At about 7 a.m. on August 30, 1989, a woman on Staten Island, New York, was sexually assaulted as she walked from her house to catch the ferry into Manhattan.
The woman told police that a man approached her holding a knife and forced her to walk to an area behind Curtis High School, where he raped her and took between $80 and $100 from her handbag. She said that when the man finished the assault, he asked the woman for a tissue, wiped her and himself, and told her to count to 100 before getting up. The man then ran away.
The woman described her assailant as a Black man between 18-20 years old, 5 feet 2 inches tall, and 135 pounds. She said that he was wearing a red-and-white baseball hat, a black-and-white jacket, and green pants. She said he wore a mask and she never saw his face.
The victim was taken to St. Vincent’s Hospital, where a rape kit was performed. The tissue and the woman’s clothing were taken into evidence along with the rape kit.
A week earlier, on August 21, another woman had reported being sexually assaulted as she walked to the ferry in the early morning. She described her assailant as a Black man, about 5 feet 6 inches, and 20 years old. She said the man covered her head while he raped her and that he robbed her and told her to count to 100 while he ran away.
Detectives from the New York Police Department considered the crimes to be related. The Staten Island Advance newspaper told its readers on August 31 that the “Morning Rapist Strikes Again.”
On September 3, police arrested 28-year-old Ronell Sheffield for a domestic-violence assault reported by his girlfriend. (The arrest did not lead to a conviction.) She told police that Sheffield was responsible for the rapes and robberies because he was out of the house at night and she had seen him with jewelry. She said that she saw the suspect’s description in the paper and knew it was Sheffield. Detectives interviewed Sheffield, and he denied any involvement with the crimes.
Police arrested Sheffield on September 6, 1989, charging him with crimes related to a robbery/burglary that occurred on August 22, 1989. At the time, Sheffield was on parole, and he was placed in jail on a parole hold. A month later, on October 3, 1989, he was charged with a separate robbery/burglary that occurred on August 29, 1989.
On November 7, 1989, a woman known as Witness #1 contacted the police and said she had been running at the high school’s track and had seen the victim from the August 30th attack and her assailant as they walked together through an opening in the fence. She said she later saw the man from about 20 yards, walking by himself. The woman appeared a few minutes later. The witness viewed a photo array and identified Sheffield as the man she saw that morning. A month later, on December 19, 1989, the woman viewed a live lineup and again identified Sheffield.
The police were also investigating Sheffield as a suspect in the August 21 rape but had run into a problem. That victim was unable to make an identification, there were no other witnesses, and Sheffield was excluded as a contributor to fingerprints left at that crime scene.
A grand jury indicted Sheffield on charges of first-degree rape, first-degree sexual abuse, and first-degree robbery. He was arrested on January 3, 1990, at the Rikers Island jail complex, where he had been held since his earlier arrests.
On September 10, 1990, a jury in Richmond County Supreme Court convicted Sheffield on burglary, robbery and criminal possession of a weapon charges stemming from the August 29 crime. The judge found him to be a “persistent felony offender” and sentenced him to 15 years to life in prison.
On May 17, 1991, Sheffield resolved his remaining charges, entering Alford pleas to a single count of burglary for the August 22 crime and a single count of first-degree rape for the August 30 sexual assault. An Alford plea, known as a Serrano plea in New York, allows defendants to plead guilty without admitting guilt, acknowledging that the state has sufficient evidence to sustain a conviction.
At the plea hearing, Justice Norman Felig asked Sheffield if he was guilty of the burglary. Sheffield answered, “No.”
Justice Felig then asked: “Did you, on or about August 30, 1989, in the borough of Staten Island, County of Richmond, being a male, engage in sexual intercourse with [the complainant], a female, by forcible compulsion. Are you guilty of that charge?”
Sheffield again answered, “No.”
Justice Felig then asked Sheffield why he was pleading guilty if wasn’t guilty.”
Sheffield answered, “Afraid if I go to trial, I’ll get more time.”
Sheffield said he had discussed the deal with his attorney, Christopher Nalley, who also told the judge that based on the strength of the district attorney’s case, the plea was in Sheffield’s best interests.
On June 7, 1991, the day of his sentencing, Sheffield moved to withdraw his plea.
At a hearing on August 27, 1991, Justice Felig denied Sheffield’s motion. Sheffield, now represented by Michael Barone, told the judge that he did not commit the rape.
“I understand this man keeps saying I pled guilty to something,” Sheffield said. “I didn’t plead guilty to nothing.”
Justice Felig responded: “You pled guilty without admitting your guilt. If you didn’t plead guilty you couldn’t be here for sentencing, that is what a Serrano plea is called … Do you understand that now?
Sheffield said he didn’t understand.
