Convict Seeks Release Based on Sibling’s Late Confession

It wasn’t unusual for Lamont Branch to be mistaken for his older brother, Lorenzo.

Neighbors “would say to me, ‘Yo, Lorenzo,’ ” Lamont recalled recently. “And I’d say, ‘Yo, I’m not Lorenzo.’ ”

But the confusion over the look-alike brothers changed from a passing annoyance to an endless ordeal when someone put a bullet in Danny Josephs’ head.

Lamont, 35, has served nine years of a 25-years-to-life sentence for killing Josephs in a drug-infested Brooklyn housing project in 1988. But now Lorenzo, 37, has said he fired the shot.

The older brother said so to his family and even on videotape, crying as he spoke to lawyers at a Legal Aid Society office. But despite his family’s pleading, he won’t appear in a courtroom and repeat under oath his story that he killed Josephs in self-defense.

“He wants to do the right thing, but he’s scared,” said Dennell Branch, another brother. “Who wouldn’t be?”

So Lamont languishes in a maximum-security prison in Upstate New York while Lorenzo walks the streets of Brooklyn.

Their mother is locked in her own prison of conflict and despair.

“I love both my sons,” Ruthel Branch said. “But I got an innocent one in jail. And I got another one who did it. . . . It makes me want to cry.”

No such conflict has troubled the trial judge, a state appeals court or the Brooklyn district attorney’s office, all of whom have stood by Lamont’s conviction. They cite inconsistencies in family members’ stories.

“A jury found him guilty beyond a reasonable doubt,” said Deputy District Attorney Dennis Hawkins. “That’s good enough for us.”

In a phone interview from Coxsackie Correctional Facility, Lamont sighed when asked about his brother.

“My hope is kind of dying,” Lamont said. “Sometimes all I can think about is that Lorenzo. I’m walking in his shoes.”

Several attempts by the Associated Press to contact Lorenzo--through his family, his lawyer and at a small Brooklyn apartment building where he’s a custodian--were unsuccessful.

Sitting in her tiny apartment, where a lacquered poster of Bob Marley hangs on the wall, Ruthel Branch, a 60-year-old home care attendant, described struggling to rear her children to “always do what’s right.”

The Branches moved to the tough East New York section of Brooklyn from North Carolina when Lamont was an infant. Branch and her husband separated soon after, leaving her to rear six children on her own.

Growing up, Lamont was friendly and forgetful, sometimes running out to pick up some milk and returning two hours later empty-handed. Lorenzo had a mean streak, his family said. Lamont remembers his brother tying him up and leaving him in a basement.

Still, Lamont and Lorenzo became, in some ways, interchangeable. At 12, Lamont grew long dreadlocks and fell in love with reggae music. Lorenzo soon did the same. Later, each drove a custom blue van with his nickname stenciled on the back. Lamont was “Brigge,” Lorenzo, “Tonto.”

“They were almost like twins,” said their older sister, Belinda Branch.

Both brothers had misdemeanor arrests for drug possession. And Lorenzo was known to carry a gun; Dennell said Lorenzo once fired it at him during an argument, grazing him.

Lamont and Lorenzo escaped serious trouble until March 26, 1988.

That morning Danny Josephs, 37, was shot dead in a second-floor apartment in Brownsville. Police would find $1,497 in the victim’s pocket and plastic bags of cocaine strewn about the apartment.

From the start, the circumstances were sketchy. Police initially found no suspects or witnesses. But more than a year later, two crack addicts being questioned about an unrelated homicide implicated Lamont in Josephs’ killing.

A frantic Lamont called his brother from the police station.

“I said, ‘You know what I’m here for?’ ” Lamont recalled. “He said, ‘I know. I did it. You’re my little brother. I’m not going to leave you there.’ ”

But three days passed with no word from Lorenzo. “I kind of knew right then what was going on,” Lamont said.

