Vernon Horn: Finally Free
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Imagine being separated from the people you love for 17 years after being convicted of crimes that you did not commit. That is what happened to Vernon Horn, who police accused in 1999 of robbing a New Haven deli and shooting two men, killing one. In the 19 years that followed, Vernon, who was just 17 at the time of the crimes, insisted over and over again that he had no involvement in the robbery or shootings. This month, the State of Connecticut finally listened. After spending nearly half of his life in prison, on April 25, 2018, Vernon finally walked out of court a free man.
Vernon in 1999
Vernon and his daughter in 2016
Vernon was simply a teenager who was in the wrong place at the wrong time. The police zeroed in on Vernon because he was one of the first people to arrive at the crime scene after the shooting, even though he voluntarily spoke with detectives and provided them with his real name, real phone number, and real address. Through an exhaustive re-investigation, including an examination of previously overlooked cell site data and the discovery of approximately 140 pages of never before seen phone records found in a retired police detective’s basement, Vernon’s lawyers were able to finally prove his innocence.
Vernon has endured unspeakable tragedy in his life. Orphaned at age 13, Vernon was arrested just after his 18th birthday. His court-appointed lawyer did not so much as review the evidence before trial let alone interview any witnesses. In 2014, after 15 years in prison, Vernon was released from prison after a judge found that his lawyer had been incompetent. He married and had a beautiful baby daughter, never thinking he would be sent back to prison. But then in June 2016, the Connecticut Supreme Court reinstated the convictions after deciding the incompetent lawyer’s errors had not legally “prejudiced” or harmed Vernon. Just a month before the decision came down, Vernon suffered traumatic injuries as a passenger in a car accident, including a broken femur and broken vertebrae in his neck. Before his current lawyers discovered evidence proving his innocence, Vernon had gone on a hunger strike to protest his inhumane treatment.
Vernon and his daughter after his May 2016 car accident
We are Yale Law students who have had the privilege of working on Vernon’s case for the past two years. We started this page to help Vernon deal with the many obstacles he must overcome to successfully transition from prison back to society. While we cannot give Vernon back the many years that were taken from him, we can help make his transition a bit easier. His dream is to eventually work as a paralegal so he can help other innocent men and women regain their freedom. In the near term, Vernon needs money for living, educational, medical, vocational, and child care expenses.
Vernon hopes that his story will eventually inspire change in the criminal justice system. But having been incarcerated for 17 of the last 19 years, and without a family to support him, he needs your help getting back on his feet. Please consider donating today.
"I would like to first and foremost thank God the most high and my beautiful daughter . . . for encouraging me in spirit to keep on fighting to prove my innocence."
– Vernon Horn
VERNON'S HEARTBREAKING LIFE STORY
As a young child, Vernon was forced to endure the trauma of witnessing both of his parents die slow and painful deaths. Vernon was just 5 when his father passed away; his mother died eight years later when Vernon was just 13. Vernon’s sister, who is only a few years older them him, did her best to raise Vernon.
Before his 18th birthday, however, police fingered Vernon as the trigger man in a convenience store murder-robbery. Too poor to afford a lawyer, Vernon was represented at trial by a court-appointed private lawyer who did less than nothing to help him. In a case with a potential life sentence, Vernon’s lawyer did not so much as bother to review the evidence before trial, hire an investigator, or interview potential witnesses. Vernon’s lawyer later admitted that he had only met with Vernon outside of court one time and for "not too long."
With no advocate fighting on his behalf, the jury convicted Vernon on all counts. At sentencing, he maintained his innocence and told the judge he had "nothing to do with" the murder-robbery. But the judge did not believe him. On June 2, 2000, Vernon was sentenced to 70 years without the possibility of parole.
"I have no lingering doubt about this case; and despite their protestation after protestation of their innocence, sometimes I wonder who they’re trying to convince, themselves? Whatever you men do while you’re waiting in jail, you should reflect upon this case and maybe you’ll come to the view that you did do this terrible crime that you deny and deny and deny to your family and everybody else."