Justice Felig said:” You don’t understand it? You have had plenty of time to understand it. You had one lawyer, you had two lawyers, everyone explained it to you. Now read my opinion and get a copy of it and maybe you’ll understand it better. That’s what it means.”
He sentenced Sheffield to five to 10 years on the burglary plea and 12½ to 25 years on the rape plea, with the sentences to run concurrently to each other and the previous burglary conviction.
In 1992, the Supreme Court’s Appellate Division ordered a new trial in the earlier burglary/robbery case. It said that Justice Felig had erred in allowing a witness who did not testify at a pre-trial hearing to identify Sheffield at the trial. Sheffield then pled guilty to second-degree robbery and was re-sentenced to eight to 16 years in prison. The resentencing did not change his sentences for the other crimes, including the rape.
Approximately 10 years after his plea, Sheffield wrote to Elizabeth Foley, the assistant district attorney who prosecuted his rape case. He asked her to conduct a DNA test on evidence collected in the rape kit. “For the last 10 years I had to live with a crime I never committed,” he wrote. “DNA is 99.9% and if a person did it, it would prove they did or didn’t … I would like to take this test. I know it will show that I never raped anybody and never would.” Foley did not respond to his letter.
In November 2021, Christine Bella, an attorney with the Wrongful Conviction Unit of the Legal Aid Society of New York, contacted Wanda DeOliveira, at the time the head of the Conviction Integrity Review Unit (CIRU) of the Richmond County District Attorney’s Office, seeking a review of Sheffield’s conviction. In a follow-up letter in May 2022, Bella requested a meeting with DeOliveira to discuss the status of the search for physical evidence from the case.
DeOliveira retired in 2022, replaced by Lisa Davis in early 2023. The CIRU began reinvestigating the conviction in September 2023.
On September 20, 2023, two investigators with the district attorney’s office interviewed Sheffield in the Schenectady City Jail, where he had been held since 2022 on burglary charges. (He was convicted of those charges in 2023 and sentenced to 20 years to life in prison.)
Sheffield told the investigators that he had pled guilty in 1991 to the burglary and rape charges to avoid a much harsher sentence if convicted at trial. He said that he told Nalley that he never raped anyone in his life, but that Nalley didn’t believe him and said a plea deal was the best route, given Sheffield’s record.
Three days before the jail interview, an investigator began looking for the rape kit and other evidence from Sheffield’s sexual-assault case. A property clerk told him that the items had been destroyed in 1996. The following day, September 18, the detective learned that the rape kit from the earlier sexual assault, where no arrest had been made, was at a warehouse in Manhattan.
This evidence was taken to the Office of the Chief Medical Examiner in October 2023. On February 8, 2024, Sheffield submitted DNA samples to test against the rape kit. The medical examiner’s office reported on July 15, 2024, that Sheffield was excluded as a contributor to the genetic material in the rape kit.
The CIRU team interviewed Nalley, who said that he advised Sheffield to take the plea deal, because of Sheffield’s exposure to consecutive, rather than concurrent, prison sentences. He also said that at the time of the plea, he did not know about the other sexual assault, where Sheffield was considered a suspect in that crime, but the fingerprint evidence was exculpatory.
On May 6, 2024, Davis and two investigators interviewed Witness #1. She said she remembered seeing the victim and a man walk across the track before disappearing behind the school. She recognized the woman as someone she had seen on the ferry but didn’t know her name. A short while later, the witness said, she saw the man leave by himself. The witness said the victim wore high heels and wore her hair wrapped up on the top of her head. The witness said the man was taller than the woman, and the witness estimated his height at about 5 feet 10 inches tall.
The witness said she learned about the sexual assault from her husband, who was a police officer. She said she called the police, but it took them a while to get back to her. She said she remembered the photo array and the live lineup, where the men were seated. At the lineup, she said, the man she ultimately identified seemed upset, and that attracted her attention and played a part in her identification. (A video recording of the lineup did not show Sheffield appearing upset.)
The witness said that in her heart she believed she picked out the wrong person. (She had made a similar recantation in 2023 to Sheffield’s legal team.) During the lineup, the witness said, she wanted to ask each man to stand up, to better assess their height, but she did not think that was allowed.
The next day, Witness #1 contacted Davis and said that when she was looking at the photo array, a detective tapped on a photo in the upper corner of the array. That photo was of Sheffield. Davis asked the witness if the tapping caused her to make an identification. The witness said yes.
Davis and investigators interviewed the victim on July 22, 2024. The woman said she was on her way to a job interview when a man put a knife to her back. The woman said she was 5 feet 4 inches tall and wearing three-inch heels and her hair up, and the man was still taller. Her earlier description said the man was 5 feet 2 inches tall. (Sheffield is 5 feet 4 inches tall.)
