Project and content management for Contemporary Authors volumes
WORK TITLE: Stand Tall
WORK NOTES:
PSEUDONYM(S):
BIRTHDATE: 1959
WEBSITE:
CITY: Fishkill
STATE: NY
COUNTRY:
NATIONALITY:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dewey_Bozella * https://www.innocenceproject.org/dewey-bozella-exonerated-after-26-years/ * http://www.denverpost.com/2017/01/12/book-review-standing-tall-dewey-bozella/
RESEARCHER NOTES:
PERSONAL
Born 1959, in Brooklyn, NY; married Trena.
EDUCATION:Mercy College, bachelor’s degree; New York Theological Seminary, master’s degree.
ADDRESS
CAREER
Boxer and motivational speaker. Previously, taught boxing at a gym in Newburgh, NY.
AWARDS:Arthus Ashe Courage Award, ESPN, 2011.
WRITINGS
SIDELIGHTS
Dewey Bozella is a boxer and motivational speaker. Previously, he taught boxing to youths at a gym in Newburgh, New York.
In 1983, Bozella was convicted for a murder he did not commit. He spent twenty-six years in prison before ultimately being released after lawyers from the Innocence Project took on his case. Bozella discusses his early life, his time in prison, his boxing career, and his new life after being released in the 2016 book Stand Tall: Fighting for My Life, Inside and Outside the Ring. Tamara Jones collaborated with him on the book. Bozella recalls his difficult childhood, with an abusive father who killed Bozella’s mother, who was pregnant at the time. Bozella and his siblings were put in group homes and in foster care. He began committing petty crimes as a teen. After serving time in a juvenile facility, Bozella moved to upstate New York to straighten out his life. Soon after, an elderly woman was found dead, and Bozella was arrested for her murder. He told Rebecca A. Binder, writer on the Amherst College Web site: “I was not a goody-goody. … I did a lot of things that I wasn’t proud of. The cops were definitely trying to find a way to get me off the street. But I was never a murderer.” In the same interview with Binder, he recalled being convicted, stating: “When the case came back. … I thought I’d just walk in and walk out. You had nothing in 1977, you have nothing now, what’s the problem? When I was convicted, I fell to the floor and started crying, screaming that I didn’t do it. When I heard the words, ‘life sentence,’ I thought: ‘Don’t take my life. That’s all I’ve got.’ I was angry and I was bitter—I was a man with no mission. For years, I didn’t do anything.” Later, he became a winning boxer within his prison.
Recalling his first meeting with Ross Firsenbaum, his Innocence Project lawyer, Bozella remarked: “When Ross walked in. … I noticed that he was young. You think of lawyers as being older, having white hair. But I didn’t care about that; I didn’t care that he was a younger guy. What I cared about was that Ross was listening to me, that he believed me and that he could help me. He sat across from me and he asked questions, and they were the right questions. I knew right away that he was a smart man, a caring man, that he understood and that he’d do whatever he could for me.” Firsenbaum was successful in achieving Bozella’s release. Afterward, he received an award from ESPN and won a major boxing match. In an interview with Leander Schaerlaeckens, contributor to the Vice Web site, Bozella stated: “I’m finding happiness. I’ve got my next ten years of my plan, and once I get that straightened out, I can actually start finding that love, peace, happiness and joy in my life. I’m at the crossroads. When my turn is going to come, it’s going to come. I’m ready.”
A critic in Kirkus Reviews described the volume as “a harrowing and inspiring account of fighting a nearly lifelong battle against injustice.” A Publishers Weekly reviewer suggested: “His writing is concise, never self-congratulatory or self-pitying, and always graceful.” Gregory L. Moore, contributor to the online version of the Denver Post, remarked: “If nothing else, his book demonstrates that life really is about having the strength to make good choices even when all hope appears lost.” Moore added: “Stand Tall is not a great book, but it is riveting in parts, especially when Bozella depicts his chilling life in prison and when he chooses self-respect over expediency. That he emerged with a loving heart, a devoted wife and his sanity is perhaps his biggest triumph of all.”
BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
Kirkus Reviews, October 1, 2016, review of Stand Tall: Fighting for My Life, Inside and Outside the Ring.
Publishers Weekly, July 11, 2016, review of Stand Tall, p. 52.
ONLINE
Amherst College Web site, https://www.amherst.edu/ (summer, 2010), Rebecca A. Binder, author interview.
Denver Post Online, http://www.denverpost.com/ (January 12, 2017), Gregory L. Moore, review of Stand Tall.
Innocence Project Web site, https://www.innocenceproject.org/ (July 27, 2011), article about author.
New York Times Book Review Online, https://www.nytimes.com/ (December 9, 2016), Kristal Brent, review of Stand Tall.
New York Times Online, https://www.nytimes.com/ (January 12, 2015), Joseph Berger, article about author; (February 11, 2015), Joseph Berger, article about author.
Vice Online, https://sports.vice.com/ (September 25, 2015), Leander Schaerlaeckens, author interview.
LC control no.: no2017006787
Descriptive conventions:
rda
Personal name heading:
Bozella, Dewey, 1959-
Located: Upstate New York (N.Y.)
Birth date: 1959
Field of activity: Public speaking Boxing
Profession or occupation:
Authors Motivational speakers Boxers (Sports)
Found in: Bozella, Dewey. Stand tall, 2016: t.p. (Dewey Bozella)
About the author page (Dewey Bozella is a motivational
speaker who works with at-risk youth, lives in upstate
New York)
Wikipedia, Jan. 17, 2017 (Dewey Bozella was born in 1959,
former amateur boxer)
Associated language:
eng
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Dewey Bozella
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Dewey Bozella
Bozella12.JPG
Dewey Bozella in 2012
Born 1959 (age 57–58)
Residence Fishkill, New York
Nationality United States American
Known for Served 26 years in prison for murder, conviction overturned after being proved innocent
Dewey Bozella (born 1959) is a former amateur boxer who is best known for being imprisoned for a conviction which was eventually overturned. Convicted in 1983 for the murder of an elderly woman, Bozella served 26 years in prison before his conviction was overturned in 2009.[1]
Contents
1 Youth
2 Alleged offense and wrongful conviction
2.1 Prison life
3 Life after prison
3.1 2011 ESPY Awards
3.2 Professional debut
3.3 Appearances
4 Professional boxing record
5 See also
6 References
7 External links
Youth
Bozella was nine when his father beat his pregnant mother so badly that she later died. He was a witness to the beating. His father ran away and never returned. One of his brothers was stabbed to death, another was shot and killed, and a third died of AIDS.[2] At 20, Bozella was sentenced to nearly three years in prison for attempted robbery.[3]
Alleged offense and wrongful conviction
In 1977, 92-year-old Emma Crapser was murdered in her Poughkeepsie, New York apartment. Police alleged that Crapser walked in on a burglary that was being committed by a then 18-year-old Bozella, who then killed her. In 1983, Bozella was convicted of murder and sentenced to 20 years to life in prison. He continued to claim he was innocent and refused to admit to the crimes he was alleged to have committed, even when in front of the parole board, who denied him parole on four occasions. Bozella contacted the Innocence Project, who agreed to examine his case. When the Innocence Project discovered that there was no DNA evidence remaining to be tested, they referred the case to WilmerHale. Lawyers at WilmerHale discovered new evidence that had been suppressed by prosecutors showing Bozella was in fact innocent and had been framed. Supreme Court Justice James Rooney of Putnam County agreed that the Dutchess County District Attorney, John King, had failed to disclose crucial evidence which would have proved Bozella's innocence.[1][4][5] On October 28, 2009, Bozella was finally released from prison after serving 26 years.[6][7]
Prison life
Bozella was imprisoned in New York State, including at Sing Sing Correctional Facility in Ossining, New York. While incarcerated at Sing Sing, he became the prison's light heavyweight boxing champion.[5]
Life after prison
On October 28, 2009, after being released from custody, Bozella began working with youths at a local gym in Newburgh, New York. At the gym, which is now closed, he worked with teenagers teaching them about boxing and about the dangers of joining gangs. He frequently visits various organizations to deliver speeches about his life experiences. Bozella is a frequent sight at New York City area boxing cards.
