After Andre Brown spent 23 years behind bars, found guilty of shooting and wounding two men on a Bronx street in 1999, his conviction was overturned on the grounds that he had a shoddy trial lawyer.
Mr. Brown, who has long maintained his innocence, stepped out of prison more than two years ago, came home to his family and began working in a youth court mentoring program.
The family of O’Neil Virgo, one of the victims, was horrified. Mr. Brown was the gunman, they said, and his release had reopened wounds they had spent decades trying to heal. Officials with the Bronx district attorney’s office challenged the judge’s decision and questioned why Mr. Brown had waited roughly two decades to present this particular defense.
On Christmas Eve, prosecutors won an appeal to reinstate Mr. Brown’s original conviction. The decision would send Mr. Brown, 48, back to prison to resume his 40-year sentence, barring a judge’s last-minute intervention.
He is set to surrender on Friday.
“I never would have thought they would have reinstated this case,” Mr. Brown said on Tuesday, seated in a bright conference room in the Bronx offices of the Fortune Society, an outreach organization where he had been slated to start a job on Monday.
“I feel as if I’m being pushed back into a sepulcher,” he said.
His two consecutive 20-year prison terms for attempted murder were far more severe than what he would have been likely to receive today, said Oscar Michelen, one of Mr. Brown’s lawyers.
