Twenty-year old Armond McCloud, Jr. was arrested in 1994 and charged with the fatal shooting of Kei Sunada, a 22-year old Japanese immigrant, in Lefrak City, an apartment complex in Queens where McCloud lived. In 1996, he was convicted and sentenced to 25 years to life. The evidence against McCloud consisted of a confession which he had immediately recanted and insisted was both coerced and false. In the summer of 2020, the CWC was contacted by Bryce Benjet, the Director of the Queens County District Attorney’s Conviction Integrity Unit. Bryce asked the CWC to work together with his office to jointly reinvestigate McCloud’s claims of actual innocence. CWC Co-Directors Laura Nirider and Steve Drizin invited Laura Cohen, a Clinical Professor at Rutgers Law School and the Director of the New Jersey Innocence Project, and her students to work on the case. The Rutgers/Northwestern team soon discovered that the same detective who had coerced McCloud into falsely confessing had obtained false confessions in several other cases, including the Central Park Four case. The team also employed a crime scene reconstruction expert who created a three-dimensional representation of the scene and the trajectory of the bullet. The reconstruction proved that the description of the crime in McCloud’s confession – one fed to McCloud and other witnesses by the detective — was “impossible.” On August 24, 2023, in a courtroom filled with Northwestern and Rutgers students who had worked on the case, Queen’s Supreme Court Justice Michelle Johnson, granted the CIU’s motion to vacate McCloud’s conviction. McCloud was exonerated. He had spent a total of 29 years in prison.
Numerous NULS students worked on the case, including Jamie Hwang, Chris Lee, Kathryn Ryan, Ian Flink, Andrew Bjorkland, Lorellee Kampschnieder, Zach Coburn and Matt Danaher. McCloud’s exoneration was the third in which Northwestern students and faculty had collaborated. The others were David McCallum (2014) and Huwe Burton (2019).
Pictured: Armond and Andrew Bjorkland on Exoneration Day.