– Vernon’s sentencing judge, June 2, 2000
Vernon spent 15 years in prison fighting to prove his innocence. During that time, he was represented by five different lawyers. Finally, in 2013, Vernon got his day in court. After hearing from more than a dozen witnesses – including a key State’s witness who recanted his testimony – a judge found that Vernon’s attorney was so ineffective that he was deprived of a fair trial. Vernon was released on bond in 2014 while the State of Connecticut appealed. While released, Vernon married and had a beautiful baby girl, confident that the decision would be upheld and the charges dismissed.
No sooner had Vernon begun to enjoy his freedom, however, than it was cruelly taken away from him again. In June 2016, the Connecticut Supreme Court reinstated Vernon’s convictions, finding that his lawyer’s performance – which the State itself had acknowledged was ineffective – did not "prejudice" or harm Vernon.
To make matters even more tragic, the month before Vernon’s convictions were reinstated, he was a passenger in a serious car accident. The car flipped over, pinning him underneath and fracturing Vernon’s femur and neck vertebrae. After returning to prison, Vernon was repeatedly denied adequate medical care. Because of the injuries he suffered, Vernon is now partially disabled.
Vernon’s daughter was just 10 months old when he went back to prison. In the 21 months that passed between his re-incarceration and exoneration, he was only able to see his daughter one time while in court, where he was not even allowed to touch her hand.
Finally, in June 2017, Vernon’s luck began to change. With help from the Yale Juvenile Justice Clinic, Vernon filed a federal habeas petition in June 2017. A few days later, the federal judge assigned to hear the case appointed the Federal Defender Office of Connecticut to represent him. Through the tireless efforts of Vernon's new attorneys and their staff, and with the help of New York law firm Arnold & Porter, Vernon was finally able to prove his innocence.
"What took place against me by this criminal justice system is a tragedy, a crime against humanity, and an assault against justice and the United States Constitution. I hope this never happens to anyone else. Nineteen years of my life were stolen from me, my daughter went without her father. I hope this does not go in vain, but rather the folks who are a part of this system will learn from this mistake to better the system."
– Vernon Horn
VERNON'S TRIAL
The key piece of evidence at Vernon’s trial was a call detail record from a cell phone that was stolen during the deli robbery (the phone itself was never recovered). The State alleged at trial that Vernon had lent the phone to two different men in the hours after the robbery and that Vernon had been with them when they used it to make phone calls.
The State’s main cooperating witness, a 16-year-old who confessed to the robbery after police found his fingerprint at the crime scene and who testified against Vernon and his co-defendant, claimed to have borrowed the phone from Vernon on January 24, minutes after the robbery, while fleeing in the getaway car on I-95 towards Bridgeport. Another State’s witness testified that Vernon lent him the stolen cell phone in New Haven on the morning of January 25 and watched as he used it to make the fourth stolen cell phone call at 11:07 a.m. from his front porch.
The stolen cell phone evidence was critical at Mr. Horn’s criminal trial because, as a Connecticut Superior Court judge noted, it placed a phone taken from the crime scene in Vernon’s hands "only one day after the crimes were committed," and was the "only evidence" that put Vernon "in the company of [the State’s cooperating witness], an admitted perpetrator," aside from the witness’s own testimony. It was also critical because the State had no physical evidence linking Vernon to the crime scene.
Vernon’s lawyer did not merely fail to rebut the State’s cell phone evidence – he affirmatively conceded to the jury during closing arguments that it was a "fact" that the stolen cell phone had been used by the State's witness to make a call from New Haven. Thus, Vernon’s lawyer helped the State convict his own client.
After trial, one of the State’s two cell phone witnesses admitted under oath, on three separate occasions, that he had lied, both to the police and the jury, about using the stolen cell phone. According to the witness, a police officer told him that if Vernon hadn’t let him use the cell phone, then he must have gotten it from the crime scene himself. Facing potential perjury charges for recanting, the witness told a judge in 2013, "I know I risk my freedom here today by telling the truth[,] but I’d rather tell the truth than let him sit in jail if he’s an innocent man."
A MOMENTARY FREEDOM
In 2014, a state court overturned Vernon’s convictions after finding that his trial lawyer had been ineffective for not conducting an investigation. The court reasoned that
[a] careful examination of all the testimony leads to only one conclusion as to the whereabouts of the cell phone over the two days. The cell phone was taken by [the State’s cooperating witness] to Bridgeport on January 24, 1999, where it remained. The cell phone never came back to New Haven. Information as to where the calls originated would almost certainly have shown that all five calls, including the controversial fourth call, were made in Bridgeport, not New Haven.
