Fernando Bermudez Wins $4.75 Million State Settlement After 18 Years of Wrongful Imprisonment

On a night in 1991, 16-year-old Raymond Blount was shot outside a Manhattan nightclub. Fernando Bermudez, a young New Yorker with no connection to the crime, was identified by eyewitnesses and convicted of second-degree murder in 1992. He was sentenced to prison and spent the next 18 and a half years incarcerated for a killing he did not commit.

The conviction rested almost entirely on eyewitness testimony. Over the years, five of those witnesses recanted. They said police officers had pressured them into naming Bermudez as the gunman. Independent accounts placed him elsewhere at the time of the shooting. A federal judge reviewed the evidence and, in 2009, ruled that Bermudez had 'demonstrated his actual innocence.' The conviction was overturned. He walked out of prison that year.

More than a year after his release, Bermudez filed a $30 million civil lawsuit against New York City and New York State. Michael Lamonsoff represented him, arguing that detectives and the Manhattan District Attorney's Office had violated Bermudez's Fourth Amendment rights through an unlawful arrest and his Fourteenth Amendment due process rights through the use of perjured testimony and illegal identification procedures.

In December 2014, the State of New York agreed to a settlement of $4.75 million, paid under the state's unjust conviction statute. At the time, it was reported as the largest wrongful conviction settlement the state had ever paid. A separate civil rights claim against New York City remained pending at the time of the state settlement.

Bermudez, who joined the Innocence Project's speakers bureau after his release, acknowledged the limits of the outcome. 'The settlement will never erase the injustice that I experienced as an innocent man in prison for 18 and a half years,' he said.