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Attorney for John Giuca Says Court of Appeals Was Misled Before Denying New Murder Trial by Dan M. Clark New York Law Journal (Online) An attorney for John Giuca, a Brooklyn man who has claimed for more than a decade that he was falsely accused of murdering a New Jersey college student, said in a … Read more

NY Court of Appeals Set to Eye Alleged Withholding of Evidence in Murder Trial of John Giuca   by Dan M. Clark New York Law Journal (Online) The state’s highest court will hear arguments next week on whether John Giuca, a Brooklyn man convicted more than a decade ago of murdering a New Jersey college … Read more

Original ‘Grid Kid Slayer’ attorney admits he was in dark about witness’ mental illness, crucial lie by Christina Carrega NY Daily News   The original trial attorney who represented the convicted “Grid Kid Slayer” conceded he was not aware that the prosecution’s key witness suffered from mental illness and admitted to fabricating stories to get … Read more

Citing Misconduct, Lawyer Seeks Review of Conviction in ’03 Brooklyn Killing By Vivian Yee New York Times The murder riveted New York City and stymied detectives for months: What chance meetings and turns of fate led Mark Fisher, a photogenic 19-year-old college football player from New Jersey, to end up shot dead on a quiet Brooklyn street, … Read more

What is a Wilson Pakula Really Worth, Anyway? by John GaltAtlas Shrugs in Brooklyn If you don’t already know, a Wilson Pakula refers to the special authorization a party can give to someone from another party to allow them to run on that party’s ticket.  For local races, the Brooklyn Republican Party’s Executive Committee is usually responsible for deciding … Read more

Mother Justice When her son was sentenced to 25 years for Brooklyn’s 2003 “grid kid” slaying, Doreen Quinn Giuliano was sure he’d been wrongfully convicted. To prove it, she went undercover, testing her sanity, her marriage, and the justice system. by Christopher Ketcham Vanity Fair November 2007, an apartment in the Bensonhurst section of Brooklyn: … Read more

“A 20-year-old named John Giuca, who hosted the football player at a house party just hours before his murder, was soon picked up by the DA’s detectives, and the leaks went out from the DA’s office to the chopping block at the tabloids. Giuca was no longer simply a young guy who threw a party and who the DA had little real evidence against. He was now head of a street gang, the “Ghetto Mafia,” arch-fiend, octopus-armed director of events that led to the murder (dispatching his henchman to kill the victim). The always execrable Andrea Peyser, the Post pundit who (my sources tell me) sprays ammonia in her eyes to start the day, all but declared Giuca guilty, and though she was kind enough to refer to him as a “skinny punk,” she couldn’t even report out his name correctly: Peyser wrote him up as “Guica,” and so did just about every one of the scores of articles about the case in the Post – so much for fact-checking.

John Giuca, who was studying to be a detective, was now beyond redemption; he was even declared the “Tony Soprano” of Brooklyn. The News and the Post pounced on whatever they could find: Giuca was once arrested for drug dealing, they reported, and he had once fired a gun in the air. They were fed blindly at the trough by the DA’s office, because none of it was true. “I hated those fucking reporters,” John Giuca’s mother, Doreen Giuliano, told me. “The drugs were one bag of pot and one pill that was found on his friend – not even on John! So there’s five guys – what, were they all gonna break the pill apart and sell it?” And the gun charge? Giuca was lighting firecrackers and got written up for it when he was 17 years old. After his arrest for the murder of the football player, “unnamed witnesses,” produced by the DA’s office, came forward to attest that the fireworks were pistols. “These assholes at the Post,” said Doreen. “They never even checked the facts. They took the DA’s spin on it whole-hog and now John is a drug dealer and a gun-wielding thug.”

Henceforth, Doreen would not believe another word she read in the Daily News or the New York Post. Her son was convicted – in part because several of the jurors were influenced by the wonderful reportage in the tabloids – and is today serving 25 years to life. But heck: this is all a moot point. The readers elsewhere don’t seem to believe the words either. The Post dropped its circulation by 200,000 over the last twelve months, the Daily News declined by 250,000 – statistics in the ongoing tragic death throes of the American newspaper. In the case of the last of New York’s tabloids, since we know enough about how the dimwits have driven into the gutter once great papers, it’s a senescence long overdue.”