Vernon was released from prison on bond the following month.
The State appealed, noting that a trial witness for the cellular service provider had testified that cell site origination information was only available for 30 days, and that Vernon’s trial lawyer had not been appointed to represent him until several months after his arrest. The State thus believed the record to be "devoid of evidence" concerning the calls’ originating locations. "For all that is known," the State hypothesized, "the call origination information may have revealed, to [Mr. Horn’s] detriment, that the fourth call originated in New Haven."
In June 2016, the Connecticut Supreme Court reinstated Vernon’s convictions and sent him back to prison. The Supreme Court found that Vernon’s trial lawyer’s incompetence, which the State had conceded, did not legally "prejudice" or harm Vernon.
THE NEW EVIDENCE
On June 27, 2017, Vernon filed a federal habeas petition. The court appointed attorneys from the Federal Defender Office to represent Vernon. Vernon’s new lawyers spent hundreds of hours reinvestigating every aspect of the robbery-murder as if it were a cold case. They discovered that, while the New Haven Police Department had lost or destroyed nearly all the evidence in the case (in violation of its own protocols), there were critical pieces of exculpatory material that the State had withheld or overlooked:
Newly discovered cell site origination evidence
What the habeas court and the parties failed to appreciate was that the trial record did in fact contain cell site origination information that proves the stolen cell phone calls could not have originated in New Haven. At trial, the State introduced a one-page call detail record from the stolen cell phone’s service provider as State’s Exhibit 95. One of the columns on the Call Detail Record was titled "ORIG" for origin or origination.
Each of the numbers under the ORIG heading refers to a cell site. The physical address of each cell site and its orientation could have been obtained simply by requesting that information through a subpoena to the cellular service provider, just as the Federal Defender Office and the State’s Attorney’s Office did through a jointly issued subpoena to T-Mobile in February 2018.
As it turns out, the cell site origination evidence establishes that all of the calls from the stolen cell phone were made from Bridgeport and connected to cell sites that were pointed away from both New Haven and I-95. Thus, the Federal Defender Office’s investigation established with certainty that the only physical item purportedly tying Vernon to the murder-robbery actually helps prove that he did not commit the crimes, and that the State’s two main witnesses lied at trial.
Hidden telephone records
In a development the federal judge overseeing Vernon’s case called "shocking," in January 2018 Vernon's new lawyers obtained nearly 140 pages of never before seen telephone records from a retired New Haven detective, which the detective had been keeping in her basement. The only phone record introduced at trial or turned over to Vernon’s trial lawyer was the one-page call detail record from the stolen cell phone’s service provider. In November 2017, however, a lawyer on Vernon's legal team discovered two search warrants for landline telephone records in the New Haven Clerk’s Office that were signed on February 25, 1999, but were not docketed until September 17, 2014, more than 15 years later. The police department has no record of the returns of responsive phone records ever being logged into evidence. Eventually Vernon's new lawyers recovered the phone records from the retired detective who had obtained the search warrants.
The newly discovered records include handwritten detective notes as well as a chart of 16 calls between an alternative suspect and one of the numbers that received a call from the stolen cell phone. In addition to the phone records of every number contacted by the stolen cell phone, the newly discovered records include Vernon’s phone records and those of his co-defendant, both of which prove that neither man had any connection with the State’s cooperating witness and admitted deli robber.
Taken together, the evidence discovered and/or developed by Vernon's new lawyers shows that the criminal justice system repeatedly failed Vernon. Instead of identifying the true culprits, the State latched onto two innocent men for disturbingly flimsy reasons. The State’s chief witnesses perjured themselves on the stand at trial to protect themselves or obtain a more favorable sentence. The State offered cell phone evidence at trial against Vernon, without doing its due diligence to discover that the evidence actually proved Vernon’s innocence. Meanwhile, Vernon’s court-appointed lawyer didn’t bother to investigate the case or even look at the evidence before jury selection; in fact, he wrongfully conceded in his closing that Vernon possessed the stolen cell phone. And even when a court finally vacated Vernon’s convictions in 2014, the State appealed, causing Vernon—an innocent man who was now the father of a baby daughter—to have to go back to prison.
