After his first murder trial ended in a hung jury, Dion Miller was offered a deal from Hudson County Prosecutors: Plead guilty, and they'd let him go free almost immediately.
But Miller declined. He said he was innocent.
That was nearly 20 years ago. On Thursday, the New Jersey attorney general’s office moved to dismiss charges against Miller for the 2003 killing of his neighbor, Romeo Cavero, 74.
It was only the second case reviewed by the attorney general’s Conviction Review Unit to result in an exoneration since that unit was formed in 2019. There have been more than 600 applications to the unit.
“Today marks a new beginning for Mr. Miller and a new phase in the investigation to identify the killer of Mr. Cavero,” Attorney General Matthew Platkin said in a statement.
Miller, now 54, of Jersey City, was arrested in January 2003 after Cavero was killed outside a Van Nostrand Avenue senior citizens’ building. Cavero had been struck in the head from behind and robbed of cash, according to the attorney general’s office. He was taken to Jersey City Medical Center, where his condition deteriorated and he died four days later.
Platkin said Cavero was lucid immediately after the attack, but never identified Miller, whom he knew.
Detectives questioned Miller for 17 hours. Miller, who Platkin said was addicted to alcohol at the time, was intoxicated during the interrogation.
Platkin’s office said Miller made three false confessions, each containing inconsistencies in the details and descriptions of the events. None of the confessions matched the description of the crime provided by the victim. Miller repeated back information that detectives had already fed him about the crime, and that process “molded Mr. Miller’s statements to fit the facts as the detectives believed them to be,” Platkin’s office said in an announcement of the exoneration.
A detective who came forward during the reinvestigation of the case said that right after Miller made the three confessions, he told him that he only confessed because he was afraid of being hurt, according to Platkins’ office.
Miller was not present at an attorney general’s office press conference about the case and could not immediately be reached for comment.
Miller’s first trial ended in a hung jury. He was convicted of felony murder, robbery and other charges at a second trial in 2007 and sentenced to 30 years in prison without eligibility for parole.
Platkin said his office’s Cold Case Network would “now pursue justice for the family of a victim whose murder remains unsolved.”
Laura Cohen of the New Jersey Innocence Project represented Miller and spoke at the press conference.
“We hope that the lessons learned from this matter, particularly with regard to the causes and frequency of false confessions, will lead to exonerations of other innocent people and help prevent future wrongful convictions from occurring in New Jersey,” she said.
Cohen said Miller’s addiction to alcohol made him especially vulnerable, as did his belief that the system would work in his favor because he was innocent.
Platkin said his office plans to review other cases investigated by the same police officers, all of whom are now retired, where the conviction was based primarily on a confession.
A NJ.com story last year found that court records and data from the state showed New Jersey was likely undercounting its population of wrongly convicted inmates.
Advocates and families of people who claimed their loved ones have been wrongly convicted said they believed the attorney general’s Conviction Review Unit was moving too slowly.
The Conviction Review Unit’s work has freed just one other individual to date — Taron Hill, after the unit found he had been wrongly convicted of killing two men in Camden. He’d been sentenced to 60 years, and spent 16 years imprisoned.
Platkin said Friday such cases are complicated and can take years to sort out. He said overturning a verdict that was handed down by a jury is not something that should be done lightly.
