by Mona Mahadevan and Thomas Breen The New Haven independent
A sitting state judge took the stand in a wrongful-conviction trial Thursday morning and said over and over again that, when he was a state prosecutor three decades ago, he never saw any evidence that Vincent Raucci fabricated evidence or coerced witnesses to secure the double-murder convictions of Stefon Morant and Scott Lewis.
That judge, David Gold, was called as a witness in the ongoing federal civil rights trial stemming from Morant’s lawsuit against the City of New Haven and a half-dozen former detectives, including Raucci. Morant is claiming that he and Lewis were framed for the 1990 double murder of former alderman Ricardo Turner and his partner Lamont Fields.
Gold has never been accused of any misconduct in this case, and he is not a defendant in Morant’s lawsuit. Instead, he was called to the stand on Thursday in a Hartford federal courtroom because he was one of the figures at the center of the case that ended with Morant’s 1994 conviction. (Morant subsequently spent two decades in prison before receiving a sentence commutation in 2015, a full pardon, and a $5.84 million wrongful-conviction award from the state.)
U.S. Judge Sarala Nagala said at the top of Thursday’s proceedings that state Judge Gold could not be called “judge” in the courtroom. Instead, he had to be referred to as “Mr. Gold.” That’s because there would be a “risk of entering dangerous territory” if the jury knew he went on to become a state court judge after serving as a prosecutor in the Morant case. The information could bias the jury to accede to Gold’s assessment of Ovil Ruiz as a witness, she argued. (Ruiz, who was a teenager at the time, was one of the key witnesses who provided evidence that helped secure Lewis’s and Morant’s convictions. Ruiz has subsequently said he was coerced by Raucci to provide false information.)
Nagala also disallowed Thomas Gerarde, an attorney representing the City of New Haven, from asking if Gold considered the reliability of Ruiz as a witness when he was prosecutor. That too could risk tainting or biasing the jury, she found.
Gold took the stand at around 8:30 a.m. Thursday. He wrapped up his testimony at around 11.
One of Morant’s attorneys in the trial, Anna Benvenutti Hoffmann, asked Gold if he received any potentially “exculpatory evidence” from the police department that would suggest the perpetrator of the crime might have been someone other than Lewis or Morant.
“No,” Gold replied.
Hoffman then referred to a statement by another witness at the time, Jose Roque. At the time of Morant’s original trial, Roque testified that his statement implicating Morant and Lewis was false, that he had been told what to say by Raucci, and that the tape of his interview was “stopped and started.” Also at that original trial, Raucci and fellow Det. Vaughn Maher said there was no coercion and no stopping of the tape.
Given that Raucci and Maher were in good standing at the time, Hoffman asked Gold on Thursday, did he take them “at their word?”
“Yes, that’s correct,” Gold replied.
Earlier in Morant’s civil-rights trial, former New Haven Det. Michael Sweeney testified to how he witnessed Raucci coerce Ruiz into providing false information that blamed Morant and Lewis as the killers.
“Were you made aware of any of this information from Mr. Sweeney before Mr. Morant’s prosecution?” Hoffman asked.
“No,” Gold replied.
“From any source?” Hoffman followed up.
“No,” Gold said.