VERNON PREVAILS
In January 2018, Vernon’s new lawyers met with members of the State’s Attorney’s Office to review the integrity of Vernon’s convictions. In light of the newly discovered evidence, the State’s Attorney’s Office did the right thing and agreed to vacate Vernon’s convictions. Vernon was released from prison on April 25, 2018.
As law students who have had the privilege of working on Vernon’s case, we have gotten to know a remarkable man. In the face of unfathomable adversity, Vernon has maintained strength, determination, kindness, and curiosity. He is an inspiration, and the world will be better with his leadership on the outside. But Vernon needs your help to put his life back together, and to build the future we all deserve. We appreciate your generosity and support.
THE PATH FORWARD
Your generosity will help Vernon rebuild his life in the following ways:
Housing
Vernon does not want to return to the crime-infested neighborhoods of New Haven where he was born and raised. Your donations will help him afford a modest studio or one-bedroom apartment in a safe neighborhood.
Educational / Vocational
Vernon aspires to become a paralegal. As a first step, he needs money to enroll in a GED program, obtain books, and purchase a computer. Once he has a GED, he intends to apply to a community college so he can obtain his Associate’s Degree.
Child Support
Vernon needs money to help provide for his daughter's physical, educational, and emotional needs.
Medical
Due to the car accident he suffered in 2016, Vernon has significant medical needs, including physical therapy and possible surgeries.
Transportation
Vernon does not have a driver’s license or a car. While he would eventually like to obtain both, for now he needs money for transportation.
Life Necessities
Vernon’s only close family member is his sister, who lives in a one-bedroom apartment and works full time at Walmart. Vernon needs money so he can afford basic life necessities such as groceries, toiletries, home furnishings, etc.
_______________________________________________________________________________________
Vernon exiting the courthouse on April 25, 2018 - the day of his release
Vernon and his family on the day of his release
Vernon celebrating his release with loved ones and his legal team
“I believe that there are as many non-DNA innocence cases as there are DNA cases, if not more. This is why it is vital that lawyers do their job and respect justice.”
– Vernon Horn
See the memorandum that Vernon’s lawyers submitted to Vernon’s federal court judge in April of 2018 here.
Vernon in 1999
Vernon and his daughter in 2016
Vernon was simply a teenager who was in the wrong place at the wrong time. The police zeroed in on Vernon because he was one of the first people to arrive at the crime scene after the shooting, even though he voluntarily spoke with detectives and provided them with his real name, real phone number, and real address. Through an exhaustive re-investigation, including an examination of previously overlooked cell site data and the discovery of approximately 140 pages of never before seen phone records found in a retired police detective’s basement, Vernon’s lawyers were able to finally prove his innocence.
Vernon has endured unspeakable tragedy in his life. Orphaned at age 13, Vernon was arrested just after his 18th birthday. His court-appointed lawyer did not so much as review the evidence before trial let alone interview any witnesses. In 2014, after 15 years in prison, Vernon was released from prison after a judge found that his lawyer had been incompetent. He married and had a beautiful baby daughter, never thinking he would be sent back to prison. But then in June 2016, the Connecticut Supreme Court reinstated the convictions after deciding the incompetent lawyer’s errors had not legally “prejudiced” or harmed Vernon. Just a month before the decision came down, Vernon suffered traumatic injuries as a passenger in a car accident, including a broken femur and broken vertebrae in his neck. Before his current lawyers discovered evidence proving his innocence, Vernon had gone on a hunger strike to protest his inhumane treatment.
Vernon and his daughter after his May 2016 car accident
We are Yale Law students who have had the privilege of working on Vernon’s case for the past two years. We started this page to help Vernon deal with the many obstacles he must overcome to successfully transition from prison back to society. While we cannot give Vernon back the many years that were taken from him, we can help make his transition a bit easier. His dream is to eventually work as a paralegal so he can help other innocent men and women regain their freedom. In the near term, Vernon needs money for living, educational, medical, vocational, and child care expenses.
Vernon hopes that his story will eventually inspire change in the criminal justice system. But having been incarcerated for 17 of the last 19 years, and without a family to support him, he needs your help getting back on his feet. Please consider donating today.
