Brooklyn Man Sues Nassau County After 31 Years Wrongfully Imprisoned

Christopher Ellis, now 56 and living in Brooklyn, spent 31 years behind bars for a murder he did not commit. He filed a federal civil rights and malicious prosecution lawsuit against Nassau County on Monday, naming five retired Nassau County Police Department detectives who, he alleges, coerced a false confession, coached a reluctant witness into identifying him, and concealed hundreds of pages of investigative notes pointing to other suspects.

The crime that consumed those decades occurred September 29, 1990, when Joseph Healy, a 25-year-old assistant football coach at Hofstra University, was shot and killed outside an Arby's drive-through at the corner of Duncan Road and Hempstead Turnpike in East Meadows. Healy had been out with friends at Long Island bars; the group stopped for food in the early-morning hours when two men approached and one shot Healy in the face.

Ellis, then 20, had an alibi. He had spent the night hosting his brother's birthday party, and the DJ and his brother's girlfriend both testified he never left. It made no difference. Detectives subjected him to an 18-hour interrogation without food, water, sleep, or a phone call, and he signed a confession he immediately recanted. A Nassau County jury convicted him of second-degree murder in December 1992 and sentenced him to 31½ years to life.

"I remember waking up the next morning after being interrogated, and it's like, 'Wow, these people really don't care,'" Ellis told the Daily News.

The complaint names detectives John Comiskey, George Pierce, Robert Shaw, Richard Wells, and Robert Winter as codefendants alongside Nassau County. All five have since retired, according to Nassau County police. Ellis is seeking compensatory damages from both the county and the detectives, and punitive damages from the detectives individually; a dollar amount will be left for a jury to determine at trial.

The lawsuit details specifically how Detective Wells, the lead investigator, shaped the eyewitness identification. He showed photographs of potential suspects to a key witness at least 25 times. When that witness was shown a six-photo array that included Ellis, she failed to pick him out. She only identified Ellis during a live lineup after detectives had him read aloud "Just do it, just do him," the phrase reportedly spoken by one of Healy's attackers the night of the shooting.

The conviction began unraveling in 2019, when Nassau County's Conviction Integrity Unit discovered that Wells's memo-pad entries, cataloging leads pointing to two other suspects, had never been disclosed to Ellis's defense attorneys. Nassau County Supreme Court Justice Patricia Harrington vacated the conviction in August 2021, concluding there was "a reasonable probability that the outcome would have been different" had the notes been turned over.

Ellis walked out of custody that August. Nassau County prosecutors retried him anyway. On January 24, 2025, a Nassau County jury unanimously acquitted him of second-degree murder and attempted robbery.

"It's about time," Ellis said after the verdict. "From day one, I've been telling them I'm innocent and nobody's been listening to me until today."

Attorney Ilann Maazel, who represented Ellis through the exoneration proceedings, accused Nassau County police of hiding "evidence, leads, confessions" and charged that the Healy case saw "not one, not two, but three young Black men railroaded by the Nassau County Police Department." The Nassau County DA's office, when the conviction was first vacated in 2021, stated it found no basis to believe the failure to disclose the detective's notes was intentional.

ECBAWM partner Earl Ward, who led the 2025 defense team that secured the acquittal, framed the lawsuit's implications plainly: "Chris' acquittal after thirty years of wrongful incarceration reaffirms the flawed and broken nature of our criminal justice system." With the federal case now filed, a jury will be asked to put a dollar figure on what Nassau County owes the man it imprisoned from age 20 to 56.