Bozella currently lives in Fishkill, New York with his wife, Trena. While accepting an award in 2011, he told an ESPN reporter that he still dreamed of having at least one professional fight one day. In 2011, boxing champion Bernard Hopkins helped Bozella's dream come true.[5]
2011 ESPY Awards
On July 13, 2011, Bozella's life was chronicled in ESPN's annual ESPY Award show in the Nokia Theatre at L.A. Live in Los Angeles, where he was honored as the recipient of the Arthur Ashe Courage Award.[8]
Professional debut
On October 15, 2011, at the age of 52 years, Bozella won his professional boxing debut[9] on the undercard of the Bernard Hopkins vs Chad Dawson match-up at Staples Center in Los Angeles, California, against Larry Hopkins by a 4-round unanimous decision.[10][11] Bozella had been training with Bernard Hopkins in Philadelphia.[12] President Barack Obama telephoned Bozella to wish him luck in the upcoming fight.[13]
Appearances
In 2012, Bozella was a guest at the Ring 10 Veteran's Boxing Foundation 2nd Annual Fundraiser where he credited boxing and the champions with whom he shared the dais for saving his life.[14][15]
Dutchess County to Pay Brooklyn Native $7.5 Million for Wrongful Murder Conviction
By JOSEPH BERGERFEB. 11, 2015
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Dewey Bozella in 2011. Mr. Bozella spent 26 years in prison for a murder he did not commit. Credit Jessica Kourkounis for The New York Times
The prize for this fight will be $7.5 million, but Dewey Bozella did not win it in a boxing ring.
In 2009, a State Supreme Court judge found that the Brooklyn-born Mr. Bozella had been wrongfully convicted of the murder in 1977 of a 92-year-old woman in Poughkeepsie, N.Y.
During his 26 years in prison Mr. Bozella sharpened his boxing skills, became the light heavyweight champion of Sing Sing and, after his release, won his only professional match in Los Angeles, at age 52.
As a free man, Mr. Bozella sued Dutchess County — which includes Poughkeepsie — and its officials in Federal District Court in White Plains for wrongfully locking him up, seeking $25 million in restitution. Hours before a jury was to be picked for a civil trial in early January, the county agreed to a settlement whose sum was not revealed at the time.
This week, the County Legislature voted to authorize the payment of $7.5 million to Mr. Bozella, now 55. It did not, however, admit any fault or liability on the part of any of its officials.
Mr. Bozella’s lawyer, Ross E. Firsenbaum, had contended that prosecutors and police officers had withheld four pieces of significant evidence from the defense that pointed to another man as the murderer.
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To pay for the settlement, the county voted to issue bonds that will be paid back over five years by county taxpayers. The $7.5 million would otherwise have been a big chunk of a county budget that for 2015 has been estimated at roughly $169 million.
Neither Mr. Bozella nor his lawyers would comment on the award because the wrongful incarceration lawsuit will not technically be withdrawn until the money is turned over, which could take several more weeks. Because Mr. Bozella’s lawyers at the firm WilmerHale took his case as a pro bono project, the entire $7.5 million will be paid to Mr. Bozella.
Mr. Bozella was twice convicted — in 1983 and at a 1990 retrial — of beating and suffocating the woman, Emma Crasper, when she returned home from a night of church bingo. He was sentenced to life. A judge later found that prosecutors relied on the testimony of two men who changed their stories to get favorable treatment for their own crimes.
The judge also found that prosecutors did not turn over to the defense crucial evidence, including a neighbor’s account of hearing rustling in the alleyway near a window where the police had found the fingerprint of a man named Donald Wise who had been convicted of killing an elderly woman in similar fashion. Prosecutors always contended that Mr. Bozella had walked through the building’s front door.
After 26 Years in Prison, Settling a Wrongful Conviction
By JOSEPH BERGERJAN. 12, 2015
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Dewey Bozella, who spent 26 years in prison for a crime he did not commit, arrived at Federal District Court in White Plains on Monday morning with his wife, Trena Bozella. Credit Robert Stolarik for The New York Times
WHITE PLAINS — Dewey Bozella was once the light-heavyweight boxing champion of Sing Sing, a distinction he won while serving 26 years in prison for a murder for which he was eventually exonerated.
More recently, he stepped into the ring for another fight, a legal one that sought $25 million for wrongful incarceration, and it concluded with a technical knockout. He reached a tentative settlement with Dutchess County, which will pay him an undisclosed sum, though it will make no admission of wrongdoing, according to lawyers familiar with the case.
After the settlement was announced in court Monday morning, Mr. Bozella hugged his lawyers and his wife, Trena.
“It’s a steppingstone in the right direction where I can move on with my life,” he said.
Mr. Bozella, a sturdily built six-footer, strode up the steps of Federal District Court here Monday for what was originally supposed to be a civil jury trial of his claim that he was put in prison for a crime he did not commit — the brutal murder in 1977 of a 92-year-old woman, Emma Crapser, who came home from a night of church bingo while a burglar was inside her home in Poughkeepsie. Mr. Bozella’s lawyers contend that prosecutors and police officers for the county withheld four pieces of evidence from his defense lawyers at the time — so-called Brady material — that would have pointed to another man as the murderer.
Continue reading the main story
The county responded that it had entirely legitimate reasons for not turning over the evidence. The trial was to be presided over by District Judge Cathy Seibel, who had indicated in pretrial papers that Mr. Bozella had a strong argument that some of the evidence might have helped his case.
Photo
Mr. Bozella, right, fought his first and only professional bout against Larry Hopkins in 2011. Credit Richard Vogel/Associated Press
Lawyers for Mr. Bozella and the county negotiated the tentative settlement over the weekend. Judge Seibel announced in court Monday that lawyers informed her Saturday evening that “an agreement in principle” had been reached. The County Legislature is to vote on the monetary amount of damages within 60 days.
Mr. Bozella, 55, was born in Coney Island, Brooklyn, and raised in group foster care after his father killed his mother. When the Crapser murder took place, he was 18 and already had a history of petty crime. He was twice convicted — first in 1983 and then at a retrial in 1990 — of beating Ms. Crapser, tying her up with an electrical cord and then suffocating her.
“I fell to the floor and started crying, screaming that I didn’t do it,” Mr. Bozella told a writer for the alumni magazine at Amherst College, which one of his lawyers attended, about his 1983 conviction. “When I heard the words ‘life sentence’ I thought, ‘Don’t take my life. That’s all I got.’ ”
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The prosecution, a judge later found, relied mainly on the testimony of two men with criminal histories who changed their stories to get favorable treatment in their own cases. Prosecutors also failed to turn over favorable evidence that might have cleared Mr. Bozella, including testimony from a neighbor who said that on the night of the murder she had heard garbage cans rustling in the alleyway, near a window of the Crapser apartment where the police had found a fingerprint of a man named Donald Wise. Mr. Wise had been convicted of killing another elderly woman in the same neighborhood and in the same manner. The location was important because prosecutors said Mr. Bozella had walked through the building’s front door, not through an alleyway.
In 2007, Mr. Bozella contacted the Innocence Project, which seeks out cases of improper convictions, and it asked Ross E. Firsenbaum, a lawyer at WilmerHale, to handle the case pro bono. He questioned a retired police lieutenant who had been the lead investigator and discovered that he had kept a file on the Crapser case because he felt uncomfortable about the way it had been handled. The file included witness accounts that had not been turned over to Mr. Bozella’s original lawyer. In 2009, the State Supreme Court concluded that Mr. Bozella had been wrongfully convicted, saying, “The court is firmly and soundly convinced of the meritorious nature of the defendant’s application.”
While in prison, Mr. Bozella earned a bachelor’s degree from Mercy College and a master’s from New York Theological Seminary. He married another inmate’s sister. He also boxed in the building that once contained Sing Sing’s electric chair but had been converted to a ring, later telling reporters that boxing gave him the discipline to make it through prison. He became the prison’s light-heavyweight champion, and after his conviction he taught boxing at a gym in Newburgh, N.Y., and was offered a shot at a professional bout.
In October 2011 he fought his first and only professional match in Los Angeles. He was 52, and officials believed was he was the oldest fighter ever licensed to box in California. He won a unanimous decision.
QUOTED: "I'm finding happiness. I've got my next 10 years of my plan, and once I get that straightened out, I can actually start finding that love, peace, happiness and joy in my life. I'm at the crossroads. When my turn is going to come, it's going to come. I'm ready."
