http://www.syracuse.com/news/index....ed_murder_starts_changeorg_petition_gets.html
DeWitt, NY -- A DeWitt man who has served more than half of his 25-year sentence for attempted murder now has nearly 40,000 supporters online.
That's after Alfred Robinson's wife, Nicole, posted a petition on Change.org proclaiming her husband's innocence and attacking the prosecutor for his 2002 conviction.
What the petition fails to mention is that Alfred Robinson, 38, of 6535 Route 298, was implicated as a Boot Camp gang member who attempted to murder a witness to keep him from testifying at trial, former federal prosecutor and current U.S. Rep. John Katko said at the time.
Robinson's wife argues that prosecutors went on a vendetta against her husband after he failed to testify the way they wanted him to at an earlier trial. She said new evidence, discovered in 2007, shows he's innocent.
"Alfred has been in jail for nearly 13 years, since our son was two days old," Nicole Robinson, of Liverpool, wrote in a Jan. 11 petition. "It breaks my heart everyday to look at my son knowing that he may never get to experience a relationship with his dad outside of prison walls."
As of 1 p.m. today, the petition had 39,322 supporters in less than two weeks.
Here's the background
Alfred Robinson was tried and convicted of shooting another man, Thihele Gaines, three times the morning of July 14, 2002 as the victim stood in a driveway in the 400 block of Westmoreland Avenue in Syracuse. The shooting came a day before Gaines was supposed to testify against Robinson in regards to a previous time Robinson had stabbed him.
A year after his conviction, federal prosecutors said Robinson was a Boot Camp gang member who stabbed Gaines because he was from a rival gang. Robinson then plotted with another man to murder Gaines to keep him from testifying, Katko told The Post-Standard in a July 11, 2003 story.
Robinson appealed his attempted murder verdict, but an appeals court rejected his claims. He took the case to federal court, where a judge also dismissed his appeal. But the federal judge did overturn an additional conviction of bribing a witness on a legal technicality.
The judge's decision to uphold the attempted murder conviction came in 2009, two years after Nicole Robinson said the new evidence came to light.
Taking away the bribery conviction
reduced Robinson's sentence to 25 years in prison from his original sentence of 35 1/2 years.
I signed the petition before I read this article.
I hope this shyt isn't true