Dewey Bozella ’07 Freed After 26 Years of Unjust Incarceration

   Occasionally we will get the kind news that bring extreme joy, and this is one such story. Our North Campus graduate, Dewey Bozella ’07, gained his freedom, on October 28, 2009, when the Dutchess County district attorney’s office, said “…it did not have sufficient evidence to go forward with a new trial.” (1) Mr. Bozella who had spent 26 years in prison was immediately released for  the 1977 murder of 92-year-old, Emma Crapser. 

   He was convicted twice — in 1983 and in a retrial in 1990. The key to this verdict was that a retired Poughkeepsie Police Lieutenant saved the case file, “figuring that the convictiion was so problematic lawyers might want it someday.” He was right. The evidence contained in the file had the “fingerprint of another man, Donald Wise, who was later convicted of committing a nearly identical murder of another elderly woman in the same neighborhood.” (2)

   It’s an extraordinary story about a man who over the years never stop proclaiming his innocence. Thanks be to God!

(Adapted from an article by Peter Applebome, in The New York Times (Our Towns), October 29, 2009.)

1. Peter Applebome, The New York Times (October 29, 2009)

2. Ibid.