September 25, 2015
Leander Schaerlaeckens
Dewey Bozella's Next Challenge: Life On the Outside
VICE is exploring America's prison system in the week leading up to our special report with President Obama for HBO. Tune in Sunday, September 27, at 9 PM EST, to see his historic first-ever presidential visit to a federal prison.
Dewey Bozella's life has only just begun. He has a 20-year plan. He wants to be an actor. And a director. Action films. Drama series. All of it. And he wants to open a boxing gym to help kids near the troubled cities where he lives, so that they might avoid wasting half their life in jail like he did. But plans are complicated. They don't always turn out the way they should. Things can go astray, like they did once for Dewey.
At 23, he went to prison and didn't re-emerge until he was 50, finally exonerated and vindicated. Twenty-six and a half years, gone — eight more than Rubin "Hurricane" Carter did, by the way. He walks with a limp but retains the vigor and energy of a young man.
Read More: Golfing With the Guards At Angola Penitentiary
Dewey is 57 now. His head is shaved, and his mouth is framed by a pencil mustache and a trimmed soul patch. His eyes are deep-sunken, but piercing. His voice is leaden, except for when he lets out the occasional squeaky giggle. His teeth are immaculate — maybe done. He's still built like a fighter. His t-shirt has an image of praying hands wrapped in a rosary.
It's been four years since Dewey was given the Arthur Ashe Courage Award at the ESPYs. Almost as long since he, at age 52 and a with bad hip and a bum shoulder, won a unanimous decision against 30-year-old Larry Hopkins in his only professional boxing bout, fulfilling a lifelong dream of proving he was more than just the light heavyweight prison champion at the infamous Sing Sing Correctional Facility. It's been three and a half years since ESPN aired a 30 for 30 film about him.
In a month, it'll be six years since he was finally set free, cleared of the murder he didn't commit. It's been six years of adjusting and reintegrating into society.
"I can't make it back up," he said. "It's lost. All I can try to do is be happy. And move forward. I want to do more. I want to be recognized as more than a guy who got up out of prison. There's more to Dewey than just that."
Dewey spent 26 and a half years at Sing Sing Correctional Facility. Photo via WikiCommons
On June 14, 1977, 92-year-old Emma Crapser was attacked in her home in Poughkeepsie, New York. Five feet of cloth was stuffed down her throat and tied around her mouth until she suffocated and died. An 18-year-old Dewey, along with two others, were arrested and charged with murder.
Dewey was known as a troublemaker, but nobody could have imagined him capable of such a horrifying crime.
When he was nine, he had watched his father beat his pregnant mother to death and then run from their Brooklyn home, never to return, sending him and his nine siblings into the maw of foster care. He saw a brother stabbed to death in a fight; another shot through the head and killed. Dewey was no angel himself. He stole and robbed. He beat up people sometimes. But he wasn't a murderer.
Initially he was not indicted on the murder charges due to a lack of evidence. But six years later, in 1983, he was arrested for the same crime. Two convicted felons pinned the murder on him in exchange for their own early release. One of the inmates' brothers backed him up to help secure his deal. That was all the prosecution had, testimony given in exchange for freedom. Dewey had done two and a half years for attempted robbery by then, but that still didn't make him a murderer. A jury found him guilty anyway. Twenty to life.
Dewey had begun turning his life around after his initial stint in jail, giving up the petty crime. But back in prison, he was bitter and acted out. "I was walking around, everything that was negative I was involved in, and that's the truth," he says. "Life didn't mean shit to me. I didn't care if I lived or died. I didn't give a shit. I didn't exist. I was just a walking number: 84AO172."
But he soon decided to surround himself with better people and make the most of his lot. He got his GED. "I went and benefited from it. I bettered myself," Dewey says. "I said to myself, 'What are you going to offer society? Because society don't owe me shit. So what are you going to do about it? Get your shit together. You're walking around mad, angry and frustrated. That's not going to get you anywhere.'"
Dewey had gone to Floyd Patterson's boxing camp upstate in his early 20s. In prison, he began boxing again. He fought at Sing Sing's so-called Death House, where the ring stood in the same spot where an electric chair had once stood. While his case worked its way through the courts, he kept winning in the ring. His only loss came against New York City Golden Gloves champion Lou Del Valle, who was brought in for a special fight. Dewey lost after he got a cut on his face, but it was close. He'd held his own against the first man who would ever knock down Roy Jones Jr.
Dewey got a re-trial in 1990. His original conviction was overturned. The prosecution knew its case was weak. This time around, the jury was informed that the original witnesses had been offered a deal, and that the brother had since recanted. So Dewey was offered a deal: 7-14 years for manslaughter, rather than murder, with credit for the six and a half years he had already served. All he had to do was enter a guilty plea and he could go before the parole board in six short months.
Dewey said no.
He was offered another deal, which allowed him to go home on time served. All he had to do was enter a guilty plea.
Dewey said no.
He was 31 then and felt confident he'd be acquitted anyway. He wasn't going to admit to something he didn't do. But a jury inexplicably found him guilty again and his original 20-to-life sentence was reinstated.
In 2003, after his 20-year-term was up, Dewey went to the parole board. If only he'd repent for his crime, he could go home. He was married by then, having met his wife Trena, another inmate's sister, in the visitors' room. He'd earned a bachelor's in counseling and a master's in theology. He had earned all 52 certificates the prison system offered.
Dewey refused. And he did so again in 2005, 2007 and 2009, when given the same choice.
The Innocence Project had taken up his case after he'd written them every week for four years. But they found out evidence in the case had been thrown out in a routine cleanup, so there was no DNA to test. New York law firm WilmerHale took Dewey's fairly hopeless cause on pro bono. A pair of young, inexperienced lawyers tracked down the lead detective from the investigation, who was 18 years retired by then. He had kept just one file from his career: Dewey's. It had never sat well with him and he figured somebody would come knocking someday. The file contained evidence and interviews that contradicted the testimony given by the convicts. None of Dewey's lawyers had ever seen this stuff, nor, needless to say, had the jury. They even discovered that somebody else had confessed to the murder on tape.
Dewey went back to court. He heard that his conviction had been overturned a second time and that the prosecution wouldn't be pursuing charges for a third trial. He sat there, stunned, shedding a single tear before hugging his wife.
"That's what God wanted; it ain't what I wanted," Dewey says now of his time in jail. "That's what He wanted for me. I gotta look at it like that. It could have been another way. I could have been dead. Who knows."
"It took me six months to realize I was free," Dewey says.
Once out of jail, he'd often go to a mall and order Chinese food from the food court. And in those moments, he'd find himself a seat in the back, like he always did. A prison habit. Fewer angles to be attacked from. "And I realized, something just got over me, I said to myself, 'Yo, man. What are you doing? You're free. You're absolutely free. You don't gotta do this shit no more.' I stood up and went over to the middle of the room and sat down. And I bust out laughing. People must have thought I was crazy."
Imagine being buried in a time capsule and crawling back out 26 years later. That's the challenge Dewey faced. "The world was different," he says. "The people were different. I had to learn how to deal with society again, dealing with people, dealing with crowds, dealing with kids. I was computer illiterate. There were a lot of things I needed to learn. They no longer did interviews to get a job; you had to do it over a computer. I had to learn how to drive at the age of 50 years old. The buses were strange. I had to learn how to do everything all over again."
He volunteered at a boxing gym for a while, working with young kids from a bad area of Newburgh. Then he got a job helping ex-offenders get to their probation officers and find work. Talking to them was his therapy. And then, out of nowhere, he was nominated for the ESPY.
After winning the award, Golden Boy Promotions got him a fight on the undercard of a Bernard Hopkins bout. On the second attempt, Oscar de la Hoya's team got him in sufficient shape to pass the California licensing exam. He is believed to be the oldest boxer cleared for a pro fight in the state's history.
In the last few years, Dewey has been reading, and going to the mall and to the movies. He gets a little bored sometimes. He's finishing up his autobiography, Standing Tall, which should come out next year. There'll be a book tour. He still volunteers at a few gyms. Sometimes he trains young boxers. He put on a boxing program for kids in Newburgh last summer, to keep them busy and focused. Maybe it was more to keep himself busy and focused, perhaps.
