Imprisoned in a “miscarriage of justice,” a Hawaii man has been released from prison after DNA evidence exonerated him.
Behind bars for 30 years, Gordon Cordeiro’s first desire was to visit the grave of his mother, who died of ALS just before he was arrested.
Cordeiro was freed based on advocacy from the Hawaiian Innocence Project, which seeks to free those wrongfully convicted by more closely examining the evidence of settled cases.
Cordeiro stood two trials in 1994 for the murder of Tim Baisdell during a drug deal-turned-robbery on the island of Maui. The first ended in a hung jury, with only one juror voting to convict, while the second saw him convicted and sentenced to life without possibility of parole.
There were tears in the courtroom when Judge Kristin Hammam ordered the suspect released.
“He cried, we all cried,” Kenneth Lawson, co-director of the Hawaii Innocence Project, told CBS News. “He believed that he was going to be exonerated … but having gone through two trials, you lose faith in the justice system. To finally hear a judge say, ‘I’m vacating your convictions,’ that’s when it hit him.”
“The police botched this case from the beginning and turned the No. 1 suspect into the state’s star witness, resulting in a 30-plus-year nightmare and miscarriage of justice for Gordon and his family,” Lawson added.
According to court documents filed by Cordeiro’s attorneys seen by CBS, the state sought to prosecute Cordeiro despite the 22-year-old having four alibis, by relying on four jailhouse informants motivated by promises of reduced sentences, something which the Innocence Project described as “prosecutorial misconduct.”
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Blaisdell had gone to an area of Maui called “Skid Row” to buy a pound of cannabis with a man named Michael Freitas. Blaisdell was found dead in a ravine the following day, and Freitas, the “No.1 suspect” according to Lawson, altered his story several times before shifting blame onto Cordeiro and becoming the “star witness.”
A DNA profile of an unidentified person was found on the inside pockets of Blaisdell’s jeans, which when combined with other DNA findings, put the possibility of Cordeiro’s involvement squarely within reasonable doubt.
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To put Cordeiro’s nightmare into perspective, he walked into the courthouse with a pager. “Now everybody’s on their phones,” he told Fox News Digital.
He visited the grave of his mother on Friday, February 21st, in Makawao, Hawaii, hours after a judge ordered his release, with the AP reporting he thanked her for watching over him. His mother died of ALS at age 49.
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