In 1987, the Manhattan District Attorney’s office prosecuted two teen-agers for the murder of a French tourist near Times Square shortly after midnight on New Year’s Day. The accused were Eric Smokes, who was nineteen, and his best friend, David Warren, who was sixteen. Smokes and Warren insisted that they were innocent, but prosecutors charged them with murder. After several other teen-agers testified against them at trial, a jury convicted them. Warren spent almost twenty-one years in prison; Smokes was in prison for nearly twenty-five years.

In 2017, Warren and Smokes filed a motion in State Supreme Court to vacate their convictions. The Manhattan D.A., Cyrus R. Vance, Jr., has fought to keep the men’s convictions intact, and this battle has played out in a Manhattan courtroom, in a hearing held over eleven months which included ten days of testimony. The judge in the case, Stephen Antignani, is expected to announce his decision on October 31st—but the D.A.’s office appears to have lost track of some of its own files from 1987, which contain a significant piece of evidence.

Many of the same people who testified against Smokes and Warren in 1987 have returned to the witness stand to testify at the recent hearing. One is Kevin Burns, who was nineteen at the time of the crime. Two weeks later, the police arrested Burns for an unrelated robbery, and while in police custody, he announced that “he was a witness to the Homicide of the Frenchman in Manhattan on New Years’ Day,” as a detective later wrote in a memo. At the murder trial, in the summer of 1987, Burns testified that he had seen Smokes punch the victim.

But at the first date of the court hearing, last November, Burns, now fifty-two, recanted on the witness stand. “Everybody has something in their life they are ashamed of doing, and they get a chance to rectify the situation,” he said. “This is my lie that I get to rectify from thirty years ago.” Burns testified that he had not seen Smokes punch anyone that night. He said that he had not even been in Manhattan on New Year’s Eve. “I wasn’t there,” he said. “I lied about everything.” Burns explained that he had known Smokes when they were teen-agers, that he had once shot Smokes by mistake with a pellet gun while aiming for someone else, and that the two had not got along. “I hated him,” Burns said.

At the time of the murder trial, Burns was on Rikers Island, waiting to be sent upstate to serve a prison sentence. “Anything I said on the stand was a total fabrication because I felt I was in jeopardy with the D.A.,” he said. “I didn’t know it was a crime to lie under oath.” He recalled an exchange that he had before he took the witness stand at the trial with a man he called “the guy with the badge.” “He told me that if I testify against Smokes, he can make my life better,” Burns said. After Burns testified, he recalled, the man asked, “ ‘Do you smoke?’ I said, ‘Yes.’ He said, ‘We know you are going upstate, so you are going to need some cigarettes. We got Camels and we got Marlboros.’ He gave me a whole carton of Marlboros. He took it inside the prison and gave it to me.”

At the original murder trial, prosecutors had built their case in large part on the testimony of four young men who claimed that they had been at the crime scene and could identify the defendants. Two of those witnesses—Burns and one other—testified at the recent hearing that they had lied thirty-two years earlier. (The other two witnesses did not testify at the hearing.) Vance’s office has sought to undermine the credibility of the two witnesses who recanted, arguing that they were telling the truth in 1987 but are now lying. In a lengthy memo submitted to the court this summer, Vance’s office attacked Burns, writing that his “claims sound so much like a cheap novel because that is what they are—bad fiction.”

The memo, signed by Christine Keenan, the veteran prosecutor who has been defending Smokes and Warren’s convictions in court, disputed Burns’s claim that he had been given a carton of cigarettes after he testified at the murder trial. She pointed out that when the lead detective on the case, George Delgrosso, the lead prosecutor, Michael Goldstein, and another prosecutor testified at the hearing, they “all denied promising or providing Burns with a carton of cigarettes.”

Goldstein, who left the D.A.’s office in 1990, was called to the witness stand one morning last January, and Keenan questioned him about the matter of the cigarettes. “Did you ever hear an investigator or Detective Delgrosso tell Mr. Burns that you would give him and allow him to smuggle a carton of cigarettes back into prison?” she asked. “I don’t remember hearing that at all,” Goldstein said.

More than a year elapsed between when Smokes and Warren filed their motion in court and the first date of the hearing. “This case has been thoroughly reinvestigated,” Keenan told the judge, last December. “We just came to the conclusion that they are not actually innocent.” It emerged, however, that she had not seen the police file of the murder investigation before the hearing began. She had asked an investigator to fetch it from the police precinct, she told the judge, and after being informed that it wasn’t there, she had gone looking for it herself. Last December, she reported that she had finally found the file “because I personally crawled through a disgusting basement in the police precinct.”

Keenan appears not to have known about the existence of another file: a tattered legal envelope filled with Goldstein’s files that had been sent to the Municipal Archives. When I found it there recently, the envelope contained numerous manila folders with crime-scene photos, witness statements, and notes about the case that Goldstein had handwritten on legal pads. Buried inside a file marked “Witnesses,” there was also an expense report he had filled out for costs related to the trial. One expense, for $17.41, was for “cigarettes and soap for inmate.” The attached receipt, which was from a pharmacy near the courthouse, was dated July 8th—the same day that Burns testified.

The Municipal Archives are located less than five blocks from the D.A.’s office, but it appeared that nobody from the D.A.’s office had retrieved the file. Meanwhile, Smokes and Warren, who both reside in Brooklyn, have been trekking into Manhattan for each court date. When their hearing started, last fall, they were both working manual-labor jobs: Smokes in construction, and Warren removing asbestos in schools. They are now middle-aged—Smokes is fifty-two, Warren forty-nine—and earlier this year Smokes underwent knee-replacement surgery. Afterward, he tried to find a less gruelling job than construction and applied to drive for Uber, but he was rejected, he said, because of his conviction.

When I called Goldstein this week to ask if he thought that Smokes and Warren might not be guilty of the crime they served time for, he declined to answer, “because the motion is presently pending before the court, and the judge has not yet made a decision.” When I mentioned Kevin Burns and the expense report, he said, “Giving someone cigarettes? I don’t think that’s something of great moment to give someone cigarettes.” When I contacted Vance’s spokesperson, Danny Frost, he gave a statement that he said is the D.A.’s policy on all such cases: “our office will thoroughly review any documents or information brought to our attention.”