In January, he settled with Dutchess County for $7.5 million. "It didn't change anything," he says. "I'm still Dewey. I'm good. I'm comfortable. I appreciate it – thank you, Lord. Now I'm thinking of who I'm giving my money to when I die."
He's got a new fight on his hands. Taxes. Perversely, the system that gave him $7.5 million for his wrongful conviction and incarceration now wants to take back half the money it gave him as compensation for its mistake.
We talk at a diner a few miles from Dewey's house. He dumps so much sugar into his coffee it almost turns to sludge — "That's what keeps me hyped." He takes occasional bites from a slice of cheesecake. He showed up in a Dodge Charger. But a $28,000 car is the only luxury he seems to have afforded himself, if you can even call it that.
He doesn't have to worry about money anymore. He's in the middle of his 20-year plan. The first five were for reintegrating; the next five to find meaningful work; five more to do that work; and then another five to prepare for retirement.
Somehow, Dewey isn't mad at the system. "Hell no. Nah. I'm over it. Walking around mad, that ain't gonna get me anywhere. Not gonna help one goddarned bit. I realized that the easier I let it go, the more easy it is for me to adjust my life and move on and be happy. The more I hold onto the bitterness, anger, hate and frustration, the worse I become. I've already been there. I've already done that. I did that at the beginning of my time. Why should I hold onto it? I'm not going to let you have the last part of me. You can't have that part. It belongs to me."
But are you happy, Dewey?
"Happy? No. I'm in between. I'm finding happiness. I've got my next 10 years of my plan, and once I get that straightened out, I can actually start finding that love, peace, happiness and joy in my life. I'm at the crossroads. When my turn is going to come, it's going to come. I'm ready."
07.27.11
Dewey Bozella: Exonerated After 26 Years
Dewey Bozella served 26 years in New York prisons for a crime he didn’t commit before he was cleared and released in 2009.
Bozella was initially arrested for the 1977 burglary and murder of a 92-year-old woman shortly after her attack, but the charges were dropped because there was no evidence linking him to the crime. He was rearrested for the crime 6 years later after 2 inmates, who were released from prison for their cooperation, told prosecutors that Bozella committed the murder. Even though a fingerprint was found at the crime scene that matched another individual who committed a nearly identical crime around the same time, the state went forward with the prosecution. Based solely on the strength of the informants’ testimony, Bozella was convicted. Bozella was given a new trial in 1990, but he was convicted again.
Bozella eventually sought the help of the Innocence Project, which uses DNA testing to exonerate people who have been wrongfully convicted of crimes. Unfortunately, the physical evidence in the case had been destroyed, so DNA testing wouldn’t be possible. Convinced of his Innocence, the Innocence Project persuaded lawyers at WilmerHale to take up his case, and they were able to prove that Dewey was innocent of the crime by uncovering additional evidence that was never turned over to Bozella.
Bozella took up boxing while he was incarcerated at New York’s Sing Sing prison. The sport helped him to channel his anger over being wrongfully convicted. He eventually became the light heavyweight champ of the prison and even got the opportunity to fight Golden Gloves champ Lou Del Valle.
While in prison, Bozella also met his wife Trena and earned a bachelor’s degree from Mercy College and a master’s from New York Theological Seminary. He was a model prisoner but was denied parole several times because he wouldn’t admit that he was guilty of the murder.
Since his release, Bozella has been teaching boxing skills and discipline to young people. His dream is to one day open his own gym. For his triumph over adversity, he was given the 2011 ESPY Arthur Ashe Courage Award.
QUOTED: "I was not a goody-goody. ... I did a lot of things that I wasn’t proud of. The cops were definitely trying to find a way to get me off the street. But I was never a murderer."
"When the case came back. ... I thought I’d just walk in and walk out. You had nothing in 1977, you have nothing now, what’s the problem? When I was convicted, I fell to the floor and started crying, screaming that I didn’t do it. When I heard the words, 'life sentence,' I thought: 'Don’t take my life. That’s all I’ve got.' I was angry and I was bitter—I was a man with no mission. For years, I didn’t do anything."
"When Ross walked in. ... I noticed that he was young. You think of lawyers as being older, having white hair. But I didn’t care about that; I didn’t care that he was a younger guy. What I cared about was that Ross was listening to me, that he believed me and that he could help me. He sat across from me and he asked questions, and they were the right questions. I knew right away that he was a smart man, a caring man, that he understood and that he’d do whatever he could for me."
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"I Was Never a Murderer"
By Rebecca A. Binder '02
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Dewey Bozella wants to be an actor or a director. He’s a 50-year-old man, a former boxer, tall, with close-cut hair and an easy smile. He’s written and performed in several plays, including an adaptation of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest and an original work exploring a prisoner’s hopes and fears. He follows directors Ron Howard (“He makes you think”) and Clint Eastwood (“He got better as he got older”). His favorite movie is Eastwood’s Unforgiven.
Speaking of forgiveness: Bozella’s thought a lot about forgiveness. “How can you ask for forgiveness,” he wonders, “if you can’t forgive?”
Bozella’s been asking himself that question for 27 years. Convicted twice for a murder he did not commit, he went to prison in 1983 and remained there until last year. He spent 22 of those years in Sing Sing, the famous maximum security prison in Ossining, N.Y. For the sake of context: in 1983, Ronald Reagan’s presidency was in its first term, the final episode of M*A*S*H broke television viewership records, Michael Jackson’s “Thriller” music video debuted, and the Baltimore Orioles won the World Series (just ask Bozella, an unabashed Yankees fan, what he thinks about that).
Finally, in October 2009, after the two-year pro bono effort of a team of lawyers led by Ross E. Firsenbaum ’02, Bozella was released. A New York State court vacated the conviction, essentially nullifying it. The judge maintained that Bozella’s constitutional rights had been violated because the prosecution had withheld evidence that could have proved his innocence. For the sake of context: in 2009, Barack Obama assumed the presidency, Michael Jackson’s death led to unprecedented spikes in Internet traffic, and the New York Yankees won the World Series (just ask Firsenbaum, an unabashed Mets fan, what he thinks about that).
Bozella’s childhood was unhappy. Born and raised in the Coney Island section of Brooklyn, Bozella and his 11 brothers and sisters had a rough start. Their father killed their mother, causing the Bozella children to fall into the foster care system. Dewey was placed in a group home, but he kept “running away,” as he describes it, to find and live with his brothers and sisters. The Bozella children ricocheted between thrown-together homes in the Bronx and Queens.
Despite its instability, though, “life was pretty good,” Bozella says, “up until 1977.” That year his brother Ernie, with whom he was living, was killed, and Bozella moved upstate to Poughkeepsie, N.Y., to live with Tony, another brother. Growing up, Bozella had had run-ins with the law. (While his youth record is sealed, public records show a later conviction, in 1980, for attempted robbery.) When Bozella left New York for Poughkeepsie, he took his “street stuff” with him. “Dewey was subjected to a lot of poverty and violence growing up,” says Firsenbaum, a senior associate at Wilmer Cutler Pickering Hale and Dorr (also known as WilmerHale), “and he did a lot of things he’s not proud of. Dewey moved to Poughkeepsie to try to get away from all of that. As soon as he got there, fingers started pointing at him again. He was an outsider, he didn’t really know anyone, and he was in the wrong place at the wrong time.”
Bozella’s version of his life in Poughkeepsie is more succinct. “I was not a goody-goody,” he says. “I did a lot of things that I wasn’t proud of. The cops were definitely trying to find a way to get me off the street.
“But I was never a murderer.”
On June 14, 1977, 92-year-old Emma Crapser spent her evening playing bingo at a Poughkeepsie church. At around 11 that night, she returned home to her first-floor apartment, where she walked in on an apparent burglary. The invaders tied Crapser up before brutally beating her, assaulting her and killing her by stuffing pieces of cloth and sharp metal down her throat.
Eleven days later, acting on a tip, the Poughkeepsie police interviewed local usual suspect Lamar Smith about the killing. Smith told police he knew nothing about it. Four days later, though, on June 29, the police arrested Smith for an unrelated burglary. Smith’s story changed while he was being interrogated for this burglary: he told police he saw an 18-year-old Bozella and Wayne Moseley, another teenage ne’er-do-well, on the porch of Crapser’s apartment building on the night of the murder, and that he watched Bozella force the lock to the building’s front door. Smith’s brother Stanley corroborated that story. The police arrested Bozella and charged him with the murder.
