Harold Hohne

Harold Hohne was a member of the sailing program at the Gateway Marina. He organized small boat races and regattas at the Rockaway Point Yacht Club, he also sailed in many (and often won).

Harold Hohne (b. 6 January 1933 in Brooklyn, NY; d. 16 December 2022 ibidem) was a German American independent telecommunications professional, family man and father.

Life

Martin Sheen played Harold Hohne in the television movie "Guilty Until Proven Innocent" (1991), Brendan Fraser plays Bobby McLaughlin, a high school drop out, who at the age of twenty buys crack and drinks his life away on a lousy salarly from his pizza delivery job.

Harold was the son of the German Americans August Hohne and his wife Frieda, née Albrecht. He married his fiancée Mary Craig and became a father, foster father and later grandfather.

Murder trial

Harold became well-known in the 1980s, crusading for his adult foster son son, Robert "Bobby" K. McLaughlin (b. 1959), who had been convicted of second-degree murder for a death that occurred during an armed robbery in Brooklyn on 29 December 1979. Three armed robbers held up dozens of people in Marine Park, known for criminality and drugs. The robbers shot and killed one victim who resisted.

Robert McLaughlin, 20 years old, was charged with robbery and murder. The prosecution’s case depended entirely on one eyewitness, Robert Keefe Tobin, 15. During a photo lineup, Detective John d’Elia told Tobin that Robert McLaughlin had been arrested with one of the other robbers. But Detective d’Elia was thinking of a different Robert McLaughlin. Despite other witnesses’ testimony that McLaughlin was nowhere near the scene at the time of the robberies, and despite another eyewitness who swore McLaughlin was not one of the perpetrators, McLaughlin was convicted and sentenced to 15 years to life. McLaughlin’s foster father, Harold Hohne, set out to exonerate him. In 1986, authorities began reinvestigating the case, and Robert Tobin’s statements were so riddled with inconsistencies that the state had to admit its error. Justice Anne G. Feldman set aside the murder conviction on July 3. Robert McLaughlin buried his head in his arms on the defendant’s table. He was free after spending 6½ years in prison for a crime he didn’t commit.

Robert "Bobby" K. McLaughlin was confused with a Robert "Bobby" L. McLaughlin. Although he passed a lie detector test at Rikers Island, a jail in New York City, he was convicted, also due to an incompetent attorney. During his prison stay, he achieved the General Educational Development Test and took two years of college classes.

Harold Hohne, a founding member of the Radio Control Society of Marine Park (founded March 1969), did not let up and involved numerous innocence projects and the media. His new lawyers believed in him and were very competent. Based on the new evidence, McLaughlin's conviction was overturned 1986 and he was released after 6-1/2 years in prison.

A judge yesterday set aside the murder and robbery convictions of a 26-year-old Brooklyn man who has spent the last six years in state prisons steadfastly maintaining his innocence. I can't believe that this terrible nightmare is really over, said the tearful man, Robert McLaughlin, after embracing his mother, Mary Hohne, and his foster father, Harold, in State Supreme Court in Brooklyn. The Hohnes, who live in the Mill Basin section, had waged a long campaign seeking his freedom, including writing letters to officials challenging the conviction. Mr. McLaughlin had been sentenced to 15 years to life imprisonment. This is the real liberty story today, said Richard Emery of the New York Civil Liberties, who, along with Barry Scheck of the Cardozo Law Clinic, represented Mr. McLaughlin. The judge, Acting Justice Anne G. Feldman, acted on a motion from defense lawyers who said that the defendant had been wrongfully convicted on the basis of a tainted identification by a witness who was 15 years old at the time of the crime. The defense motion was supported by the Brooklyn District Attorney's office, which said that it now had no confidence in the credibility of the witness, Robert Tobin, because of contradictory statements he recently made during a reinvestigation. We can no longer support the conviction that rests wholly on the identification testimony of this witness, an assistant district attorney, Peter A. Weinstein, said.

McLaughlin filed a claim for compensation, and in November 1989 New York Court of Claims Judge Adolph Orlando ordered that McLaughlin be paid a total of $1.93 million, the highest sum ever awarded up to that date. This was later appealed and was reduced to $1.4 million.

A special state prosecutor has found no grounds to prosecute members of the Brooklyn District Attorney's office, the Police Department or a witness for their roles in the conviction and imprisonment of a Brooklyn man in 1980 on murder and robbery charges that were later overturned. The man, Robert McLaughlin, 27 years old, spent more than 6 years in prison on a 15-year-to-life sentence, based on the testimony of one witness, who was 15 years old at the time of the investigation. The conviction was overturned last July, when questions were raised by Mr. McLaughlin's lawyers in two post-trial proceedings about the handling of the murder investigation by a police detective and by the assistant district attorney who prosecuted the case. According to a report released yesterday by the special prosecutor, Charles J. Hynes, the office of District Attorney Elizabeth Holtzman acknowledged that the key identifying witness, Robert Keefe Tobin, may have been influenced by an unnecessarily suggestive and erroneous statement by a homicide detective. The report said the prosecution and the police knew at the time of the trial that the witness had been misled by a detective who told him Mr. McLaughlin had previously been arrested with a co-defendant in the murder case, William Ferro. In fact, the report said, the co-defendant, who was also convicted of murder and robbery, had once been arrested in a separate incident with another man named Robert McLaughlin. The report concluded, however, that there was no criminal offense or criminal intent by the detective, John d'Elia, in the misidentification. The report denied criminal intent in what it called questionable procedures used by the police in lineups to identify the suspect and it said insufficient evidence was available to bring charges of perjury, aiding perjury and witness tampering against the detective. The report also said there were insufficient grounds to bring charges of aiding perjury and tampering with physical evidence against the prosecutor in the case, Kathy Plazner. Mr. McLaughlin's lawyers had charged that the prosecution had deliberately withheld information contained in a detective's file and memorandum, which, they said, would have shown that the witness's initial description of the suspect did not match the man who was arrested and later convicted. A lawyer for Mr. McLaughlin, Richard Emery, called the report quite fair and said he was now convinced that the evidence in the case does not support a criminal prosecution.'

External links

• Wrongfully convicted McLaughlin tells his story
• Robert McLaughlin – Inadequate Legal Defense
• The National Registry of Exonerations

Videos

• Guilty Until Proven Innocent (1991), YouTube