CNN
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Emel McDowell was in the Rikers Island jail when a guard called his name. An envelope slipped between the metal bars and into his cell.
He looked at the sender in disbelief.
It was from the man he believed fired the fatal shot in a murder that had put McDowell behind bars in New York City. The man he believed should have been arrested, not him.
He opened the envelope. The words hit him like a punch.
Emel, you know me and you were friends for a long time. And that incident that happened…should not break our friendshipthe letter said.
Emel, don’t think for a second that because I’m here I’m not suffering… I don’t think I deserve to walk the face of the earth because one of my best friends is locked up for something he didn’t do.
The “incident” occurred three months earlier at a Brooklyn house party, when McDowell said his friend opened fire during an altercation, killing a 19-year-old man.
“I’m sitting here charged with murder, trying to adjust to being in jail,” McDowell told CNN this month. “I had just spent my first birthday incarcerated. I had spent my first Christmas (incarcerated). My first New Year’s. And receiving this letter… opened many wounds.”
McDowell believed the letter, handwritten on unlined paper and dated January 1991, would clear his name. He handed it over to his court-appointed lawyer and trusted that justice would be done.
It wasn’t like that, at least for a long time.
Despite conflicting witness accounts and a letter from the alleged killer that suggested McDowell had nothing to do with the shooting, a jury convicted him of murder and weapons possession. He was sentenced to between 22 years and life in prison.
The letter remained with him. He kept it inside a brown Bible next to his bed in prison, still believing it was key to his freedom.
From prison, McDowell waged a tireless campaign to prove his innocence. He called unannounced lawyers, activists and journalists to tell them about the letter. He took paralegal classes in prison, earned college credits and helped other inmates write legal briefs. He filed his own appeal.
Years passed and his hope faded. The letter’s frayed edges and deepening wrinkles became a symbol of his long fight for justice.
Then, in December 2009, prosecutors offered him a deal: plead guilty to involuntary manslaughter and be released with his sentence served.
“It was a chance to come home to my family for Christmas after spending 19 years and two months in prison for something I didn’t do,” McDowell said.
He accepted it and left prison a free man, although still guilty before the law. But freedom without exoneration was not justice, he said.
Finally, more than 13 years later, the vindication he had sought for so long arrived. The Brooklyn District Attorney’s Office overturned his conviction in March 2023 after declaring that McDowell’s friend confessed to the shooting.
Last year, McDowell was awarded $9 million in a wrongful conviction lawsuit against the City of New York and several police officers.
Now he has filed a lawsuit against the state, alleging, among other arguments, forced labor and lost wages while working for pennies an hour in prison, a situation his lawyer compares to a modern form of slavery.
Nearly 35 years later, the fight that began before that single envelope reached his cell is not over.
“Every time I looked at that letter, I cried, I was moved,” she said. “I have stopped reading it because it opens old wounds.”
McDowell’s parents separated when he was 10 years old. His mother raised him and his younger brother in Brooklyn.
By the fall of 1990, he was a high school honor student, ready to graduate and enlist in the Army. His goal was to later join the Air Force and become a pilot.
The night he went to the party at her house that October, his mother had asked him to stay home. But he was 17 and wanted to spend time with his girlfriend, so he went anyway, he said.
A fight broke out at the party involving a friend of McDowell. Another friend, the one who sent him the letter, pulled out a gun and opened fire, he said. McDowell told investigators that he grabbed his girlfriend’s arm and fled the scene.
The shooting left 19-year-old Jonathan Powell dead and ultimately shattered the lives of two families. Once he left the party shortly after midnight, McDowell went to another friend’s house to spend the night, not knowing it would be his last night of freedom.
The next morning, his mother told him to return home immediately.
“I walked straight to my house, which was about eight blocks away. And when I got there, my mother told me, ‘Oh, the detective was looking for you.’ I asked her, ‘Why?’ And she said, ‘For the boy who was shot.'”
His mother urged him to go to the police station and find out what they wanted.