With only the Smith brothers’ story, a 1977 grand jury found there was not enough evidence to charge Bozella with the Crapser murder and refused to indict him. Newspaper articles indicate that William O’Neill, the assistant district attorney heading up the prosecution, anticipated as much. “We just need more evidence,” he told the Poughkeepsie Journal before the grand jury convened. The investigation—and the case against Bozella—went cold. In fact, the pendulum of common sense swung away from Bozella’s involvement. In 1978 a man named Donald Wise and his brother Anthony were convicted of, and sent to prison for, a murder strikingly similar to the Crapser killing. The Wise brothers broke into a house three blocks away from Emma Crapser’s and bound, beat and suffocated Mary King, the elderly woman who lived there.
But in 1983, with the Crapser murder unsolved, and with Wayne Moseley—who, according to Lamar Smith, was Bozella’s accomplice—in prison on another charge, things suddenly changed for Bozella. That March, with nine years left on Moseley’s sentence, the district attorney’s office offered Moseley a deal: in exchange for testifying against Bozella, Moseley would be appointed an attorney who would file a motion to vacate the judgment against Moseley, and the prosecution would not oppose the motion. Essentially, the DA’s office offered Moseley a get-out-of-jail-free card if he fingered Bozella for the Crapser murder.
Now, armed with two pieces of evidence—the Smith brothers’ story and Moseley’s bargained-for testimony—the DA’s office had the police re-arrest Bozella and charge him with murder. After hearing testimony from the Smith brothers and Moseley, a new grand jury indicted Bozella for the Crapser murder. As agreed, Moseley was released. For good measure, Lamar Smith, who at the time of his testimony was also in prison for an unrelated conviction, was also released, a month later, on the district attorney’s favorable recommendation.
A juggernaut quickly formed. In April 1983, while Bozella was awaiting trial, the girlfriend of Anthony Wise—who, with his brother Donald, had been convicted of the similar King murder—told police that Donald Wise had killed Crapser, documents show. Two months later the police matched a fingerprint from the inside ledge of Crapser’s bathroom window to Donald Wise. Still, O’Neill pressed forward with Bozella’s prosecution. At the 1983 trial, O’Neill argued that Bozella had entered Crapser’s apartment through the building’s front door. The defense countered that there was no physical evidence, that there were no credible witnesses and that the fingerprint had to mean that Donald Wise had committed the murder.
Dewey Bozella was convicted of Emma Crapser’s murder in December 1983, on a Friday afternoon. “When the case came back,” Bozella says, “I thought I’d just walk in and walk out. You had nothing in 1977, you have nothing now, what’s the problem? When I was convicted, I fell to the floor and started crying, screaming that I didn’t do it. When I heard the words, ‘life sentence,’ I thought, ‘Don’t take my life. That’s all I’ve got.’
“I was angry and I was bitter—I was a man with no mission. For years, I didn’t do anything.” Eventually another prisoner—“my man Sharif,” Bozella calls him (he doesn’t know his full name)—started bringing him back. “He taught me that the only way I could be an asset to society, even if I was in prison, was to have something, some education, some skills under my cap,” Bozella says. “That’s when my mind started waking up.”
Bozella enrolled in educational and vocational programs and courses offered by the prison. “Dewey had no education,” Firsenbaum marvels. “He had no future, and he was in prison for a murder he didn’t commit. He could have just given up. But instead, he turned himself into an educated man, an empathetic man and a man who’s able to and wants to contribute to society.” Bozella is fiercely proud that, while in prison, he earned his G.E.D., a bachelor’s degree from Mercy College and a master’s from the New York Theological Seminary.
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In this 1986 photo, Dewey Bozella, in Sing Sing prison, warms up for a boxing match. He became Sing Sing's reigning light heavyweight champion.
Bozella even got married during his time in prison. In 1995 he was taking photographs of inmates and their families in the visiting room at Sing Sing when he noticed a woman, another inmate’s sister, and offered to snap a photograph of her with her brother. “And we started talking,” Bozella says. “I told her that I was a boxer (in fact, at the time, Sing Sing’s reigning light heavyweight champion), that I was going to school. She came back to visit me, and we built a relationship little by little.”
“He could talk,” Trena, Bozella’s wife, says. “He walked right up to me, told me all about himself and asked me to visit him. I took a huge risk, but I came back the next week to see him again. About a year after we met, Dewey asked me to marry him.” He did it the old-fashioned way: “I snuck her dad in before I proposed. I wanted to ask him for his blessing.”
Bozella never gave up on fighting his sentence. In 1989 he successfully argued that, during jury selection for the 1983 trial, prosecutors used their preemptory challenges to exclude potential jurors on the basis of race, thus violating his rights under the Equal Protection Clause of the 14th Amendment. Yet while the court granted him a new trial as a result, Bozella was convicted of Crapser’s murder a second time, in 1990.
“One of the hardest things to do is to get someone to believe you,” Bozella says, describing the many letters he wrote to the Innocence Project from his jail cell after his second conviction. In 2007 the organization, which is dedicated to exonerating wrongfully convicted people through DNA testing, took notice. The Innocence Project passed the case on to WilmerHale, and Firsenbaum, who typically practices securities litigation and complex commercial litigation, was immediately interested. “I saw an e-mail about staffing a wrongful conviction case,” Firsenbaum says, “and I jumped at the chance. When I was at Amherst, I saw Peter Neufeld from the Innocence Project present with an exoneree in the Red Room. Since then, I’d wanted to do this kind of work.”
Firsenbaum, a native of Queens, N.Y., who now lives and works in Manhattan, is in many ways a typical young lawyer at a large, powerful firm. He works long hours and frets over his cases. His schedule is especially booked these days, as he and his wife, Amanda (Bronfman) Firsenbaum ’02, recently welcomed their first child, a daughter. Firsenbaum represents major investment banks and financial institutions. A double major at Amherst in psychology and law, jurisprudence and social thought, he says that so far, his practice has exceeded his expectations. And yet, during his day-to-day practice, Firsenbaum thought often about the day he sat in Converse Hall’s Cole Assembly Room listening to the Innocence Project exoneree. “I saw the impact the Innocence Project had on this man’s life,” Firsenbaum says. “Their client was rotting in prison for a crime he had not committed. They saved his life. What greater good could there be than that?” Rebekah Coleman ’02, a close friend of Firsenbaum’s, also remembers the panel. “Ross dragged me to the Red Room,” she says. “And it was absolutely eye-opening. It’s striking to be faced with that kind of injustice.” Firsenbaum had wanted to be a lawyer since his first year at Amherst. “We would sit and watch The Practice together in my room,” Coleman says. “Ross would analyze the case on that week’s episode and pick it apart into all its pieces.”
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Ross Firsenbaum '02 sits beside Bozella in court. "Ross couldn't just put this case down at night and go home," a colleague says. "Dewey's case weighs on you."
“Ross spends long days doing billable work,” says Shauna Friedman, a senior associate at WilmerHale who worked closely with Firsenbaum on Bozella’s case. “But Dewey’s case was personal. Ross couldn’t just put this case down at night and go home. Dewey’s case weighs on you, and his pro bono lawyers were probably his last hope.”
Firsenbaum had only two years of practice under his belt when he took the lead on Bozella’s case, planning out the legal and factual arguments he would need to win a motion to vacate the conviction. Bozella first met Firsenbaum and his team in the winter of 2007, shortly after being transferred to Otisville (N.Y.) Correctional Facility. Bozella describes Otisville as “a retirement home for people who had lost hope,” and to hear Firsenbaum describe the place, it sounds like he agrees. “This was my first time inside a prison, and it was surreal,” Firsenbaum says. “It was a cold, dreary winter day. We left the highway for a one-lane road, and then we passed a small town, and then it was just barren. Then, out of nowhere, this prison just appeared, with nothing around it. We met Dewey in a very small room, and we were sitting on these short wooden chairs, like you’d find in a kindergarten classroom.” Firsenbaum remembers the chairs because Bozella, who is more than 6 feet tall, looked so uncomfortable in his. “Seeing him sitting in that tiny chair in that tiny room, with his legs cooped up beneath him, looking right into my eyes and telling me his story, I’ll never forget it.”
