NEW YORK – A Brooklyn resident who spent nearly 30 years behind bars for a murder he didn’t commit was exonerated in 2020, and he’s still adjusting to life outside prison.
He’s among them the hundreds of exemptions in New York in recent years. According to the National Register of Exemptions, New York has had 347 waivers since 1989 with 157 in New York City alone between 2014 and 2022.
Brooklyn has had the most in New York City – 40 since the Conviction Review Unit was established in 2014. Most of the exemptions are from black men. Experts say fewer people are being wrongfully convicted these days because of tools like DNA and cell phone towers.
“Why am I going to jail for something I didn’t do?”
Gerard Domond was convicted of a murder in Brooklyn in 1987, but Domond says he wasn’t even in the city at the time of the murder.
“I wasn’t in New York City at all,” Domond said. “[I was in] Georgia with my then girlfriend.”
“What was going through your mind?” asked Jennifer Bisram of CBS News New York.
“This can’t be happening to me. Why am I going to jail for something I didn’t do? And I thought, damn, how many other people are probably going to go through this? How many, you know, black guys from my hood?” Domond said.
He spent most of his adult life in the Auburn Correctional Facility as inmate 89-A-8836, with many sleepless nights on hard prison beds, surrounded by prison guards and violence.
In 2020, he was acquitted by the Brooklyn district attorney’s office after they said key information from the case was withheld.
Domond sued the city and was awarded more than $13 million, but he says no amount of money can bring back all the lost years of his life and take away the nightmares and emotional trauma.
‘Money doesn’t heal you. Money does nothing for you, for the soul,” Domond said. “You take off the chains, but you’re still a prisoner [in your mind] because the pain and scars will never be removed anyway.”
The Brooklyn district attorney’s office says no other suspect has been identified in the killing.
‘I was afraid to come home’
Today, Domond lives 210 miles away from the Auburn Correctional Facility in a home in New Jersey.
“I bought it because the trees there remind me of freedom,” Domond said.
At the age of 62, he finally lives outside the prison walls in a house with his family, including his two-year-old daughter Laila.
“It’s like time stopped at the age of 23, and I’m carrying on with all this. So now I’m here again. It’s like I’m trying to catch up on what I missed,” Domond said. “I grew up in prison, literally… All those decades just passed by.”
But four years later he still doesn’t feel free.
“I find it hard to deal with things because sometimes I act like I’m still locked up,” Domond said. “Sometimes when I say I have to go upstairs, I say I’m going to my cell.”
He says each of his 10,775 days in prison was a struggle.
“I wanted someone to kill me. Yes, I really did, because all this time I thought I couldn’t do it,” Domond said.
Every day is now a mental battle.
“I was scared to come home, so to speak,” Domond said. ‘Because this is a new world. It’s like I felt comfortable for some reason. I knew what to do there, but for the most part I’m lost here, you know.”
Domond says his family and building cars help him heal.
“I go to therapy, but I have no peace. Money, everything, I have that, but it’s still a burden. It’s still… I’m looking for something, I don’t know what it is… Part of I’m in there,” Domond said.
But he says that just as he never gave up his innocence, he won’t give up his freedom either.
