Carl King Talks about Devoting his Life to Freeing Colin Warner, Inspiration for Crown Heights
The Hudson Union www.hudsonunionsociety.com is where everyone comes to be inspired, to change our world.
Check us out on Twitter @ActualJoePascal
After the screening (film opens nationwide on August 25) and before Crown Heights, appears in theaters, Lakeith Stanfield (played Snoop Dogg in Straight Outta Compton, Civil Rights activistic in Selma, and starred opposite Don Cheadle in Miles Ahead), Nnamdi Asomugha (All-Pro NFL star, and actor), and the real Colin Warner and Carl King will join us for the in person interview.
Amazon Studios Crown Heights film synopsis:
In 1980, a teenager was gunned down in the Flatbush section of Brooklyn. A fourteen-year-old boy claimed he saw what happened and was taken into custody. Police spent hours pressuring the child into identifying a suspect. Eventually, he pointed at the mug shot of Colin Warner, a teenager from neighboring Crown Heights who recently emigrated from Trinidad. Colin had no connection to the crime, but was arrested and charged with the murder. He was arrested at the height of the crime wave in New York City and homicide detectives were overwhelmed. They wanted to close cases, and as a result, innocent people went to prison. In 1982, Colin was tried alongside the actual perpetrator and, despite the lack of physical evidence, or a credible eyewitness, he was convicted of murder and sentenced to life in prison.
Colin’s childhood friend Carl ‘KC’ King took up the case. KC grew up in Trinidad with Colin and they both immigrated to Crown Heights in the late seventies. KC couldn’t accept that an innocent man could be sent to prison, and so he devoted his life to fighting for Colin’s freedom.
In prison, Colin knew he didn’t belong there and refused to submit to the prison rules and culture. He fought with other inmates and guards and spent more than four years in solitary confinement during his first decade in prison. When his grandmother died in Trinidad, he had an awakening. He realized that, although time had stopped for him, the world outside was passing him by. Colin went back to school to earn his GED and become a teacher’s aide at the prison college. He worked on appeals in the law library and staged a concerted effort with KC to fight his conviction in the courts.
During this time, Colin reconnected with a childhood friend named Antoinette. They began writing letters and she became involved with their efforts to exonerate him. Eventually, they fell in love and were married at the prison. For years, KC worked tirelessly on Colin’s appeals. He recruited lawyers, took personal loans to cover the costs and becomes a legal courier to learn the court system. But each appeal came up short. They mounted legal challenges based on technicalities and were denied by the courts at every turn.
After serving fifteen years Colin was eligible for parole. In a devastating hearing, he was denied his freedom because he maintained his innocence. He would not be paroled unless he took responsibility for the crime, and so he decided he would rather die in prison than confess to a murder he didn’t commit. Colin was repeatedly denied parole and believed his situation was hopeless, but KC and Antoinette refused to give up.
KC came to realize that no judge would release Colin on a technicality. He needed to present the real story of what happened, and so he began reinvestigating the case himself. KC enlisted a lawyer named William Robedee to help with the case. Robedee was just starting his own practice and was working out of his Brooklyn apartment. He agreed to help with the case in exchange for KC’s services as a legal courier. They tracked down witnesses, convinced the actual perpetrator to come forward and earned the support of the victim’s family. In 2001, their appeal compelled the New York State Supreme court to release Colin from prison after 21 years of wrongful incarceration.