Brooklyn District Attorney Moves to Vacate Conviction and Free Man Serving Time for Robbery After Two Others Were Identified and Confessed

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

Monday, March 16, 2026

Brooklyn District Attorney Moves to Vacate Conviction and Free Man Serving Time for Robbery
After Two Others Were Identified and Confessed

Became Suspect After Using Money Order Stolen from Elderly Victim;
Consistently Claimed and Testified That He Wasn't Involved in Robbery

Brooklyn District Attorney Eric Gonzalez today announced that following a thorough reinvestigation by his Conviction Review Unit (CRU), he will move to vacate the conviction of Kenneth Windley, who served 19 years in prison after being sentenced to 20 years to life. He was convicted as one of two men who robbed an elderly man of money orders after he used one of the money orders to buy a stove and was identified by the victim. Windley contended all along that he met two men he knew from the neighborhood who sold him the money order to make that purchase and that was his entire involvement. He later tracked down the two alleged suspects, who were imprisoned for committing a pattern of similar robberies, and they attested he wasn't involved. The CRU confirmed their identities and found their account plausible. The complete CRU report is available here.

District Attorney Gonzalez said, "After a complicated and thorough reinvestigation, our CRU was able to confirm evidence that was developed after trial, which showed that Mr. Windley's repeated claims that he did not commit this robbery were supported by the facts. It has taken many years, but today we are able to validate his account, release him from prison and exonerate his name. We have the most active conviction integrity unit in the country, and we intend to continue leading the way by overturning any miscarriage of justice we discover in Brooklyn."

Windley will be brought from prison and appear in court today at 2:15 p.m. before Brooklyn Supreme Court Justice Matthew D'Emic at 320 Jay Street, 15th Floor.

The District Attorney said that on the morning of April 1, 2005, 70-year-old Gerald Ross returned to his Crown Heights home after going to the bank and post office. Two men followed him into his building where they robbed him in the elevator of cash and two money orders (for $542.77 and $9.48) that were blank and unsigned. Shortly thereafter, Windley used the larger money order to buy a stove at Big Daddy appliance store in Brownsville. He provided his driver's license, and had the stove delivered to his Queens address. The store manager testified that the defendant was with two men. The victim identified him as one of the robbers.

Over a month after the incident, the victim was informed that one check was cashed in an electronics store. (The money orders were virtually untraceable, but Ross used the same post office to get them every month and the teller, who knew him, agreed to search for the tracking numbers.)

Windley testified before trial and at his trial. He recounted that on the day of the robbery he left his girlfriend's apartment and went to buy his mother a stove. At a parking lot, he met two men he's seen in the neighborhood who told him they would cover the tax for the $379 stove if he would give them his cash and use their money order instead, which he did.

A jury convicted Windley of second-degree robbery in March 2007. Because of his prior felony convictions, he was adjudicated as a persistent felony offender, increasing the mandatory time of incarceration. He was sentenced to 20 years to life in prison. He subsequently filed various appeals that were all denied.

The CRU was asked by Windley's lawyer to investigate his claim of innocence. Specifically, that the two men who sold him the money order were the two individuals his client had tracked down and that they were the ones who robbed the victim. He provided statements by both men attesting to these facts.

The CRU interviewed nearly everyone involved in the case, including the two suspects. It discovered that both had extensive criminal histories, were convicted of committing seven robberies together from April 4, 2005 (three days after Ross's robbery) through February 1, 2026, and sentenced to prison for those and other crimes. The robbery pattern took place in the same neighborhood, using the same modus operandi of following elderly men from banks to their homes, then robbing them. Both men confirmed Windley's version of events in interviews. Their accounts were corroborated through recorded prison phone calls and in emails that the CRU reviewed.

If the jury had known about the other, similar robbery pattern for which two other men were charged, there is a reasonable probability the jury would have credited Windley's explanation and rejected the one-witness identification case before it.

The District Attorney accordingly recommends that his conviction be vacated, and, because the victim has died and the case can't be retried, that the indictment be dismissed.

To date, the work of the Conviction Review Unit has resulted in 42 convictions being vacated since 2014. Currently, CRU has approximately 40 open investigations.

This case was investigated by Julio Cuevas, Special Counsel to CRU, with assistance from Lori Glachman, Editor in Chief of CRU.

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