Private sanitation worker Michael Taylor finally caught a break yesterday when a judge dismissed charges against the Brooklyn man—moments before his trial for robbing a Radio Shack of $1,400 in 2009 was to start. The case was thrown out after the key witness spotted the "real" perp while he walked to court.
The news was especially sweet for Taylor as the 50-year-old had been in jail for months serving a petit larceny sentence and then waiting for his trial rather than pay a $50,000 bail. The witness, who was also the victim of the robbery, was the only person who had identified him. And Taylor, who had two previous prison stints in the '90s under his belt for robbery, had been maintaining his innocence all along and even passed a lie detector test, according to his lawyer. “There were no prints, no video—even though this was a Radio Shack,” she said. “This has been a learning process on the unreliability of eyewitnesses.”
Richard Dougherty, the witness, told lawyers when he got to court yesterday that he was wrong in his identification and that he'd in fact seen the real criminal that day on his way to the Jay Street courthouse. Faced with the new development prosecutors chose to scrap the trial. A source tells the News that the new suspect is not being actively pursued.
Having watched quite a few crime dramas in our day, a few things in this story make our ears perk up ("private sanitation worker," an eyewitnesses who sees the "real" crook the day of the trial) but that's just us. And we do know from experience that making a successful ID from a lineup is way harder than it looks on TV. Meanwhile, Taylor couldn't have asked for better weather for his reentry into society. "It was beautiful," his lawyer beamed yesterday. "There was no more perfect day to be released from Rikers.”
