A Hawaii man who spent more than 30 years behind bars for a murder he had long insisted he did not commit, was released on Friday on the orders of a judge who cited new evidence in his case.
The man, Gordon Cordeiro, was convicted in October 1998 for the August 1994 murder of Timothy Blaisdell in an apparent drug deal robbery on the island of Maui. For decades, Mr. Cordeiro, 51, has maintained his innocence.
On Friday, Mr. Cordeiro’s sentence was vacated in a Maui courtroom because of new evidence, including DNA evidence that his legal team said showed that Mr. Cordeiro was not at the crime scene the night of the murder. The Associated Press reported that there were gasps in the courtroom as Judge Kirstin Hamman of the Maui Second Circuit Court in Hawaii said that “the judgment and sentence is vacated and the defendant is ordered to be released from custody.”
Mr. Cordeiro said in an interview on Sunday that he hugged his lawyers after the judge issued her decision. “It was definitely a long-awaited relief,” he said.
Kenneth Lawson, a director of the Hawaii Innocence Project, which took up Mr. Cordeiro’s case, choked up in an interview as he described sitting beside Mr. Cordeiro in the courtroom on Friday.
“There was relief, there was joy,” he said.
Andrew Martin, the prosecuting attorney for Maui County, did not respond to a request for comment. The A.P. reported that Mr. Martin’s office planned to appeal and file a motion seeking to impose bail on Mr. Cordeiro’s release. Mr. Cordeiro is a flight risk because of the murder charge, he said.
According to court documents, Mr. Blaisdell went to Maui’s skid row on Aug. 11, 1994, with a man named Michael Freitas and $800 in cash to buy marijuana. Mr. Blaisdell’s body was later found at the bottom of a ravine. Mr. Freitas, who died in 2020, changed the story he gave to the police several times, eventually implicating Mr. Cordeiro as the person who killed Mr. Blaisdell, Mr. Cordeiro’s legal team said. (According to court documents, Mr. Freitas believed Mr. Cordeiro had snitched on one of Mr. Freitas’s friends in an unrelated drug case.)
Mr. Cordeiro was at his parents’ house the entire day building a shelving unit, with witnesses and receipts corroborating his activities, according to the Hawaii Innocence Project.
Mr. Cordeiro’s first trial ended in a hung jury, with only one juror voting to convict him, according to the Hawaii Innocence Project. Mr. Cordeiro was found guilty after a second trial, in part because jailhouse informants who, in exchange for leniency, gave testimony that connected Mr. Cordeiro to the murder.
He was convicted of murder, attempted murder and robbery and was sentenced to life without parole.
The Hawaii Innocence Project argued last week that Mr. Cordeiro should be released because new evidence proved his innocence. That includes DNA testing on the inside of the jeans that Mr. Blaisdell was wearing the day he was killed, which found “an unidentified DNA profile” but no traces of Mr. Cordeiro’s DNA, the court documents filed by Mr. Cordeiro’s attorneys said.
The Hawaii Innocence Project also argued Mr. Cordeiro had an ineffective defense team and was a victim of misconduct by prosecutors.
The judge ruled that there was insufficient evidence to show that the state intentionally used false testimony, and she rejected the claim of prosecutorial misconduct, The A.P. reported.
After he was released, Mr. Cordeiro went to visit his mother’s gravesite. On Saturday, he visited his grandparents’ graves. He is staying at his parents’ house on Maui, and his family has been helping him settle in, buying him clothes and feeding him, he said. They have been his “rock,” he said.
“I’m starting over from scratch,” he said.
Mr. Cordeiro attended church with his family on Sunday morning, and the sermon was about forgiving those who harm you. He has learned to forgive those who implicated him in Mr. Blaisdell’s murder, he said. It felt as if the priest was speaking directly to him.
“It was a perfect message,” he said. “It was a perfect sermon.”