Judge declines to dismiss murder case in 1990 Hofstra coach shooting

A judge who previously threw out a Brooklyn man's conviction in the 1990 slaying of a Hofstra University coach refused to dismiss his murder indictment Friday, saying the man could present allegations about police misconduct, false confessions and eyewitness unreliability at a new trial.

Acting State Supreme Court Justice Patricia Harrington released Christopher Ellis, 52, on his own recognizance last August after he served three decades behind bars for the slaying of assistant football coach Joseph Healy.

Ellis, who maintains his innocence, had been due to start parole less than three months later at the time Harrington awarded him a new trial.

She decided authorities had improperly withheld evidence favorable to him before his 1992 trial, including information from a detective’s notes about at least two identifiable people who claimed to have committed the murder.

But in a ruling Friday, Harrington rejected arguments from Ellis’ defense team that there were compelling reasons to dismiss the charges altogether in the interest of justice.

"In weighing all the factors, the defendant has failed to demonstrate some compelling factor, consideration or circumstance which renders his prosecution unjust," Harrington's decision said, while calling a retrial "appropriate."

Ellis will have to appear again in court in June, when his new trial date could be set.

"We’re going to defend Chris to the very end ... He had nothing to do with this terrible crime," Ellis’ attorney, Ilann Maazel, told Newsday. "Chris will have his day in court and I’m hopeful that the jury will see that he is innocent and he never should have been prosecuted in the first place."

A spokesman for the Nassau County District Attorney’s Office, which had opposed the indictment’s dismissal, declined to comment on the case Friday except to repeat that prosecutors intend to retry Ellis.

Maazel had argued in court papers that law enforcement’s failure to turn over even more exculpatory evidence was among the reasons the judge should throw out Ellis’ charges.

He wrote that Nassau prosecutors recently disclosed more than 200 new pages of murder leads, identifications and confessions that police gathered in Ellis’ case, what he dubbed a "treasure trove" of "previously hidden" material.

Maazel said prosecutors handed over the file, including information about at least 10 other suspects and multiple statements about other perpetrators having committed the slaying, after saying in September that they intended to prosecute Ellis again.

Prosecutor Barbara Kornblau wrote in court papers that it was "an unlabeled folder" she found inside the Nassau County Police Department’s homicide file that had "additional notes and other documents pertaining to potential suspects and leads" that she had not seen before she began to gather materials for Ellis’ retrial.

The district attorney’s office further argued that it had disclosed the identities of the potential suspects and the nature of those leads to the defense before Harrington threw out Ellis’ conviction last year.

In seeking the indictment's dismissal, Maazel also argued that prosecutors had decided to retry his client because of improper concerns that he would sue for a wrongful conviction and win millions of dollars. But former Nassau prosecutor Sheryl Anania, who had led the district attorney’s Conviction Integrity Unit, countered in a court affidavit that comments she made to Maazel in a phone conversation last year were taken "out of context."

Prosecutors also said in court paperwork while arguing against the indictment’s dismissal that Ellis "should not be permitted to get away with murder and have no conviction for that crime when all the evidence leads to the conclusion that he is guilty."

Two other men, who previously made parole, also went to prison for murder in the death of Healy, 25, who had been taking graduate business classes at Hofstra while coaching.

Healy was shot in the heart outside an Arby’s near the college campus while eating sandwiches with friends at about 2:30 a.m. on Sept. 29, 1990, in what Nassau police believed was an attempted robbery.

Four months later, police arrested Ellis and his co-defendants on murder charges after nabbing the trio during a Freeport drug sting and recognizing two from composite sketches of the shooting culprits.

Ellis’ trial lawyer claimed police coerced a confession from him 15 hours after his arrest.

Decades later, the defense in 2018 got an affidavit from a woman who used the Arby’s pay phone shortly before the shooting. It said she had told the case prosecutor at the time of the murder investigation that none of the suspects police arrested for the crime was among the two she saw at the scene.

Prosecutors previously have contested the truth of the affidavit and Harrington has said that evidence could be addressed at a retrial.

Maazel said Friday he now plans to file a motion seeking to suppress what he called his client’s "coerced confession," along with the "alleged identification" of Ellis by an eyewitness.