"I would like to first and foremost thank God the most high and my beautiful daughter . . . for encouraging me in spirit to keep on fighting to prove my innocence."
– Vernon Horn
VERNON'S HEARTBREAKING LIFE STORY
As a young child, Vernon was forced to endure the trauma of witnessing both of his parents die slow and painful deaths. Vernon was just 5 when his father passed away; his mother died eight years later when Vernon was just 13. Vernon’s sister, who is only a few years older them him, did her best to raise Vernon.
Before his 18th birthday, however, police fingered Vernon as the trigger man in a convenience store murder-robbery. Too poor to afford a lawyer, Vernon was represented at trial by a court-appointed private lawyer who did less than nothing to help him. In a case with a potential life sentence, Vernon’s lawyer did not so much as bother to review the evidence before trial, hire an investigator, or interview potential witnesses. Vernon’s lawyer later admitted that he had only met with Vernon outside of court one time and for "not too long."
With no advocate fighting on his behalf, the jury convicted Vernon on all counts. At sentencing, he maintained his innocence and told the judge he had "nothing to do with" the murder-robbery. But the judge did not believe him. On June 2, 2000, Vernon was sentenced to 70 years without the possibility of parole.
"I have no lingering doubt about this case; and despite their protestation after protestation of their innocence, sometimes I wonder who they’re trying to convince, themselves? Whatever you men do while you’re waiting in jail, you should reflect upon this case and maybe you’ll come to the view that you did do this terrible crime that you deny and deny and deny to your family and everybody else."
– Vernon’s sentencing judge, June 2, 2000
Vernon spent 15 years in prison fighting to prove his innocence. During that time, he was represented by five different lawyers. Finally, in 2013, Vernon got his day in court. After hearing from more than a dozen witnesses – including a key State’s witness who recanted his testimony – a judge found that Vernon’s attorney was so ineffective that he was deprived of a fair trial. Vernon was released on bond in 2014 while the State of Connecticut appealed. While released, Vernon married and had a beautiful baby girl, confident that the decision would be upheld and the charges dismissed.
No sooner had Vernon begun to enjoy his freedom, however, than it was cruelly taken away from him again. In June 2016, the Connecticut Supreme Court reinstated Vernon’s convictions, finding that his lawyer’s performance – which the State itself had acknowledged was ineffective – did not "prejudice" or harm Vernon.
To make matters even more tragic, the month before Vernon’s convictions were reinstated, he was a passenger in a serious car accident. The car flipped over, pinning him underneath and fracturing Vernon’s femur and neck vertebrae. After returning to prison, Vernon was repeatedly denied adequate medical care. Because of the injuries he suffered, Vernon is now partially disabled.
Vernon’s daughter was just 10 months old when he went back to prison. In the 21 months that passed between his re-incarceration and exoneration, he was only able to see his daughter one time while in court, where he was not even allowed to touch her hand.
Finally, in June 2017, Vernon’s luck began to change. With help from the Yale Juvenile Justice Clinic, Vernon filed a federal habeas petition in June 2017. A few days later, the federal judge assigned to hear the case appointed the Federal Defender Office of Connecticut to represent him. Through the tireless efforts of Vernon's new attorneys and their staff, and with the help of New York law firm Arnold & Porter, Vernon was finally able to prove his innocence.
"What took place against me by this criminal justice system is a tragedy, a crime against humanity, and an assault against justice and the United States Constitution. I hope this never happens to anyone else. Nineteen years of my life were stolen from me, my daughter went without her father. I hope this does not go in vain, but rather the folks who are a part of this system will learn from this mistake to better the system."
– Vernon Horn
VERNON'S TRIAL
The key piece of evidence at Vernon’s trial was a call detail record from a cell phone that was stolen during the deli robbery (the phone itself was never recovered). The State alleged at trial that Vernon had lent the phone to two different men in the hours after the robbery and that Vernon had been with them when they used it to make phone calls.
