That teenager, Landu Mvuemba, told Smith s lawyers that LAPD detectives had pressured him into the i

He was only 4 years old when John Edward Smith was arrested in a Los Angeles shooting homicide. But R B singer Chris Brown was in the courtroom Monday when the former gang member was exonerated after serving 19 years of a life term for murder.
During 19 years behind bars, Smith, a 37-year-old former gang member, adamantly maintained his innocence in the drive-by shooting, insisting that he was miles away at his grandmother european cruise travel vacation s house at the time of the crime.
His claims were ignored until three years ago, when a fledgling wrongful convictions group, Innocence Matters, took his case and identified problems with the testimony of the lone witness to identify him as the killer.
The judge s ruling came after the district attorney s office completed its own yearlong investigation and determined that the witness, a high school student injured in the shooting, had lied on the stand.
That teenager, Landu Mvuemba, told Smith s lawyers that LAPD detectives had pressured him into the identification and that he had tried on a number of occasions over the years to alert authorities about his false statements.
The killing was a skirmish in a bloody war between gangs associated with the Crips and Bloods european cruise travel vacation in the Mid-City neighborhood. On the morning of Sept. 9, 1993, two neighborhood teenagers went to look at the scene where a gang shooting had occurred the previous night.
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