In a statement after his arrest, Lamont described the day of the killing: He was alerted there was trouble at the other apartment, heard a shot as he approached the door, found his wounded friend Josephs inside, shouted for someone to call 911, then left.

He recalled another friend who was there, John Green, telling him, “It was a mistake.” But the statement said nothing about Lorenzo.

As Lamont’s 1990 trial approached, the Branch family says it tried to warn attorneys on both sides they had the wrong brother.

After the killing--and well before Lamont became a suspect--Lorenzo confessed to Belinda, the family said. Another sister said Lorenzo had ditched the murder weapon at her home. The gun was never found.

Belinda and Lamont’s former girlfriend, Brenda Gilbert--the mother of five of his seven children--told the district attorney’s office that Lamont was home with them at the time of the shooting. Still, the case moved forward.

In an opening statement, defense attorney Harvey Mandelcorn told the jurors that members of Lamont’s family would help convince them his was a case of mistaken identity. The family never did.

Mandelcorn says that when it came time to take the stand, they backed out. They say they were never called.

The key prosecution witnesses, Thomas Edwards and Shorn Green, testified they saw “Brigge” toting a gun when he and two men broke into the apartment. Moments later, they heard gunfire, saw the men run out and take off in a blue van. Edwards also labeled Lamont a drug dealer.

On cross-examination, both witnesses admitted that at the time they were constantly high on crack. And Edwards testified first that another man had the gun. Then, after conferring privately with prosecutors, they testified that Lamont did.

Jurors deliberated two days and sent the judge two notes saying they were deadlocked, before finally finding Lamont guilty of second-degree murder, first-degree burglary and criminal possession of a weapon.

Although the family didn’t accept the verdict and begged Lorenzo to free his brother by turning himself in, he did not agree to talk until after the Court of Appeals upheld the conviction in 1994.

On videotape, Lorenzo recounted going with an unidentified person to the apartment, which he had recently renovated for himself, to try to get Josephs to stop selling drugs there. An argument ensued and Josephs drew a pistol, he said. There was a struggle.

“Both our hands went up and a shot rang out,” he said. “And I watched Danny fall. . . . I knew I couldn’t change nothing, you know what I mean?

“It was nothing really done intentional,” he continued, in tears. “I didn’t know he was gonna pull out a gun. I just didn’t want to get myself hurt.”

Lorenzo said he left the scene in his van.

The video prompted Justice James G. Starkey to hold a hearing in 1997 on whether the new evidence would have changed the outcome of the trial. The brothers were reunited in a Brooklyn courtroom.

“When I saw him, I nearly passed out,” Lamont said. “I thought, I do have a brother, you know?”

Lorenzo’s testimony lasted all of two minutes.

“Can you tell the court what you know about the death of Danny Josephs?” a defense lawyer asked.

“I know my brother didn’t do it.”

“Do you have firsthand knowledge that your brother didn’t do it?”

“I take the Fifth [Amendment] on that because it might incriminate me.”

Lorenzo was done. The hearing continued with testimony from family members saying Lorenzo had confessed to them.

But in January, Starkey wrote in an opinion that the Branch family’s statements were “rife with contradictions.”

And he questioned Lorenzo’s videotaped account. According to a pathologist, Josephs was shot in the face from at least 18 inches away, a finding the judge found difficult to reconcile with Lorenzo’s claim of self-defense in a hand-to-hand struggle.

The judge admitted “the facts as described create a gnawing sense” that Lorenzo may have been involved in Josephs’ killing. But he upheld Lamont’s conviction and life sentence anyway.

Lamont’s attorney, Elon Harpaz, has filed another appeal, this time in federal court, based on new evidence, including Lorenzo’s videotape, and what he calls the prosecution’s improper coaching of Lamont at trial.

Harpaz is the husband of an AP reporter.

The lawyer still hopes to persuade John Green, a man several people have said witnessed the shooting, to testify to what he has told others privately: that Lorenzo was the shooter.

But Green declined to talk to the AP about it.

“That’s between Lamont and his brother,” he said.