On Aug. 9, 2021, Christopher Ellis, a Brooklyn man imprisoned for murder, walked free after a New York trial judge vacated his conviction, finding that his trial attorneys had never received hundreds of pages of potentially exculpatory police notes pointing to at least 11 other suspects.

By then, Ellis had spent more than 30 years incarcerated for his 1992 conviction on second-degree murder, attempted robbery and other charges stemming from the fatal shooting of Joseph Healy in Hempstead, New York.

But even after the court tossed Ellis' conviction, the Nassau County District Attorney's Office refused to dismiss the case, instead choosing to subject him to another criminal trial.

It wasn't until Jan. 24, 2025, after a jury acquitted him of all charges following a week-and-a-half trial, that Ellis, who was 20 at the time of his arrest, could clear his name.

Now, Ellis is turning to the federal court to seek justice and compensation for all the years of life he lost behind bars due to a criminal prosecution his attorneys say was filled with constitutional violations from the start.

In a complaint filed April 7 seeking compensatory and punitive damages, Ellis accused five former Nassau County Police Department detectives of coercing false statements from him and other witnesses, fabricating evidence, using faulty identification procedures, and suppressing exculpatory evidence that, if used by his defense lawyers, could have changed the course of his trial.

"The facts of the underlying case, the documentary evidence, and the circumstances leading to his arrest show that Mr. Ellis suffered an egregious deprivation of process and miscarriage of justice," says the complaint, filed by attorneys with the civil rights boutique firm Emery Celli Brinckerhoff Abady Ward & Maazel LLP.

Ellis said in a statement that he brought the lawsuit "to seek accountability and to help ensure this does not happen to anyone else."

"I lost more than 30 years of my life for something I did not do," Ellis said. "You can't give that time back. I missed decades with my family, milestones, and opportunities I will never get again."

In a phone call with Law360, Ellis, now 56, said what pained him most was that the criminal justice system showed no care for his life, despite his insistence that he was innocent.

"They didn't listen," Ellis told Law360. "That was the thing that really bothered me. It's like no care at all, just throwing away your life like that. It's traumatizing."

The Nassau County Police Department declined to comment.

A Recanted Confession

On Sept. 29, 1990, Healy, an assistant football coach at Hofstra University, was fatally shot outside an Arby's drive-through in Hempstead during what prosecutors alleged was an attempted robbery. According to trial testimony, two men approached Healy, and one of them shot him after the pair confronted him near the restaurant's driveway.

Police arrested Ellis and two of his friends several months later after questioning him in connection with an unrelated attempted robbery. Detectives told Ellis that witnesses ostensibly saw him at Healy's murder scene and that there was "no way" that he would get out of the situation. They ultimately obtained a confession from him after hours of interrogation, the complaint says.

At trial in 1992, prosecutors relied primarily on that confession and the testimony of eyewitness Stephanie Scheele, who identified Ellis as one of the men involved in the shooting after a police lineup. A jury convicted Ellis of second-degree murder, attempted robbery and weapons charges, and he was sentenced to 31 1/3 years-to-life in prison.

The trauma of his prosecution and incarceration often takes Ellis back, he said, to Feb. 15, 1991, when he was interrogated for 18 long hours — all while being denied food, water, access to a lawyer, a phone call and sleep.

Exhausted and fearing he would never see his newborn son again after Nassau County police detectives threatened him with life in prison, Ellis signed a confession stating he drove a car to the scene of the shooting. He recanted that confession and later said he signed the statement because of the pressure and the threats he was facing. Ellis' friends and codefendants, David Liles and Gary Lawrence, also gave written statements confessing to his involvement in the killing.

"These detectives were ruthless," Ellis said. "You know, 20 years old, I was scared."

That confession is now a cornerstone of Ellis' lawsuit, which includes a host of constitutional violations brought under Section 1983 of Title 42 of the U.S. Code, a federal statute allowing individuals to sue state or local government officials in federal court for civil rights violations.

"All constitutional violations are serious. Criminal defendants in our society have rights, and you're entitled to the protection of those rights," said Eric Abrams, an Emery Celli attorney who represents Ellis. "The coerced confession is one that is particularly egregious."

Ellis' attorneys argue in the complaint that the confession was not only coerced, but demonstrably false and riddled with factual inaccuracies that detectives added during the interrogation process.

According to the suit, detectives told Ellis there was a "problem" with his signed confession because it placed him only in the vehicle and not near the gunfire. The officers then allegedly pressured him to sign an addendum revising his statement to say he had been standing outside the car near bushes by the Arby's drive-through when the shooting occurred. The amended statement also included details about a physical struggle between the victim and shooter that contradicted eyewitness accounts, the complaint says.

