Photos: Facebook\Innocence Project
Nearly 26 years after she was wrongfully convicted for the 1995 murder and robbery of her landlord, Renay Lynch was finally exonerated Friday in Buffalo, NY.
A post-conviction re-examination of crime scene fingerprint evidence — which law enforcement had previously withheld from the defense — pointed to another tenant of the victim as the likely perpetrator of the crime. Renay was released in Jan. 2022 and now becomes the 250th person to be freed by the Innocence Project.
On May 19, 1995, a local landlord in Amherst, NY was found stabbed to death in her apartment. Initially, the investigation focused specifically on people who were known to have disputes with the landlord over property and money. But after 18 months, the murder was still unsolved.
Police began talking to Renay who was a tenant of the victim, and they initially viewed her as an informant who might help them break open the case. In late 1996, they narrowed their focus to a man named Kareem Walker, who Renay knew. She was helping them gather information around him, but as their efforts continued to fail, eventually police told Renay that in order to arrest Kareem, they “needed [her] to be there at the murder.” So they used coercive interrogation techniques known to elicit false confessions.
After hours of rigorous questioning and threats of perjury charges and prison, Renay told investigators what they wanted to hear. And though she quickly recanted her confession and has always maintained her innocence, she was wrongly convicted.
Renay’s case highlights many common causes of wrongful conviction: a coerced false confession; the fabricated testimony of an incentivized informant; and police misconduct — specifically withholding key crime scene evidence from the defense.
“Today is bittersweet. Ms. Lynch lost the last 26 years of her life to a wrongful conviction because of systemic flaws that continue to exist in the criminal legal system,” said Susan Friedman, Renay’s Innocence Project attorney.
Renay reflected on her time wrongfully incarcerated and said, “I have waited 26 years for this day to come. That’s days without seeing my children grow up, days without holding my grandchildren, days that I will never get back. I’m grateful to finally have this weight lifted.”
