New York University Review of Law and Social Change
1990/1991
Challenging the Death Penalty: A Colloquium
Part Two
INEVITABLE ERROR: WRONGFUL NEW YORK STATE HOMICIDE CONVICTIONS, 1965-1988
by Marty I. Rosenbaum

Excerpt

Luis Marin was convicted in Westchester County of twenty-six counts of murder arising from a 1980 hotel fire.1 Marin successfully moved the trial court for a post-verdict order dismissing the indictments based on insufficiency of the trial evidence. The prosecution appealed. The Appellate Division and Court of Appeals upheld the trial court order of dismissal.2 It was held that having an empty gasoline container and siphon in his car were insufficient facts to support the inference that Marin had set the fire. In sum, the evidence presented at trial was simply insufficient to sustain the charges. “[T]he loss of life at the Stouffer’s Inn fire was a tragedy of staggering proportion ... However, the tragedy would be compounded by the conviction and imprisonment of a person whose criminal responsibility for that tragedy has not been proven.”3

Footnotes

1. See People v. Marin, 102 A.D.2d 14, 15, 478 N.Y.S.2d 650, 651 (2d Dep’t 1984), aff’d, 65 N.Y.2d 741, 481 N.E.2d 556, 492 N.Y.S.2d 16 (in which the trial order dismissing Marin’s indictment was affirmed).
 
2. Id.
 
3. Id. at 33, 478 N.Y.S.2d at 662.