Withheld Evidence and Manipulation of a Witness

Ellis has maintained for decades that he had no involvement in the killing and was instead at his brother's birthday party the night of the shooting, an alibi that multiple witnesses testified to at trial, according to the complaint.

A crucial factor in Ellis' conviction, according to the lawsuit, was detectives' alleged suppression of statements from witness Cynthia Louissaint, who repeatedly told police that Ellis was not one of the men she saw at the scene after being shown his photograph.

The lawsuit alleges Detective Richard Wells never told Ellis or his defense counsel about Louissaint's statements.

Later, during a pretrial suppression hearing, Wells testified that Louissaint had not excluded anyone as a suspect. Wells' suppression of Louissaint's statements deprived Ellis of "material exculpatory evidence" that could have changed the outcome of his trial, according to the complaint.

Ellis' attorneys say detectives manipulated Scheele, the sole eyewitness who placed Ellis at the crime scene, by first showing her his photograph on multiple occasions in advance of a lineup and then allowing her to hear him repeat the words "just do it, just do him" before she identified him as one of the men involved in the shooting. The attorneys contend the identification procedure improperly tainted Scheele's memory and rendered her identification unreliable.

The lineup contention came up on appeal before the Appellate Division, Second Department, a state intermediate court, which in December 1995 rejected Ellis' arguments. The court also found that, contrary to his claims, Ellis waived his Miranda rights and that there was evidence showing that he was not deprived of food or sleep while in custody. The highest court in the state, the New York Court of Appeals, declined to take his appeal two months later.

Locked up for more than two decades, Ellis reached out to Emery Celli partner Ilann Margalit Maazel after reading a 2014 New York Law Journal article he wrote on the topic of wrongful convictions. The firm began representing Ellis in 2016.

In October 2019, Ellis filed a motion to vacate his conviction based on recently discovered evidence and the nondisclosure of Louissaint's statement, arguing it violated the principles the U.S. Supreme Court mandated in its 1963 decision Brady v. Maryland, which says that the prosecution is required to turn over to a criminal defendant any significant evidence in its possession that might be exculpatory.

The Nassau County District Attorney's Office Conviction Integrity Bureau became involved in reviewing Ellis' conviction, leading to the discovery of more than 100 pages of exculpatory police files that included memo notes pointing to at least two people who claimed to have killed Healy, multiple murder leads and sworn statements that the Nassau County Police Department had never turned over to Ellis' defense attorneys. 

Opposing Ellis' motion, Nassau County prosecutors conceded that materials had been withheld, but argued they would not have changed the outcome of Ellis' trial.

But on July 22, 2021, less than two weeks after Ellis was granted parole, New York Supreme Court Justice Patricia A. Harrington vacated his murder conviction, concluding that had Wells' notes been turned over to the defense in a timely manner "there is a reasonable probability that the outcome would have been different."

Justice Harrington found that the evidence against Ellis "was not overwhelming or strong" — there was no forensic or physical evidence tying him to the crime and no witness present at the time of the shooting who, with the exception of Scheele, placed Ellis at the crime scene. On the other hand, the judge said in her order, denying Ellis access to the police notes deprived him of the opportunity to mount a more effective defense strategy.

"It is clear that the withholding of this material prevented defendant from being able to develop additional facts that could have aided his defense by establishing alternative theories to support his defense," the judge wrote. "The failure to disclose it severely erodes the public's sense of justice in this case."

On Trial Again

Once Ellis walked free following a bail hearing roughly three months before his parole release date, Nassau prosecutors had a choice: dismiss his criminal indictment or put him back on trial. They chose the latter.

Prosecutors are generally permitted to retry a defendant after a conviction has been vacated without violating the Constitution's protections against double jeopardy, so long as the conviction was not overturned for insufficient evidence.

The office's Sept. 20, 2021, announcement that it would retry Ellis came as a surprise to him, his lawyers and his family.

"I was shocked," Ellis said. "I didn't understand it. I didn't know what they were planning to achieve."

But as prosecutors were dragging Ellis back to court, his defense case was gaining strength.

Discovery provided another trove of previously hidden Brady material, including a 234-page file that contained police notes and arrest records as well as statements by suspects and witnesses that pointed to additional leads and suspects, according to Ellis' civil rights complaint.

The Nassau DA's office declined to comment.

A state jury acquitted Ellis of all charges, and his indictment was ultimately dismissed.

To Ellis, justice now means something simple that remained out of reach for years: "Live my life and enjoy my life with my family."

Ellis is represented by Ilann Margalit Maazel, Jonathan S. Abady, Earl S. Ward, Eric Abrams and Vivake Prasad of Emery Celli Brinckerhoff Abady Ward & Maazel LLP.

Counsel information for Nassau County and the individual detectives is not yet available.

The case is Ellis v. Nassau County et al., case number 2:26-cv-02041, in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of New York.

--Editing by Alex Hubbard.

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