Emel McDowell served 19 years for a fatal shooting he didn’t commit. A letter from the gunman changed everything

Emel McDowell was in jail at Rikers Island when a guard yelled out his name. A single envelope slid through the metal bars into his cell.

He stared at the return address in disbelief.

It was from the man he believed fired the fatal shot in a killing that had put McDowell behind bars in New York City. The man he believed should have been arrested – not him.

He tore open the envelope. The words hit like a punch.

Emel, you know me and you were friends for a very long time. And that incident that occurred… should not break our friendship, the letter said.

Emel, don’t think for one bit that cause I’m out here I’m not suffering... I don’t think I deserve to walk the face of the earth because one of my best friends is locked up, for something that he didn’t do.

The “incident” occurred three months earlier at a Brooklyn house party, when McDowell said his friend opened fire during an altercation, killing a 19-year-old man.

“I’m sitting here charged with murder, trying to adjust to being in jail,” McDowell told CNN this month. “I had just spent my first birthday incarcerated. I had spent my first Christmas (incarcerated). My first New Year. And to get this letter … it opened a lot of wounds.”

McDowell believed the letter, hand-written on unlined paper and dated January 1991, would clear his name. He gave it to his court-appointed attorney, and trusted justice would prevail.

It didn’t — not for a long time.

Despite conflicting witness accounts and the letter from the alleged killer suggesting McDowell had nothing to do with the shooting, a jury convicted him of murder and weapon possession. He was sentenced to 22 years to life in prison.

The letter stayed with him. He tucked it inside a brown Bible beside his bed in prison, still believing it was key to his freedom.

From behind bars, McDowell launched a relentless campaign to prove his innocence. He cold-called lawyers, activists and journalists to tell them about the letter. He took paralegal classes in prison, earned college credits and helped other inmates draft legal briefs. He filed his own appeal.

Years passed, and his hope faded. The letter’s fraying edges and deepening creases became a symbol of his long fight for justice.

Then in December 2009, prosecutors offered him a deal: plead guilty to manslaughter and walk free with time served.

“It was an opportunity to get home with my family for Christmas after spending 19 years and two months in prison for something I didn’t do,” McDowell said.

He took it and left prison a free man who was still guilty in the eyes of the law. But freedom without exoneration was not justice, he said.

Finally, more than 13 years later, came the vindication he had long sought. The Brooklyn District Attorney’s Office vacated his conviction in March 2023 after it said McDowell’s friend confessed to the shooting.

Last year, McDowell received a $9 million settlement in a wrongful conviction lawsuit against New York City and several police officers.

Now he’s filed a claim against the state, citing, among other arguments, his forced labor and lost wages while working for pennies an hour in prison, a situation his attorney compares to a modern form of slavery.

Almost 35 years later, the fight that started before that single envelope fluttered into his cell is not over.

“Every time I looked at that letter, I cried, I got emotional,” he said. “I stopped reading it now because it opens old wounds.”

McDowell’s parents separated when he was 10. His mother raised him and his younger brother in Brooklyn.

By the fall of 1990, he was a high school honor student set to graduate and enlist in the Army. His goal was to later transition to the Air Force and become a pilot.

The night he went to the house party that October, his mother had asked him to stay home. But he was 17 and wanted to spend time with his girlfriend, so he went anyway, he said.

A melee broke out at the party involving a friend of McDowell’s. Another friend – the one who sent him the letter – pulled out a gun and opened fire, he said. McDowell told investigators that he grabbed his girlfriend’s arm and fled the scene.

The shooting left 19-year-old Jonathan Powell dead and ultimately shattered the lives of two families. Once he left the party shortly after midnight, McDowell went to a different friend’s house for a sleepover, not knowing it would be his last night of freedom.

The next morning, his mother told him to return home immediately.

“I walked straight to my house about eight blocks away. And when I got there, my mother said, ‘Oh, the detective was here looking for you.’ I said, ‘For what? And she was like, ‘About the boy who got shot.’”

His mother urged him to go to the precinct and find out what they wanted.