“My mother didn’t even come with me because, for both of us, I had nothing to do with it. I didn’t even participate in the fight,” he said.
At the police station, McDowell said he was taken directly to the homicide division, where detectives charged him with murder. He never returned home.
Within 24 hours, police charged him with the crime. Despite conflicting statements from witnesses, detectives did not follow up on the allegations against their friend, the Brooklyn District Attorney’s Office later stated in a statement.
Two witnesses identified McDowell as the attacker, while several others indicated it was their friend, prosecutors said.
The weapon used in the murder was never recovered.
In the letter, his friend, who was at the party with him, said that what happened that night haunted him.
Don’t think for a minute that I’m here celebrating, the friend wrote in the letter. I am suffering. I have nightmares, I can’t sleep or eat. Sometimes I just pray for death. … PS: Please try to keep our letters confidential.
McDowell testified on the day of his arrest that he told police station investigators that his friend had done it. But for law enforcement at the time, blaming him was an easy victory, he said.
The party shooting occurred in the midst of the crack epidemic and a year after five black and Latino teenagers were charged with the rape and attempted murder of a jogger in New York’s Central Park, a case that horrified the country. (Years later, after being convicted and serving prison sentences, the men were exonerated after the serial rapist confessed to the attack.)
“The political climate back then was the need to do something about the terrible crime rates in New York, particularly with juvenile crime,” McDowell said. “So the police wanted to get figures, and I seemed like a good candidate: Seventeen, black, with a peculiar name, was present at the party and came from a working-class family headed by a single mother.”
In his letter, McDowell’s friend stopped short of a full confession, but said enough to launch an investigation, according to Oscar Michelen, McDowell’s current attorney.
“Emel understood what he meant and told his lawyer (at the time) that his friend…had done it,” Michelen said. “So, the friend’s name was known to everyone and things could have been done to establish that it was him, such as subpoenaing him to testify or putting pressure on him. But no one did anything, really.”
His attorney at the time did not present the letter as evidence at trial or share it with the prosecution.
The Brooklyn District Attorney’s Office later determined that investigators failed to investigate evidence implicating McDowell’s friend as the attacker.
“This was likely due to a narrow view and confirmation bias that led police to focus on one suspect and discard evidence to the contrary,” prosecutors said in a statement.
CNN has reached out to McDowell’s friend for comment but is not naming him because he has not been charged with a crime.
After more than two years in prison, McDowell was found guilty in a jury trial. I couldn’t believe that at 19 years old he was going to prison for a murder he didn’t commit.
“As a young man, I believed that the criminal justice system had a way of solving things. So when I went to trial in 1992… I never thought I would be convicted,” he said. After the verdict, he said: “I was paralyzed. I was thinking, ‘It’s over, it’s over. My life is over. I’ll never breathe free air again.'”
After a stint at Rikers Island, McDowell was transferred to the Elmira Correctional Facility in upstate New York, where he became inmate number 92A5351.
During his years of incarceration, he spent time in several state prisons. But with each move, he clung to his Bible. It kept his most prized possession safe. Some nights, he ran his fingers over its pages to make sure the letter was still there.
“I carried my Bible with me everywhere,” he said. “That letter was a symbol of hope that the truth would finally come to light.”
It also gave him a sense of purpose.
At one prison, the Great Meadow Correctional Facility in Comstock, professors from nearby Skidmore College visited to teach classes to inmates. McDowell began earning credits toward a college degree and enrolled in a paralegal certification program.
His friends helped him pay his tuition while he learned law and acquired the tools to challenge his conviction. The training was so effective that McDowell taught legal research classes at another prison. He helped other inmates file legal briefs challenging their cases, even while continuing to work on his own.
In 1995, a state appeals court denied a motion by McDowell challenging his conviction. Not giving up, he subsequently sent his file to several lawyers. One of them was Michelen.