The State’s main cooperating witness, a 16-year-old who confessed to the robbery after police found his fingerprint at the crime scene and who testified against Vernon and his co-defendant, claimed to have borrowed the phone from Vernon on January 24, minutes after the robbery, while fleeing in the getaway car on I-95 towards Bridgeport. Another State’s witness testified that Vernon lent him the stolen cell phone in New Haven on the morning of January 25 and watched as he used it to make the fourth stolen cell phone call at 11:07 a.m. from his front porch.
The stolen cell phone evidence was critical at Mr. Horn’s criminal trial because, as a Connecticut Superior Court judge noted, it placed a phone taken from the crime scene in Vernon’s hands "only one day after the crimes were committed," and was the "only evidence" that put Vernon "in the company of [the State’s cooperating witness], an admitted perpetrator," aside from the witness’s own testimony. It was also critical because the State had no physical evidence linking Vernon to the crime scene.
Vernon’s lawyer did not merely fail to rebut the State’s cell phone evidence – he affirmatively conceded to the jury during closing arguments that it was a "fact" that the stolen cell phone had been used by the State's witness to make a call from New Haven. Thus, Vernon’s lawyer helped the State convict his own client.
After trial, one of the State’s two cell phone witnesses admitted under oath, on three separate occasions, that he had lied, both to the police and the jury, about using the stolen cell phone. According to the witness, a police officer told him that if Vernon hadn’t let him use the cell phone, then he must have gotten it from the crime scene himself. Facing potential perjury charges for recanting, the witness told a judge in 2013, "I know I risk my freedom here today by telling the truth[,] but I’d rather tell the truth than let him sit in jail if he’s an innocent man."
A MOMENTARY FREEDOM
In 2014, a state court overturned Vernon’s convictions after finding that his trial lawyer had been ineffective for not conducting an investigation. The court reasoned that
[a] careful examination of all the testimony leads to only one conclusion as to the whereabouts of the cell phone over the two days. The cell phone was taken by [the State’s cooperating witness] to Bridgeport on January 24, 1999, where it remained. The cell phone never came back to New Haven. Information as to where the calls originated would almost certainly have shown that all five calls, including the controversial fourth call, were made in Bridgeport, not New Haven.
Vernon was released from prison on bond the following month.
The State appealed, noting that a trial witness for the cellular service provider had testified that cell site origination information was only available for 30 days, and that Vernon’s trial lawyer had not been appointed to represent him until several months after his arrest. The State thus believed the record to be "devoid of evidence" concerning the calls’ originating locations. "For all that is known," the State hypothesized, "the call origination information may have revealed, to [Mr. Horn’s] detriment, that the fourth call originated in New Haven."
In June 2016, the Connecticut Supreme Court reinstated Vernon’s convictions and sent him back to prison. The Supreme Court found that Vernon’s trial lawyer’s incompetence, which the State had conceded, did not legally "prejudice" or harm Vernon.
THE NEW EVIDENCE
On June 27, 2017, Vernon filed a federal habeas petition. The court appointed attorneys from the Federal Defender Office to represent Vernon. Vernon’s new lawyers spent hundreds of hours reinvestigating every aspect of the robbery-murder as if it were a cold case. They discovered that, while the New Haven Police Department had lost or destroyed nearly all the evidence in the case (in violation of its own protocols), there were critical pieces of exculpatory material that the State had withheld or overlooked:
Newly discovered cell site origination evidence
What the habeas court and the parties failed to appreciate was that the trial record did in fact contain cell site origination information that proves the stolen cell phone calls could not have originated in New Haven. At trial, the State introduced a one-page call detail record from the stolen cell phone’s service provider as State’s Exhibit 95. One of the columns on the Call Detail Record was titled "ORIG" for origin or origination.
Each of the numbers under the ORIG heading refers to a cell site. The physical address of each cell site and its orientation could have been obtained simply by requesting that information through a subpoena to the cellular service provider, just as the Federal Defender Office and the State’s Attorney’s Office did through a jointly issued subpoena to T-Mobile in February 2018.
As it turns out, the cell site origination evidence establishes that all of the calls from the stolen cell phone were made from Bridgeport and connected to cell sites that were pointed away from both New Haven and I-95. Thus, the Federal Defender Office’s investigation established with certainty that the only physical item purportedly tying Vernon to the murder-robbery actually helps prove that he did not commit the crimes, and that the State’s two main witnesses lied at trial.
