Brooklyn prosecutors pulled off a tough victory yesterday, reconvicting a killer they’d first sent away more than a decade ago — even though the main witness against him recanted her testimony.
A jury found Terrance Breazil, 45, guilty of murder for opening fire on two men who dared speak to his girlfriend in May 1995 in Vinegar Hill. McKeever Kinnard was killed and the other man was wounded.
The bizarre case began as a slam-dunk prosecution in 1996, but wound up a wing-and-a-prayer after Breazil used a 2000 US Supreme Court ruling to dismantle much of the evidence against him.
Breazil, already on parole for robbery, was nabbed two months after the shooting when cops stopped him because he matched the description of a suspected thief phoned in to 911.
The 9mm gun in his fanny pack was a positive ballistics match to the murder weapon.
But while serving his time upstate at Attica, Breazil read about the high-court decision, which held unconstitutional any search conducted solely as a result of an anonymous 911 tip.
He became the first murder defendant in the nation to win retrial as a result of the decision.
Then, in 2007, eyewitness Amenai Smith, suddenly reversed herself after visiting Breazil at Rikers Island. She gave a notarized statement to a private eye hired by Breazil’s mom, recanting her damning 1996 testimony.
The jury had to decide the case based only on which of the two versions from the same witness they believed — one delivered live from the witness stand or the one read by a prosecutor from a 13-year-old transcript.
The old version won.