“It was so organized…I was impressed that it was written by a pro se inmate,” he said. “And I thought it would present good facts. So we investigated further and I decided to take the case.” In December 2009, just before a hearing on whether to overturn his conviction, prosecutors offered him a plea deal to involuntary manslaughter, allowing him to be released from prison. As part of the deal, he admitted participating in the crime but not shooting the victim, Michelen said.
McDowell briefly considered rejecting the deal and fighting for a full exoneration, but became distrustful of the court system after it failed him once, he said.
He chose freedom.
McDowell began to plead his case outside of prison. He learned to use his mother’s computer and the Internet, immersing himself in a digital world he had not had before prison.
After years of preliminary work, he and his lawyer contacted the Brooklyn District Attorney’s Office and asked the prosecutor’s office to review the case.
In March 2023, with a different chief prosecutor in office, their efforts finally bore fruit. District Attorney Eric Gonzalez, who was elected in 2017, announced that an investigation by his office’s Conviction Review Unit determined McDowell’s innocence and requested that his conviction be overturned.
A friend of McDowell confessed to unit investigators and claimed to have fired the gun in self-defense, according to the Prosecutor’s Office.
“Our legal system failed Emel McDowell when he was wrongfully convicted of murder in 1990 and his release years later was conditioned on his admission to a crime he did not commit,” Gonzalez stated in a 2023 statement. “…Today we will ask for his good name to be restored. As prosecutors, it is our obligation to bring justice in every case.”
A law enforcement source confirmed to CNN that the friend who prosecutors say confessed to the murder was the same person who wrote the letter to McDowell in 1991.
Authorities said they determined the friend acted in self-defense that night at the party and do not plan to press charges.
For McDowell, the battle continues.
In his civil suit against the state, he argues that he is owed compensation for being forced to work in prison for nearly two decades and for losing years of income he likely would have earned had he not been incarcerated. Similar legal actions have been filed in New York and other states.
“I’ve given them free work for years, very cheaply… and they wrongfully convicted me,” McDowell said. “They forced me to work. They can’t keep it. They have to compensate me for that.”
Although McDowell received millions in his settlement with the City of New York for his wrongful conviction, the state owes him damages for his forced and free labor, Michelen claimed.
“It’s easy for people who weren’t high school honors seniors and had their lives destroyed for 19 years to try to devalue someone’s life and experience,” he told CNN.
The New York state attorney general’s office declined to comment on the lawsuit.
McDowell was 17 when he was first incarcerated. He left prison in his late 40s. He is now 53.
No amount of money can make up for what he lost in prison, he said.
His father died while he was in prison and he never had the chance to reconnect with him, he said.
Sometimes he wonders what his life would be like now if he had never been wrongfully convicted.
“I didn’t have the life experiences that most young people have… school, work, girls…,” he said. “If I could have achieved what I have now with my obstacles, what could I have achieved in life? Where would I be now?”
Although his exoneration is a positive step, the stigma of a felony conviction never goes away, he said. CNN conducted a national search of McDowell’s criminal history and the results show his conviction for involuntary manslaughter, but no mention of his exoneration.
CNN also conducted a similar search in New York state, which did not show results under McDowell’s name. That means his file has been sealed, according to a law enforcement source.
But McDowell said he still must constantly prove himself to those judging him for his conviction and sentence.
Those exonerated face additional obstacles, he said. When adopting children, opening certain businesses such as liquor stores or applying for professional licenses to practice law or real estate, they may be required to submit detailed records and affidavits, he said. “People think that after an exoneration, we continue to live like any other citizen. That is a myth. Especially in the state of New York, where they only seal the records, they do not expunge them,” he said. “There is never real justice.”
McDowell is licensed as a real estate agent and works under contract with law firms to help them prepare motions. He said his goal is to study law and become an attorney specializing in a wide range of legal cases, including wrongful conviction cases.
“I didn’t come this far in my life to be pigeonholed,” he said.
And he no longer looks at the letter; It brings back too many painful memories. He gave it to his lawyer to keep as a reflection of his past.
Instead, look forward. He believes the future is now his to write.