Hidden telephone records
In a development the federal judge overseeing Vernon’s case called "shocking," in January 2018 Vernon's new lawyers obtained nearly 140 pages of never before seen telephone records from a retired New Haven detective, which the detective had been keeping in her basement. The only phone record introduced at trial or turned over to Vernon’s trial lawyer was the one-page call detail record from the stolen cell phone’s service provider. In November 2017, however, a lawyer on Vernon's legal team discovered two search warrants for landline telephone records in the New Haven Clerk’s Office that were signed on February 25, 1999, but were not docketed until September 17, 2014, more than 15 years later. The police department has no record of the returns of responsive phone records ever being logged into evidence. Eventually Vernon's new lawyers recovered the phone records from the retired detective who had obtained the search warrants.
The newly discovered records include handwritten detective notes as well as a chart of 16 calls between an alternative suspect and one of the numbers that received a call from the stolen cell phone. In addition to the phone records of every number contacted by the stolen cell phone, the newly discovered records include Vernon’s phone records and those of his co-defendant, both of which prove that neither man had any connection with the State’s cooperating witness and admitted deli robber.
Taken together, the evidence discovered and/or developed by Vernon's new lawyers shows that the criminal justice system repeatedly failed Vernon. Instead of identifying the true culprits, the State latched onto two innocent men for disturbingly flimsy reasons. The State’s chief witnesses perjured themselves on the stand at trial to protect themselves or obtain a more favorable sentence. The State offered cell phone evidence at trial against Vernon, without doing its due diligence to discover that the evidence actually proved Vernon’s innocence. Meanwhile, Vernon’s court-appointed lawyer didn’t bother to investigate the case or even look at the evidence before jury selection; in fact, he wrongfully conceded in his closing that Vernon possessed the stolen cell phone. And even when a court finally vacated Vernon’s convictions in 2014, the State appealed, causing Vernon—an innocent man who was now the father of a baby daughter—to have to go back to prison.
VERNON PREVAILS
In January 2018, Vernon’s new lawyers met with members of the State’s Attorney’s Office to review the integrity of Vernon’s convictions. In light of the newly discovered evidence, the State’s Attorney’s Office did the right thing and agreed to vacate Vernon’s convictions. Vernon was released from prison on April 25, 2018.
As law students who have had the privilege of working on Vernon’s case, we have gotten to know a remarkable man. In the face of unfathomable adversity, Vernon has maintained strength, determination, kindness, and curiosity. He is an inspiration, and the world will be better with his leadership on the outside. But Vernon needs your help to put his life back together, and to build the future we all deserve. We appreciate your generosity and support.
THE PATH FORWARD
Your generosity will help Vernon rebuild his life in the following ways:
Housing
Vernon does not want to return to the crime-infested neighborhoods of New Haven where he was born and raised. Your donations will help him afford a modest studio or one-bedroom apartment in a safe neighborhood.
Educational / Vocational
Vernon aspires to become a paralegal. As a first step, he needs money to enroll in a GED program, obtain books, and purchase a computer. Once he has a GED, he intends to apply to a community college so he can obtain his Associate’s Degree.
Child Support
Vernon needs money to help provide for his daughter's physical, educational, and emotional needs.
Medical
Due to the car accident he suffered in 2016, Vernon has significant medical needs, including physical therapy and possible surgeries.
Transportation
Vernon does not have a driver’s license or a car. While he would eventually like to obtain both, for now he needs money for transportation.
Life Necessities
Vernon’s only close family member is his sister, who lives in a one-bedroom apartment and works full time at Walmart. Vernon needs money so he can afford basic life necessities such as groceries, toiletries, home furnishings, etc.
_______________________________________________________________________________________
Vernon exiting the courthouse on April 25, 2018 - the day of his release
Vernon and his family on the day of his release Vernon celebrating his release with loved ones and his legal team“I believe that there are as many non-DNA innocence cases as there are DNA cases, if not more. This is why it is vital that lawyers do their job and respect justice.”
– Vernon Horn
See the memorandum that Vernon’s lawyers submitted to Vernon’s federal court judge in April of 2018 here.
Organizer and beneficiary
Alison Gifford
Organizer
New Haven, CT
Vernon Horn
Beneficiary
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