“When Ross walked in,” Bozella says, “I noticed that he was young. You think of lawyers as being older, having white hair. But I didn’t care about that; I didn’t care that he was a younger guy. What I cared about was that Ross was listening to me, that he believed me and that he could help me. He sat across from me and he asked questions, and they were the right questions. I knew right away that he was a smart man, a caring man, that he understood and that he’d do whatever he could for me.”
Firsenbaum and his team began the long and contested process of tracking down, requesting and reviewing old case files, interviewing witnesses and piecing together the answers to 30-year-old questions that had never been fully resolved. The pro bono lawyers filed written request after written request for access to police and DA records. “They fought us on almost every item,” Firsenbaum contends. “We had discussions about narrowing the scope of the subject of the requests, about restrictions they wanted to place on which pieces of a file we could and couldn’t see and about whether such old records were even accessible and hadn’t been destroyed.” Finally invited to review and copy the files they’d requested, the lawyers spent a day hovering over a copy machine in the district attorney’s office in Poughkeepsie. They returned to New York with boxes of materials and reams of paper that they hoped would set Bozella free.
Firsenbaum was surprised when retired police lieutenant Art Regula, the lead investigating officer who had testified against Bozella at both trials, agreed to Firsenbaum’s request for an interview. “Dewey felt that Lt. Regula had a vendetta against him,” Firsenbaum says. “We went in with the mentality that he was our opposition.” Firsenbaum was wholly unprepared for what happened next. Firsenbaum traveled to Regula’s house, sat at his dining room table and started to thumb through his notes. “I hope you don’t mind,” Firsenbaum remembers Regula saying before the lawyer could start on his prepared questions, “but I refreshed my recollection before you got here. I took out my case file and reviewed it.”
Firsenbaum was shocked. “Needless to say,” he laughs, “there weren’t any questions in my outline about him saving a 30-year-old case file.” Firsenbaum proceeded cautiously, asking Regula if it was customary for police officers to save their case files at retirement. “No,” he remembers Regula saying. This was the only file the police officer had kept. There was something wrong with the case, Firsenbaum says Regula told him, and the police officer always thought someone would come around one day asking about it.
Regula has mostly stayed out of the public eye since Bozella’s release. A local newspaper reporter spoke with him on the day after Bozella finally walked free. In the Oct. 29, 2009, interview with the Poughkeepsie Journal, Regula told a reporter that he began to doubt Bozella’s conviction when Bozella flatly rejected a plea bargain shortly before his 1990 trial. When asked if Bozella’s release was just, Regula answered, “Absolutely. Guilty or not, he served more time [than most other convicted murderers].”
Inside Regula’s case file—and in records and on tape recordings that they collected from the police department and DA’s office—Firsenbaum and his team recovered four critical pieces of evidence, none of which had been disclosed by the prosecution to Bozella’s original lawyers and all of which contributed to the plain-as-day conclusion of Bozella’s innocence.
First, Firsenbaum’s team found statements made by Emma Crapser’s upstairs neighbors during the original investigation of her murder. The statements shed serious doubt on the prosecution’s theory at trial that Bozella had broken into Crapser’s apartment through the building’s front door. In fact, the statements made clear, people were leaving and entering the building through its front door over the course of the entire night of the murder. To a man, none of them saw Bozella, none of them heard anything and none of them noticed anything unusual about the supposedly broken-in front door.
Second, Regula’s file gave additional weight to the defense’s theory at trial: that Donald Wise had broken into Crapser’s apartment through the bathroom window, in an alley next to the building. In an affidavit that Firsenbaum used to support his argument to overturn the conviction, Regula stated that during the police investigation, a next-door neighbor told officers she heard the garbage cans in the alley—located right underneath Crapser’s bathroom window—rustling on the night of the murder. The neighbor’s observation was never put in writing and was never part of the district attorney’s report.
Third, knowing that Donald Wise had been convicted of the similar Mary King murder, Firsenbaum pored over the King file, where he found a report on a third, similar attack that had occurred in the same time span and that police had also linked to Wise. The police had used the third attack to try to show that Wise used a common modus operandi in carrying out the King murder. Firsenbaum wondered why, if police had linked Wise to the King murder and to the third attack, they didn’t extend that logic to exculpate Bozella and shift the spotlight onto Wise.
Fourth, and most important, Firsenbaum found a critical tape recording in the King file. As Bozella’s defense had noted in trial, Wise left a fingerprint on the inside ledge of Crapser’s window. As it turned out, a man named Saul Holland was interrogated during the King investigation, and that interrogation was taped. Listening to the tape, Firsenbaum heard Holland say that Wise had recruited him as an accomplice for the King murder, assuring Holland that he “had done this before and gotten away with it,” according to Firsenbaum, who says that Wise then described to Holland the entire Crapser murder. On the tape, though, as soon as Holland begins to relay what Wise said about Crapser, that the interrogating officer interrupts. “We don’t want to get into that,” the interrogating officer tells Holland, according to Firsenbaum, “because we’re liable to get confused.” Armed with this material, Firsenbaum filed his motion to vacate Bozella’s conviction in April 2009, arguing that the prosecution had violated Bozella’s constitutional rights by failing to disclose the four pieces of exculpatory evidence. The Dutchess County Court ruled on Firsenbaum’s motion on Oct. 14, 2009.
“Upon a thorough and careful review of the record,” the extensive October opinion reads, “the court, without reservation, is firmly and soundly convinced of the meritorious nature of the defendant’s application.” The court called Firsenbaum’s legal arguments and the uncovered evidence “compelling, indeed overwhelming,” and vacated Bozella’s conviction. The district attorney chose not to charge him with Emma Crapser’s murder a third time, and two weeks later, Bozella was a free man. “Justice had been served, and I was grateful to have been a part of it,” Firsenbaum says.
“Ross is an incredibly thorough lawyer,” colleague Shauna Friedman says. “He thinks about details very carefully, and he doesn’t miss anything. Here, the tiniest details about what a witness said 30 years ago made a huge difference.”
Firsenbaum’s work for Bozella isn’t over yet. On June 24, 2010, Bozella, represented by Firsenbaum, filed a $25 million civil lawsuit in federal court, alleging that Dutchess County, the City of Poughkeepsie, William O’Neill and Robert DeMattio—the detective who interrogated Saul Holland—all violated Bozella’s constitutional rights.
The lawsuit alleges that county and city policies and customs promoted and allowed illegal and unconstitutional practices, including disregarding Bozella’s right to review evidence that eventually set him free. Investigators received no formal training in the applicable law, the suit claims, and therefore, Bozella argues, he fell victim to individual interpretation of the law by different investigators. The lawsuit states that the county and city maintained a policy of destroying notes taken while investigating a crime—a violation of state law that led to the destruction of evidence that had the potential to prove Bozella’s innocence, according to the suit. Also, the lawsuit claims, there was no mechanism to ensure that evidence collected in one investigation—here, the King murder—was cross-checked against evidence in other crimes—here, the Crapser murder.
The suit claims that O’Neill “initiated and continued the criminal prosecution of Mr. Bozella without probable cause or other legal justification, suppressed evidence exculpating Mr. Bozella and incriminating Donald Wise, failed to investigate known exculpatory leads, and maliciously abused legal process.” Specifically, the lawsuit alleges that O’Neill, among other things, failed to link the King murder and Wise’s third assault to the Crapser murder, failed to tell the grand jury that the fingerprint on Crapser’s bathroom window belonged to Wise and failed to go after Wise for the Crapser murder.
O’Neill told the Poughkeepsie Journal in late June that he did not believe Bozella’s claims had any merit. On June 27, 2010, in an interview about the lawsuit, the newspaper quoted O’Neill as saying, “I’m satisfied with the verdicts [convicting Bozella]. I always was, and I’ve seen nothing to change my mind.”
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Just freed, Bozella leaves court with his wife, Trena, whom he met and married while in prison. "I used to think the world owed me something," he says.
“When I left prison, they didn’t give me a gold watch or anything,” Bozella says. “In fact, I had to give back all my state-owned clothes. All I had left to wear was a T-shirt and some orange jeans. Ross brought me a suit to wear the very next day.”
