had to keep up hope, and eventually, my hope was rewarded.”

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