Time lost since John Giuca arrested on Dec. 21, 2004
In September of 2003, John Giuca was a college student, studying Criminal Justice at the prestigious John Jay University in New York City. But just two years later, his life would grind to a screeching halt when he was sentenced to 25-years to life for a crime he did not commit. Convinced that her son was innocent, Doreen Giuliano went undercover, discovering malfeasance that should eventually exonerate him.
In February 2018, an appellate court overturned John’s conviction and ordered a new trial. But the wheels of justice move very, very slowly.
2020: Undercover Mother
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For complete details of Mark Fisher’s murder and the trial, see The Case
• No physical or forensic evidence linked John to the crime.
• No eyewitnesses ever linked John to the crime.
• The prosecution had no murder weapon, no clear motive, and, admittedly, no idea what actually happened.
• The physical evidence pointed away from John.
• Initial suspects gave conflicting statements, and changed their stories multiple times, in significant ways.
Despite this, John was convicted, with his co-defendant, Antonio Russo, for the 2003 murder of Mark Fisher. Even though Russo admitted he did not get a gun from John, and multiple witnesses saw a gun in Russo’s waistband both before and after the murder, John was nevertheless accused of giving Russo the gun, which Russo then used to shoot and kill Mark.
John was convicted based on the testimony of four main witnesses, three of which have recanted; two of them accusing the trial prosecutor of coercion and intimidation (allegations that aren’t unfamiliar to the Brooklyn DA’s office, or to these particular prosecutors). The fourth witness has been completely discredited, his lies both during the investigation and the trial exposed and laid out for you here.
So then how did an innocent man end up spending the last 14 years in prison, and why is he still there? This site is dedicated to explaining just that, from an investigation whose most critical facts were abandoned, and whose lingering questions remain unanswered; to a trial riddled with inconsistencies and lies, a tainted jury, and enough prosecutorial misconduct to leave people like Professor Bennett Gershman (who literally wrote the book “Prosecutorial Misconduct”), astounded.
Wrongful convictions happen more than you’d like to think, and they can happen to normal, everyday people just like John. If this could happen to him, it could happen to anyone.
“ADA Nicolazzi displayed a cynical disregard for the truth in her presentation of the evidence…a prosecutor is ethically forbidden to play fast and loose with the evidence in the way ADA Nicolazzi did.”
“John Giuca, in my opinion, did not receive a fair trial. The integrity of his conviction was corrupted by an evidentiary foundation built on false evidence, and further undermined by the misconduct of the prosecutor who knowingly presented perjured testimony, and vouched for its truthfulness.”– Bennett Gershman, in a letter to DA Ken Thompson, February 24, 2014