Watching them together, it’s clear that Firsenbaum and Bozella have a strong bond and a mutual respect that goes beyond their attorney-client relationship. Bozella is open and engaging, but he’s also slightly awkward. When Firsenbaum walks into the room, though, Bozella lights up. He’ll leap from his chair, bound over to Firsenbaum, pump his hand in a hearty handshake and then give him a bear hug. He’ll introduce Firsenbaum to anyone within earshot of his booming voice, and he’ll beam as his lawyer makes the rounds. As Bozella embraces him, Firsenbaum will break into a wide smile, as happy to see Bozella as Bozella is to see him. “Dewey and I will always have a special relationship,” Firsenbaum says. “I grew to respect him, not only for his courage in facing such grim odds, but also for the optimism he has for his future.”
This story has no fairy-tale ending, not yet. “In prison, I was a caterpillar in a cocoon,” Bozella says. “I’m still not flying yet, but I’m better than I was. It’s not that easy to just say, OK, I’m a regular citizen now.” Trena, Bozella’s wife, tells an illustrative story. “One day,” she says in her quiet, high-pitched voice, “Dewey lost a white tube sock. It was pretty soon after he got home. He was tearing the house apart looking for it, and I didn’t understand why. I said, Dewey, it’s OK, we can just get you some more socks next time we go to the store.”
“But the thing about the sock is,” Bozella interrupts his wife, “it was my sock. My sock. When I was in prison, they’d only give you a few socks, and those were your socks, and you had to look after them. We get so attached to these little things that belong to us in there, like those cheap socks, that they become so much more important than what they are. I have to re-learn that a sock is just a sock.” Bozella also has to come to terms with the fact that he’s missed large pieces of the lives of people he cares about.
Firsenbaum sees a bumpy road ahead, but he’s hopeful. “Money’s a serious problem for Dewey right now. He’s trying as hard as he can, but he hasn’t been able to find a job. He needs someone to look past the fact that he’s been in prison for 26 years and look at the educated, dedicated and caring person in front of them.”
Bozella speaks often about his dream of becoming an actor or a director. Failing that, he wants to use his experiences to help others. “Dewey wants to work with kids who have the same choice he had,” Firsenbaum says. “The choice to turn to either the streets or to education. He can help these kids; he can give them real advice. The problem is, and it’s very ironic, that it’s very difficult for someone who has been in prison to be allowed to work with kids that are struggling with the same issues.”
Bozella, though, knows better than to see his past as an ending to his future. Now, on the other side, he knows how to trump his demons. “I used to think the world owed me something,” he says. “That’s not it at all. I owe the world something. I’ll get there. Life is a challenge. There’s struggle and conflict. It’s what you do with that struggle and conflict that matters.”
Rebecca Binder is a litigation associate at the Boston law firm D’Ambrosio LLP, where she practices commercial and real estate litigation. She is also president of her Amherst class. This is her fourth feature for Amherst magazine.
QUOTED: "a harrowing and inspiring account of fighting a nearly lifelong battle against injustice."
Dewey Bozella, Tamara Jones: STAND TALL
(Oct. 1, 2016):
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2016 Kirkus Media LLC
http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
Dewey Bozella, Tamara Jones STAND TALL Ecco/HarperCollins (Adult Nonfiction) 27.99 ISBN: 978-0-06-220815-6
One mans struggle to stay positive when he was incarcerated for a crime he didnt commit.Bozella suffered an extremely different childhood within the foster care system and turned to petty theft, but the murder for which he was convicted in 1983 forced him to spend 26 years behind bars. In this candid memoir, the author tells his painful side of the story: how he was accused and found guilty on scant proof and how he spent the next half of his life as a prisoner in Sing Sing and other jails. Convicted murderer. Theres no way ever to take the sharp edge off those words or grow accustomed to their pain, he writes. Especially when theyre a lie, when youre paying for another mans crime, your whole life hijacked by people who turned their backs on the truth. That they did it so casually made it all the worse.I was a convenient scapegoat for an ambitious prosecutor and a bumbling police department. Throughout, Bozella shares specific details that only someone who has spent time in jail would knowe.g., the code of conduct inmates must follow if they want to avoid being attacked by a fellow prisoner; the underground commerce in drugs, food, clothes, and sex and how a pack of cigarettes often takes the place of cash; and the endless hours that need to be filled, which Bozella used to learn foreign languages, certificates in a variety of subjects, and his masters degree. Throughout his ordeal, the author stayed surprisingly positive and used his instincts as a
boxer to help him make the necessary changes in his attitude toward life. When he was finally exonerated, he was able to forgive those who had sent him to prison. Telling people my story, he writes, is the best way Ive found to turn bitterness into hope. A harrowing and inspiring account of fighting a nearly lifelong battle against injustice.
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"Dewey Bozella, Tamara Jones: STAND TALL." Kirkus Reviews, 1 Oct. 2016. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA465181781&it=r&asid=7d87842fde4873b5f50bb088490b480f. Accessed 1 Mar. 2017.
QUOTED: "His writing is concise, never self-congratulatory or self-pitying, and always graceful."
Gale Document Number: GALE|A465181781
Stand Tall: Fighting for My Life, Inside and Outside the Ring
263.28 (July 11, 2016): p52.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2016 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Stand Tall: Fighting for My Life, Inside and Outside the Ring
Dewey Bozella. Ecco, $27.99 (240p) ISBN 978-0-06-220815-6
In this beautifully told memoir, former amateur boxer Bozella writes about growing up in foster care and his survival on the streets of New York City. Just as he is starting to make a respectable life for himself in the late 1970s, he is convicted of murdering a 92 year-old woman. There's no evidence he committed the crime, yet he is put away on the testimony of a couple of acquaintances who got immunity deals in return for implicating him. He spends the next 20 years in jail; refusing an early release deal that would have required him to admit guilt. This strong internal compass guiding his decisions makes Bozella a compelling narrator. He decides early on in prison to better himself, and has the strength of mind to follow through. He becomes the boxing champion of Sing Sing, and begins working toward a college degree. He eventually marries while still in prison. When a white-shoe law firm gets word of his story, its lawyers work pro bono, spending over a million dollars to get his conviction vacated. His writing is concise, never self-congratulatory or self-pitying, and always graceful. (Dec.)
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"Stand Tall: Fighting for My Life, Inside and Outside the Ring." Publishers Weekly, 11 July 2016, p. 52. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA458915349&it=r&asid=6d3d86301132d629a817762306d56c49. Accessed 1 Mar. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A458915349
QUOTED: "If nothing else, his book demonstrates that life really is about having the strength to make good choices even when all hope appears lost."
"Stand Tall is not a great book, but it is riveting in parts, especially when Bozella depicts his chilling life in prison and when he chooses self-respect over expediency. That he emerged with a loving heart, a devoted wife and his sanity is perhaps his biggest triumph of all."
Justice delayed: 26 years mostly in Sing Sing for a murder he didn’t commit
By Gregory L. Moore | The Denver Post
PUBLISHED: January 12, 2017 at 4:08 pm | UPDATED: January 12, 2017 at 4:25 pm
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By Gregory L. Moore, Special to The Washington Post
stand-tallDewey Bozella was just 18 when he was first arrested for the brutal murder of 92-year-old Emma Crasper in her Poughkeepsie, N.Y., home in 1977. A small-time hood, Bozella had moved to Poughkeepsie from Queens to escape the pull of petty crime. “I was never anyone’s goody-goody, and I had been on a self-destructive road since I was in grade school,” he writes. “I had gotten into trouble before and had a short rap sheet for stealing. I took bicycles left outside grocery stores. I took boom boxes. I took a wallet from a guy on the street one time. But I never took anyone’s life.”
Bozella was held for 28 days, but with no physical evidence, he was released.
We learn in his painful and uneven memoir, “Stand Tall,” written with Tamara Jones, that Bozella’s release was just an interlude. Six years later, he was re-arrested and quickly convicted for the Crasper murder on the word of two men facing prison time. Bozella served 26 years, mostly in the Sing Sing maximum-security prison, 30 miles north of New York City.
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If nothing else, his book demonstrates that life really is about having the strength to make good choices even when all hope appears lost. Bozella wins his release after reinventing himself — embracing religion and leaving behind smoking, drinking and drugs to focus on self-improvement. In one dramatic test early in his sentence, he meets the man he had sworn to kill for murdering his younger brother. With other inmates watching, Bozella ends up hugging the man and offering his forgiveness. “That was the birth of my true identity,” he writes.
