CADMAN PLAZA EAST — A man who was held on Rikers Island for 17 months after police misidentified his fingerprints recently received a $145,000 settlement in Brooklyn federal court.

Dwight Gomas, 31, is an Atlanta resident whose fingerprints were in NYPD records after he was arrested in Brooklyn driving without a license. Other than that, his record was almost spotless.

But an NYPD detective investigating the 2003 robbery of a Queens jewelry store matched a partial fingerprint from the crime scene to Gomas’ fingerprints, and U.S. Marshals arrested him in Atlanta.

Gomas was then incarcerated in Rikers Island and advised to plead guilty by his Legal Aid Society attorney and serve a five-year prison sentence, according to a Daily News exclusive that was published Thursday.

He refused, and was in prison for 532 days, until a detective re-examined the identification as Gomas was about to go to trial and realized there had been a mistake.

Gomas accepted a $145,000 settlement from the city in U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of New York against the advice of his new lawyer, who believed they could have gotten a larger sum, the Daily News reported

During his stay in prison, Gomas reportedly lost his position in cooking school, and his girlfriend took their child and moved in with another man.

The NYPD scoured the records of the two detectives who made the incorrect identification and reportedly found no other errors.

—Samuel Newhouse
Brooklyn Daily Eagle

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