July 22, 2026

Firm files unjust conviction claim for Derrick Ulett in Brooklyn case

On July 22, 2026, our firm filed an unjust conviction claim in the New York Court of Claims on behalf of Derrick Ulett, seeking at least $25 million in compensatory damages from the State of New York. Mr. Ulett, then twenty, a gainfully employed father and husband who had never been convicted of a crime, was framed for the March 2008 shooting death of his childhood friend Ruben Alexandre in Flatbush. The prosecution case rested entirely on three contradictory witnesses whose identifications were orchestrated by Detective Kevin Stumpf, who months earlier had used coercive tactics to manufacture a false identification in another Brooklyn murder case. Worse, the prosecution withheld surveillance video from the lobby of the building where Alexandre was shot that exculpated Mr. Ulett and discredited the witnesses against him. Mr. Ulett was convicted in 2011 and sentenced to twenty years to life in state prison. On June 25, 2019, the New York Court of Appeals vacated the conviction, finding that the trial prosecutor had withheld the exculpatory surveillance video—while falsely representing that no such video existed. Mr. Ulett was released on bail in October 2020, but the Brooklyn D.A. did not move to dismiss the indictment until December 19, 2025. Mr. Ulett’s Legal Aid Society counsel, Erin Darcy, stated that the dismissal “is about one thing, which is that Derrick Ulett is innocent and no amount of time, no amount of effort, no efforts to relitigate could ever overcome that fact.”