His journey is indeed heroic. But there were pain and anger along the way. Bozella was sent to prison the second time with no more evidence than police had on the first arrest. He writes that the police never forgot that he had earlier wriggled off the hook and they harassed him in those intervening years. His assertion that he was a victim of an ambitious prosecutor and bumbling cops is not that implausible, given what we have seen in some other high-profile cases of innocent men sent to prison.
Through four parole hearings, Bozella refused to admit guilt to gain early release. He won a new trial in 1990 because African-Americans were excluded from his first trial. But a diverse jury convicted him a second time.
Resigned to his 20-years-to-life sentence, Bozella recalls: “I locked my soul up, too. Sealing my true self up tight — putting my soul in solitary — was the only way I could see to survive this terrifying underworld that was my new home.”
Life in Sing Sing was brutal: Stay alive by minding your own business, never look in another man’s cell, and figure out a hustle to buy cigarettes, the coin of the realm in the joint. Anything a man could get on the outside, Bozella writes, was available in “Swing Swing” — drugs, chicken, alcohol and sex.
His back story is the typical hell-to-cell existence. He was the second-oldest of six kids born to a black mother and an abusive, two-timing white father. The children were driven into foster care when Bozella was 11 after his father beat his mother to death.
He left Queens for good at 17 to live with an older half brother in Poughkeepsie. Despite the close call in 1977, Bozella still found trouble and ended up serving two years in prison for robbery. Once out, he was determined to go straight and was taught to box by retired heavyweight champion Floyd Patterson. But before he could get a fight, he was off to Sing Sing in January 1984.
Inside, he trained with a corrections officer and became the undefeated light-heavyweight champion of the prison. The book doesn’t dwell on his boxing exploits. But his fighting spirit is a theme as he tries to improve himself and prove his innocence. He became a jailhouse lawyer and a man of faith, and earned a GED as well as bachelor’s and master’s degrees. “For the first time in my life,” Bozella writes, “I started feeding my mind instead of numbing it.”
He met and married the sister of a prisoner. But marriage straddling prison was complicated for Dewey and Trena. They were unable to conceive a child during conjugal visits and began drifting apart: He suspected she did not believe in his innocence, and she was turned off by his increasing coldness.
After he won the attention of the Innocence Project, which has freed nearly 350 inmates with DNA evidence, Trena became a fierce advocate. In 2009, the project dropped the case because of a lack of DNA evidence to pursue, but not before getting a white-shoe law firm to take it pro bono. A team of four inexperienced lawyers took on the challenge with gusto, finding the retired detective who put Bozella away. Art Regula immediately handed over the case file. Asked why he kept it all those years, he said, “Because I knew someone like you would be at the door someday, because he didn’t do it.”
Energized, the lawyers hunted down more records, including accounts that contradicted the men who placed Bozella at Crasper’s apartment. They also found witness statements supporting a theory that another man, serving time for a similar murder of an elderly widow, did the killing. None of this information had been shared with Bozella’s defense. A judge agreed that his due process rights had been violated and granted him a third trial. On Oct. 28, 2009, prosecutors finally decided to drop the case. (The Crasper murder remains unsolved.)
A free man at 50, Bozella became something of a celebrity. A documentary about him aired on ESPN, he won the network’s Arthur Ashe Award for Courage, and he received a settlement for his years in prison, later reported to be $7.5 million. The book has a Rocky-like finish, with Bozella getting his first and only professional fight in 2011, surviving four rounds to win a unanimous decision.
“Stand Tall” is not a great book, but it is riveting in parts, especially when Bozella depicts his chilling life in prison and when he chooses self-respect over expediency. That he emerged with a loving heart, a devoted wife and his sanity is perhaps his biggest triumph of all.
Gregory L. Moore, the former editor of The Denver Post, teaches journalism at the University of Colorado’s College of Media, Communication and Information.
How a Boxer Fought Free After Years of Wrongful Imprisonment
By KRISTAL BRENT ZOOKDEC. 9, 2016
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Dewey Bozella Credit Jessica Kourkounis for The New York Times
STAND TALL
Fighting for My Life, Inside and Outside the Ring
By Dewey Bozella with Tamara Jones
238 pp. Ecco/HarperCollins Publishers. $27.99.
To ESPN fans and New Yorkers the story of Dewey Bozella will be familiar. An amateur boxer imprisoned for two and a half decades for a murder he didn’t commit, Bozella, freed in 2009, was the network’s 2011 Arthur Ashe Courage Award winner. He was also the subject of a subsequent documentary that chronicled his dream of being allowed into the ring for a professional bout as a free man.
“Stand Tall” revisits this journey and more, taking readers deep inside an engrossing narrative that is equal parts inspiration and heartbreak.
“I’ve been a case number for most of my life,” Bozella begins. “Foster care, at-risk programs, welfare checks.” His father, Harry (whom Bozella secretly called Dirty Harry), was a violent, sporadic presence. A “white man who wore glasses” and never once sat down to dinner with his son, Dirty Harry was usually “thundering around the house like a charging bull,” once cracking 8-year-old Dewey’s head open with a baseball bat. At 9, he watched his father pummel his mother for the last time, her death marking the end of childhood for him and his five siblings.
Shuffled through group homes and foster care, Bozella dropped out of high school (no surprise there) and embarked on a life of stealing, smoking marijuana, drinking and gambling. His first sentence was 16 months in juvenile detention for stealing a stereo by sticking his finger in a potato chip bag and pretending it was a gun.
But his discovery of boxing lights a path forward, as he rides his bike to an old barn that has been converted into a center for at-risk youth on the heavyweight champion Floyd Patterson’s chicken farm in New Paltz. The makeshift gym becomes everything to Bozella, who for a blissful time trains with the heart of a champion.
Until that too falls apart: In 1983, Bozella is arrested and convicted for the murder of 92-year-old Emma Crapser and sentenced to 20 years to life at Sing Sing prison.
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“Stand Tall” is as much a celebration of one man’s tenacious spirit as it is an indictment of the criminal justice and foster care systems. In prison Bozella hungrily completes degrees and certificates, from food services to peer counseling to theology. He becomes a certified paralegal and files motions on his case “all the way up to the U.S. Supreme Court.” He writes to Congress and to the NAACP. He copies out motivational books and makes five‑, 10- and 20-year plans. He even studies Japanese and Arabic.
By the time the Innocence Project arrives on the scene — after Bozella has written to them every week for four years — he’s been wrongfully convicted by an all-white jury, received a retrial and then, unbelievably, convicted again. In fact, his first attorney was so disillusioned by the decision that he gave up criminal law entirely.
As jaw-dropping and nonsensical as his legal fiasco is, it’s Bozella’s family pain that at times cuts even more sharply. If I could ask for anything more from this riveting book it would be to know something of what became of Harry, released from prison by the time Bozella was a teenager, and of his surviving brothers, who had once blown through Brooklyn together on “bikes, homemade go-carts, hijacked shopping carts” in happier days. Instead they simply disappear from the story. One yearns for some shred of connection, or at the very least, explanation, for Bozella’s sake, to mitigate the decades of loneliness spent waiting for “things that never materialized. A visit, a letter, a package.”
At 52, Bozella wins his only professional bout, thanks to the patronage of Oscar De La Hoya, and to Bozella’s wife, Trena, whom he married 13 years into his sentence. And he receives a $7.5 million settlement (half of which will go to taxes) from Dutchess County, although even today, prosecutors refuse to admit wrongdoing.
Yet, despite these victories, there’s a sense of incompletion in the book’s final pages; a sinking feeling that Bozella is once again being left to drift. “Design clothes line, live to 90s, good food, own a boxing gym,” he writes, listing his goals in the book’s epilogue. He tries to put a positive spin on things, but the dream of coaching at-risk youths in a gym of his own has unraveled and never quite comes together again. Bozella does his best to forgive, and to move forward with his life, but he’s already recognized a hard truth early on — one that becomes increasingly clear in the book’s final, meandering pages. “No one can ever repay you for a stolen life.”
Kristal Brent Zook, a journalism professor at Hofstra University, is the author of “Black Women’s Lives: Stories of Power and Pain.” She is currently working on a book about multiracial experience.