“My mother didn’t even come with me because in both our minds, I didn’t have anything to do with it. I wasn’t even involved in the fight,” he said.

At the precinct, McDowell said he was taken straight to the homicide division, where detectives accused him of murder. He never made it back home.

Within 24 hours, police charged him with the crime. Despite conflicting witness statements, detectives didn’t follow up on the accusations against his friend, the Brooklyn District Attorney’s Office said later in a statement.

Two witnesses identified McDowell as the shooter while several others indicated it was his friend, the district attorney’s office said.

The gun used in the killing was never recovered.

In the letter, his friend, who was at the house party with him, said he was haunted by what happened that night.

Don’t think for a minute that I’m out here rejoicing, the friend wrote in the letter. Man, I’m suffering. I have nightmares, I can’t sleep or eat. Sometimes I just pray for death. … P.S. Try & keep our letters confidential.

McDowell said on the day he was arrested, he told investigators at the precinct that his friend did it. But for law enforcement at the time, blaming him instead was an easy win, he said.

The house party shooting occurred amid the crack cocaine epidemic and the year after five Black and Latino teens were charged with the rape and attempted murder of a female jogger in New York’s Central Park – a case that horrified the nation. (Years later, after being convicted and serving time in prison, the men were exonerated after a serial rapist confessed to the attack.)

“The political climate back then was do something about these horrible crime rates in NYC, particularly juvenile criminals,” McDowell said. “So, the cops wanted to get numbers, and I looked like a good candidate: Seventeen, Black, unique name, was present at the party and from a working-class family headed by a single mother.”

In his letter, McDowell’s friend stopped short of a full confession but said enough to prompt an investigation, said Oscar Michelen, McDowell’s current lawyer.

“Emel understood what he meant by it, and he told his lawyer (at the time) that his friend … did it,” Michelen said. “So, the friend’s name was known to everybody and there were things that could have been done to establish that it was him, like subpoenaing him, putting any pressure on him. But no one did anything, really.”

His attorney at the time did not present the letter as evidence at trial or share it with prosecutors.

The Brooklyn District Attorney’s Office later determined that investigators did not follow up on evidence implicating McDowell’s friend as the shooter.

“That was likely due to tunnel vision and confirmation bias that led the police to focus on one suspect and discount evidence to the contrary,” the office said in a statement.

CNN has reached out to McDowell’s friend for comment but is not naming him because he hasn’t been charged with a crime.

After more than two years in jail, McDowell was found guilty in a jury trial. He couldn’t believe he was going to prison at 19 for a murder he didn’t commit.

“As a young man, I believed that the criminal justice system had a way of sorting things out. So, when I went to trial in 1992 … I never in my wildest dreams thought I would get convicted,” he said. After the verdict, he said, “I was numb. I was like, ‘This is it, I’m done. My life is over. I’m never gonna breathe free air again.’ ”

After a stint in Rikers Island, McDowell was shuttled to the Elmira Correctional Facility in upstate New York, where he became inmate No. 92A5351.

Over his years of incarceration, he moved through several state prisons. But with every transfer, he held onto his Bible. It kept safe his most prized possession. Some nights, he’d run his fingers through its pages to make sure the letter was still there.

“I took my Bible with me wherever I went,” he said. “That letter was a symbol of hope that the truth would eventually come to light.”

It also gave him a sense of purpose.

At one prison, Great Meadow Correctional Facility in Comstock, professors from nearby Skidmore College visited to teach classes to inmates. McDowell started earning credits toward a college degree and enrolled in a paralegal certification program through the mail.

His friends helped him pay the tuition as he learned the law and gained the tools to challenge his conviction. The training proved so effective that McDowell taught legal research classes at another prison. He helped other inmates file legal briefs challenging their cases — even as he continued to work on his own.

In 1995, a state appeals court denied a motion by McDowell challenging his conviction. Not one to give up, he later sent his file to several attorneys. One of them was Michelen.

“It was so organized … I was impressed with the fact that it was written pro se by an inmate,” he said. “And I thought he’d set out good facts. So, we did some additional investigation, and I decided to take the case.”

