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#AceNewsRoom With ‘Kindness & Wisdom’ Mar.01, 2022 @AceBreakingNews 

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#AceBreakingNews (CNN) — Anthony Sims has spent 24 years in prison for a murder he says he did not commit: He was convicted in 1999 of killing a Chinese immigrant in Brooklyn and sentenced to 25-to-life: Sims’ friend, Julius Graves, was the single eyewitness who testified to seeing him fire the fatal shot.

Sims says Graves is the real killer, which he testified to in a hearing that has been playing out at Brooklyn’s Kings County Supreme Court since October.

When reached by CNN, Graves declined to comment for this story. However, he maintains Sims was the shooter.

Sims’ attorneys also allege that Mark Hale, the trial prosecutor, withheld key evidence about Graves’ criminal history and failed to correct his perjured testimony. 

Hale is renowned for leading the Brooklyn district attorney’s Conviction Review Unit (CRU), which has helped pioneer the re-examination of old convictions. Under Hale, Brooklyn’s CRU overturned 30 wrongful convictions and documented the investigative flaws that led to them. Hale, who retired last year, previously faced allegations of misconduct related to Emmanuel Cooper’s murder conviction, which was overturned in 2020. The DA’s office cleared Hale of any wrongdoing in the Cooper case.

In Sims’ case, the unit found no misconduct and the district attorney’s office is vigorously defending Sims’ conviction.

Sims’ attorneys filed a motion last year to overturn his conviction arguing his innocence and that he was deprived of a fair trial. The Brooklyn DA’s office consented to an evidentiary hearing after investigating their claims, preferring that a judge settle the factual disputes, according to a DA spokesperson. 

Hale declined to comment to CNN. However, in testimony Wednesday, he said he did not remember anything about the Sims case.

Sims with his second wife, Keisha. 

Sims, now 46, told CNN before proceedings began that he was optimistic the office would find wrongdoing. Their opposition changed his mind.

“I started to lose faith in the system again,” Sims said in a phone interview from Woodbourne Correctional Facility in Woodbourne, New York. 

Sims remains hopeful that a new witness who says she saw Graves with the gun that night, among other new evidence, can sway what he and his wife, Keisha, call “an emotional roller coaster” of a hearing in his favor.

The crime in question

Sims was a 6’3″ powerhouse basketball player at Brooklyn’s Westinghouse High School, who dunked more often than he should have, much to the chagrin of coach Marty Gahagan, who described Sims as a “fun-loving kid.”

At Westinghouse, he met his first wife, Kisha, and Graves. After graduating, Sims worked various jobs to support Kisha and their sons, Anthony Jr. and Antoine.

Graves dropped out of school, and in 1994 pleaded guilty to felony gun possession and was sentenced to five years probation.

By 1998, Sims was working as a phone company technician. Graves, unemployed and living with his fiancée’s family, had stopped reporting to probation for two years, violations that could have resulted in his arrest. 

On the night of May 18, 27-year-old Li Run Chen was working behind the counter of a takeout restaurant near Graves’ apartment. It was a hot night, so Chen had opened the plexiglass window at the counter, owner Ang Chan told CNN through an interpreter.

Around 10 p.m., Sims says he entered the restaurant, followed shortly after by Graves, who then allegedly shot Chen through the open Plexiglass window.

Graves testified last year he never went inside — contradicting his trial testimony and those of three others — and that he saw Sims shoot Chen while standing on the street. 

Chan and a cook were in the rear kitchen area, but did not see the shooting.

After the shooting, Sims and Graves ran to Sims’ car. Two friends of Graves were in the back seat, both of whom later said they saw Sims throw a gun through the window into the car. Sims denies this, saying Graves was holding the shotgun when he got into the car. After Sims drove up the block and kicked Graves and his buddies out, Graves took the shotgun with him, according to all four.

Inside Graves’ apartment, the friends say they watched Graves wipe the gun for fingerprints. One friend took and hid the gun, according to their trial testimonies. 

Sims and Graves didn’t call the police that night. Graves left behind his fiancée and children and went to his sister’s apartment, where he would stay for several days, and Sims drove home. He told Kisha what he saw. 

Chan said Chen was a “hardworking individual” with little family in America. The murder left Chan frightened and Chen’s family devastated. He closed the restaurant for a few days after the killing and sold it a few months later. 

Swift focus on Sims

Detectives focused on Sims as their suspect the day after the shooting, records show, largely based on a statement from Graves’ future brother-in-law, who said Sims and Graves were involved. 

Graves came out of hiding first, three days after the murder. He told investigators Sims shot Chen as revenge for a months-old argument over a food order. Graves’ wife, mother-in-law and his friends in Sims’ car the night of the shooting backed up his story.

Shalema Rodriguez, who was at a friend’s second-floor apartment across the street from the Chinese restaurant, told police she saw several Black men run out of the restaurant, the taller, more muscular man — referring to Sims — carrying a long gun, according to police records and her trial testimony. Rodriguez recanted this account in February. 

Rodriguez confirms that she saw people run from the restaurant and one of them carrying a long gun, but that she was not able to tell anything specific about the people she saw. She testified in February that she said all of this to police during their original investigation, and denied identifying the taller man as holding the gun, stating “I wouldn’t be able to have that information because I couldn’t see that from where I was in the window.” 

No physical evidence implicated Sims: Records show that fingerprints from the restaurant did not match, and the recovered 16-gauge shotgun was not fingerprinted, according to a detective’s testimony.

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