Aug 18, 2022
RawNews1st – Man Sentenced To 20 Years To Life For New York Murder Was Released And Allegedly Killed Again.
Cody Backus seemed destined to spend decades in prison — perhaps his entire life — after being convicted of murder in 2008.
Backus, now 37, lost two appeals in state court and a separate appeal in federal court for the 2006 murder of James Brennan Jr. He was properly convicted of murder for his role in a Syracuse robbery that left Brennan dead, judges ruled.
But in 2018, Backus got the break of his life.
Now, he’s accused of fatally beating an 82-year-old man in Fulton. Backus faces a new murder charge in Marshell Foster’s death, an attack that police say Backus partially recorded and later uploaded to social media.
How exactly did Backus end up a free man at the time of Foster’s murder?
It turns out that a key prosecution witness from 2006, who testified at Backus’s first murder trial, had lied about what happened. In fact, that purported witness, Clarence Paige, likely wasn’t even there during the events that led to Brennan’s death during a drug robbery on Graves Street in Syracuse.
Learning that their key eyewitness had lied to a jury — and probably wasn’t even there for the events he described — Onondaga County prosecutors told a judge in 2018 they had no choice but to ask for Backus’s murder conviction to be tossed.
“…I’m uncomfortable with a conviction that based on probable perjured testimony,” former First Chief Assistant District Attorney Rick Trunfio told a judge in 2018.
Defense lawyer Kim Zimmer had been working for years to get Backus’s murder conviction tossed. She had uncovered Paige’s deception by providing evidence that he had recanted to others and also testified to different facts in a different trial.
Backus was never accused of being the actual shooter who killed Brennan in 2007; he was charged with murder after someone else pulled the trigger.
Under New York law, Backus could be convicted of murder if he participated in a robbery that led to someone’s death.
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