LOCKPORT — One of two men found guilty of the murder of popular South End deli owner Ahmad “Poppy” Alsaid has had his conviction overturned by a state appeals court.
A five-judge panel of the New York State Supreme Court Appellate Division Fourth Department ruled that now-retired Supreme Court Justice Richard C. Kloch Sr. failed to give the jury that convicted William Coleman proper instructions on how to weigh the value of circumstantial evidence in the case, what is known as a “circumstantial evidence charge.”
As a result of that finding, the appeals court threw out Coleman’s convictions on two counts of second-degree murder, five counts of first-degree robbery, two counts of criminal possession of a weapon in the second-degree and one count of second-degree assault. The court ordered that Coleman “is entitled to a new trial.”
Coleman, 36, of the Falls, returned to Niagara County Court Thursday morning. Judge John Ottaviano ordered him held without bail and set a schedule for pre-trial proceedings in the case.
The conviction of Coleman’s co-defendant and uncle, Jonathan McEnnis, 41, of Buffalo, was unanimously upheld by a different panel of Fourth Department justices. McEnnis continues to serve a prison term of 115 years to life for his convictions on two counts of second-degree murder, five counts of first-degree robbery, two counts of second-degree criminal possession of a weapon and one count of first-degree assault.
In McEnnis’ case, the appeals court found that he did receive “effective assistance of counsel”, concluded that his conviction was not “against the weight of the evidence” in the case, and called the trial court’s failure to give a circumstantial evidence charge “harmless error.”
The appeals panel hearing Coleman’s case did find that his conviction was “supported by legally sufficient evidence.” In ruling to overturn Coleman’s conviction, the court found that the failure to give a circumstantial evidence charge was not harmless because prosecutors did not have the same physical evidence that tied McEnnis to the crime.
“(McEnnis) and his vehicle could be tracked to the scenes of all the offenses based upon cell phone data, license plate readers and surveillance video,” the court wrote in its ruling. “However, the evidence of (Coleman’s) involvement was substantially less.”
In the ruling, the justices wrote that, “had (Kloch) given the circumstantial evidence charge, alerting the jury of the need to ‘exclude to a moral certainty every other reasonable hypothesis of innocence’, we conclude that the verdict may have been different.”
McEnnis and Coleman were convicted of gunning down Alsaid as he sat in his Bridgeway Market store on Niagara Street on the night of Thanksgiving Eve 2018. A Niagara County Court jury found the pair guilty on 20 of the 22 counts they faced in an indictment that accused them of the Bridgeway Market homicide and robbery, as well as the armed robbery of a 7-Eleven convenience store a short time later and the robbery and shooting of a Falls man 11 days prior to their pre-Thanksgiving mayhem.
McEnnis and Coleman were each on parole at the time of Alsaid’s murder, after serving 10 years in prison on charges related to a violent robbery in Buffalo. Their defense teams asked Kloch to set aside their convictions, but the judge refused, saying that jurors told him, after their verdict, that the evidence in the case against McEnnis and Coleman had been “overwhelming.”