Investigators also re-interviewed Sheffield’s former girlfriend. She said that when she told detectives in 1989 that Sheffield was responsible for the assaults, she had no independent knowledge of his involvement, but that Sheffield wore a distinctive black jacket that fit the description of clothing she read in the newspaper. (The CIRU found no mention of this jacket in newspaper articles or police reports.)
The investigators also interviewed the woman sexually assaulted on August 21, 1989. She said she never saw the man’s face, but she believed that he was about 5 feet 8 inches tall.
On October 9, 2025, Bella moved to vacate Sheffield’s rape conviction and dismiss his charge.
That same day, the Richmond County District Attorney’s Office filed an affirmation detailing its investigation and agreed that Sheffield’s conviction should be vacated and his charge dismissed.
The affirmation said the CIRU review made clear that the police believed the same person committed the two rapes and that Sheffield had been excluded as a contributor to the rape kit evidence from the August 21 sexual assault.
“The DNA results, in conjunction with the now-questionable identification, and the height discrepancy between Mr. Sheffield and the description given by the victim and eyewitness, have caused us to believe that there exists substantial probability that Mr. Sheffield is actually innocent of the offense of which he was convicted based on his Alford plea,” the affirmation said.
In the motion for new trial, Bella said Sheffield’s plea to the rape charge was not knowingly, voluntarily, or intelligently made.
“Neither Mr. Sheffield nor his attorney at the time of his plea were aware of the weaknesses in the People’s case,” the motion said. “They were not told about the connection to the August 21st rape—the commonalities between the two rapes, that detectives believed they were committed by the same person, and that Mr. Sheffield was initially a suspect, but his fingerprints did not match those found at the August 21st scene.”
In addition, because there had not been a hearing to assess the credibility of Witness #1’s identification, Sheffield and Nalley did not know about the “suggestive” procedure used by the police, the motion said.
The state’s case against Sheffield was weak, “involving a one-witness cross-racial identification made by a witness who had a limited vantage point and who had doubted her identification and was unduly influenced during the photo identification,” the motion said, and Justice Felig “failed to establish that there was strong proof of Mr. Sheffield’s guilt as required to allow an Alford plea.”
Sheffield had been paroled from prison on March 18, 2021. The motion said he had previously been turned down for parole several times because he maintained his innocence.
At a hearing before Justice Mario Mattei on January 21, 2026, Davis said the evidence to fully exonerate Sheffield was no longer available for testing.
“However,” she said, “based on our extensive review of the facts and circumstances in this case and the evidence that was still available, we are no longer confident that justice is served by holding this conviction and that there exists a substantial probability that the defendant is actually innocent of the crimes for which he entered the Alford-Serrano plea.”
Bella outlined the case and the confluence of events that led to Sheffield’s plea in 1991.
“My words cannot capture all of what Mr. Sheffield has endured since this wrongful conviction” she said. “For more than thirty-five years, Mr. Sheffield has carried the weight of this rape conviction for a crime he did not commit. Today’s decision does more than correct a legal error. It hopefully restores a measure of humanity that was taken from him.”
She continued: “He has described being labeled a ‘rapist’ as something he wouldn’t wish on his worst enemy. He’s described his life as being labeled a rapist as a ‘horror story.’ He has suffered abuse and humiliation at the hands of [Court-Ordered Supervision], correction officers, and other incarcerated people, and has long sought to clear his name.”
Addressing the court, Sheffield said, “For 35 years, every day of my life [has] been in jeopardy.” Even his release from prison had created its own ordeal. “I was only home 56 days after 31 years,” he said. “I know it sound[s] crazy to people, but every job that I went to—after seeing my wife go to work every morning, come back, go to work every morning, come home tired—every time I asked for a job application, filling it out, they asked ‘What crime did you commit?’ I put down ‘I speak to that at the interview.’ Some wrote back, some, I never even went back.”
“How can you put down rape, that you been convicted of rape but looking for a job? I couldn’t get jobs. I couldn’t go near schools, which had a lot of janitorial openings. It was just hard. So, you know, I felt not that jail was where I belonged, but it was an environment that I knew, I was comfortable with. And my family says it all the time, like, ‘You know you rushed and went back to jail because you more comfortable there.’ And it was true. I knew what to expect.”
Prior to his ruling, Justice Mattei said: “In one sense, I don’t want to say it was the perfect storm, but maybe a horrible hurricane in that he had other cases pending, other convictions. He had just been convicted of a trial in one case, as far as I can recall, and now he has two cases pending. And he is being offered the opportunity to get concurrent time, which I know is … a desire to not be punished more than you should be. But even if you committed other crimes, right, you don't want to get more punishment. If you can avoid more punishment, you avoid more punishment.”
He then granted the motion to vacate Sheffield’s conviction and dismiss the indictment. As part of the proceedings, Sheffield was also removed from the state’s sex-offender registry.
– Ken Otterbourg
Posting Date: 02-11-2026