In December 2009, just before a hearing on whether to vacate his conviction, prosecutors offered him a deal to plead guilty to manslaughter under an agreement that allowed him to be released from prison. As part of the deal, he admitted to taking part in the crime but not shooting the victim, Michelen said.

McDowell briefly considered rejecting the deal and fighting for full exoneration, but he did not trust the justice system after it failed him once, he said.

He chose freedom.

McDowell began fighting his case from outside prison. He learned how to use his mother’s computer and the internet, diving into a digital world unavailable to him before prison.

After years of legal groundwork, he and his lawyer reached out to the Brooklyn District Attorney’s Office and asked prosecutors to review the case.

In March 2023, with a different chief prosecutor in office, their efforts finally paid off. District Attorney Eric Gonzalez, who was elected in 2017, announced that an investigation by his office’s Conviction Review Unit had determined that McDowell was innocent and moved to vacate his conviction.

McDowell’s friend had confessed to the unit’s investigators and said he fired the gun in self-defense, the District Attorney’s Office said.

“Our legal system failed Emel McDowell when he was wrongfully convicted of murder in 1990 and his release years later was conditioned on an admission to a crime he did not commit,” Gonzalez said in a 2023 statement. “…Today we will ask to give him his good name back. As prosecutors, it is our obligation to do justice in every case.”

A law enforcement source confirmed to CNN that the friend who the DA’s office said confessed to the killing was the same person who wrote the letter to McDowell back in 1991.

Authorities said they have determined the friend acted in self-defense that night at the party and do not plan to file charges.

For McDowell, the battle goes on.

In his civil claim against the state, he argues that he’s owed compensation for being forced to work in prison for almost two decades and for missing out on years of income he likely would have earned if he hadn’t been incarcerated. Similar legal actions have been brought in New York and other states.

“I’ve given you free labor for years, at pennies on a dollar … and I was wrongfully convicted,” McDowell said. “You forced labor out of me. You don’t get to keep it. You have to compensate me for that.”

Although McDowell received millions in his wrongful-conviction settlement with New York City, the state owes him damages over his forced free labor, Michelen said.

“It’s easy for people who were not honor roll high school seniors and had their lives torn apart for 19 years to attempt to devalue life and someone’s experience,” he told CNN.

The New York state attorney general’s office declined to comment on the lawsuit.

McDowell was 17 when he was first jailed. He was released from prison in his late 30s. Now he’s 53.

No amount of money can make up for what he lost while behind bars, he said.

His father died when he was in prison, and he never got a chance to reconnect with him, he said.

Sometimes, he wonders what his life would be like now if he’d never been wrongfully convicted.

“I didn’t get the life experiences that most youth have … school, work, girls …” he said. “If I was able to accomplish the things that I have now with my roadblocks, what could I have accomplished in life? Where would I be now?”

Though his exoneration is a welcome step, the stigma of a felony conviction never really goes way, he said. CNN ran a nationwide criminal background search on McDowell and the results show his manslaughter conviction but no mention of him being exonerated.

CNN also ran a similar search in New York state, which shows no results under McDowell’s name. That means his case file has been sealed, a law enforcement source said.

But McDowell said he still must constantly prove himself to people who judge him for his conviction and prison term.

Exonerees face extra hurdles, he said. When adopting children, opening certain businesses like liquor stores or applying for professional licenses to practice law or real estate, they can be required to submit detailed records and sworn statements, he said.

“People think after an exoneration that we go on to live like any other citizen. That’s a myth. Particularly in New York state, where they only seal the record, not expunge it,” he said. “There is never really justice.”

McDowell has a real estate license and works on contract with law firms to help them prepare motions. He said his goal is to go to law school and become an attorney who does a broad range of legal work – including wrongful conviction cases.

“I didn’t come this far in my life to be pigeonholed,” he said.

And he no longer looks at the letter — it brings back too many painful memories. He gave it to his attorney for safekeeping as a reflection of where he’s been.

Instead, he’s looking ahead. The future, he believes, is now his to write.