Last summer, an Erie County judge threw out the conviction of Brian Scott Lorenz in a 1993 murder that had set off a raft of accusations involving bad cops, famous killers and prosecutorial misconduct. Nearly a year later, the crime is still unsolved and Lorenz remains behind bars. In 1994, Lorenz and a co-defendant were found guilty of the savage slaying of a young mother, Deborah Meindl, in the Buffalo suburb of Tonawanda. Last August, a state judge set aside the conviction, citing DNA taken from the crime scene that did not match either defendant and the fact that prosecutors had not revealed evidence to the defense. But the Erie County district attorney’s office continues to appeal the overturned convictions, raising the prospect of a second trial despite a paucity of physical evidence or potential prosecution witnesses. And the district attorney has successfully fought efforts to release Lorenz, who has spent more than half his life behind bars for a crime he insists he did not commit. “It just seems like it’s never going to end,” Lorenz, 54, said in a recent interview from jail in Erie County. “I’m on a treadmill, in a tunnel, with the light at the end. But it’s just not getting nowhere, man.”
Ilann Maazel, one of Lorenz’s lawyers, called his client’s continued imprisonment a “Kafkaesque nightmare” that is “intolerable, unconstitutional and wrong. “We have a man languishing in prison for over 30 years without receiving a fair trial and can’t even get his day in court,” Maazel said. “This is not the quality of justice we should expect in New York State in 2024.” In a letter to the Court of Appeals in late July, the Erie County district attorney’s office said that Lorenz’s “current pretrial detention of under 11 months on a murder case, in and of itself, does not rise to the level of a due process violation.” It also pointed out that while Lorenz’s conviction was dismissed, “his claim of actual innocence was rejected by the court,” and argued that bail should be denied because of “the gravity of the charges” as well as “the evidence of risk of flight and dangerousness.”
Comments