The Appellate Division, Second Department, ordered a new robbery trial in light of a prosecutor’s suggestion that another person in the one-witness case had implicated the defendant.
The case against Ricardo Benitez started with information from a tip line that caused a detective to look for a white male Hispanic possibly named Rick. The detective went to the sixth floor of a Queens building but did not find a person fitting the description. He later returned and was told the person was in front of the building. He found Benitez and arrested him. Benitez confirmed he lived on the building’s sixth floor.
