Judge releases Hawaii man who argued he spent 30 years in prison for a murder he didn't commit

HONOLULU (AP) — A judge on Friday ordered the release of a Hawaii man who was imprisoned for 30 years for a murder he has long said he didn't commit.

New evidence, including DNA test results, would likely change the results of another trial against Gordon Cordeiro, Judge Kirstin Hamman ruled Friday in vacating his convictions and life sentence.

There were gasps and cries in the courtroom when Hamman said, “And the judgement and sentence is vacated and the defendant is ordered to be released from custody,” before a Zoom feed broadcasting the hearing suddenly turned off.

In 1994, a man was murdered on Maui during a drug deal robbery. Cordeiro would eventually be found guilty of murder, robbery and attempted murder and sentenced to life without the possibility of parole.

The Hawaii Innocence Project took up his case and during a hearing earlier this week argued Cordeiro must be released on the grounds of new evidence proving his innocence, ineffectiveness of his previous attorney and prosecutorial misconduct.

Maui County Prosecuting Attorney Andrew Martin didn't immediately return a phone message seeking comment after the judge ordered Cordeiro's release.

Kenneth Lawson, co-director of the Hawaii Innocence Project, said he was waiting for Cordeiro, now 51, to be processed and released from custody after the hearing.

“It was very, very emotional. He cried, we all cried,” Lawson said. “He believed that he was going to be exonerated ... but having gone through two trials you lose faith in the justice system. To finally hear a judge say ‘I’m vacating your convictions,’ that’s when it hit him.”

According to court documents filed by Cordeiro’s attorneys, he was wrongfully convicted for the shooting death of Timothy Blaisdell partly because police relied upon four jailhouse informants. They say those informants were motivated by promises of reduced sentences and concocted a fabricated murder-for-hire plot. The plot, they say, claimed Cordeiro tried to arrange the killing of the man who tried to pin the death on Cordeiro due to a previous dispute.

“Unfortunately for Cordeiro, the State’s use of incentivized jailhouse informants and their fabricated evidence and testimony about the murder-for-hire plots, was enough to convince a jury of his guilt in his second trial,” the Hawaii Innocence Project said in a court filing.

The first trial against Cordeiro ended in a hung jury, with only one juror voting to convict him.

Cordeiro had several alibi for the day Blaisdell was killed, his attorneys said: The then 22-year-old was at home with his parents and sisters, spending the day building a shelving unit in his family's open-air garage and installing a stereo in his sister's car. He was nowhere near the area known as “Skid Row” in upcountry Maui where Blaisdell was killed.

Blaisdell had gone to Skid Row with a man named Michael Freitas, where Blaisdell planned to buy a pound of marijuana with $800 in cash, according to court documents. Blaisdell's body was found at the bottom of a ravine there.

Freitas kept changing his story, Cordeiro's attorneys said, and shifted the blame onto Cordeiro, a friend he falsely believed had “snitched” on him in an unrelated drug case.

After Cordeiro's conviction, new testing on physical evidence from the scene excluded Cordeiro as the source of DNA on Blaisdell's body and other crime scene evidence, and found there was a DNA profile of an unidentified person on the inside pockets of Blaisdell's jeans, the Hawaii Innocence Project said.

Cordeiro's attorneys believe Freitas set up Blaisdell to get robbed and was involved in his killing. Freitas died in 2020, Lawson said.

The judge agreed that the new DNA evidence and new information about gunshot residue would change the results of a later trial.

“The police botched this case from the beginning and turned the No. 1 suspect into the state's star witness, resulting in a 30-plus-year nightmare and miscarriage of justice for Gordon and his family,” Lawson said.