Source: Emma McIntyre / Getty
On January 31, 2001, his murder conviction was vacated. Collin Warner was finally a free man.
Or was he?
Because for 21 years, Warner spent time behind bars for a crime he didn’t commit, and it wasn’t until his co-defendant, Norman Simmonds, revealed it was he who murdered Mario Hamilton outside of Erasmus Hall High School in Flatbush in April 1980 that Warner was released.
”I never understood anything and I felt like justice would have been justice,” Simmonds told Warner’s lawyer in a deposition in January 2001. ”I knew Collin was innocent. I knew I did the crime.”
Starring Lakeith Stanfield (Atlanta, Get Out), Amazon Studios and IFC Films’ Crown Heights tells the story of Collin Warner from that very spring of 1980 through childhood friend Carl ‘KC’ King’s fight to have Warner’s conviction overturned. The film co-stars Nnamdi Asomugha (executive producer, Beasts of No Nation), Natalie Paul (Boardwalk Empire, Power), Bill Camp (Midnight Special), Nestor Carbonell (The Dark Night franchise, Imperium), and Amari Cheatom (Django Unchained, The Alchemist Cookbook).
Asomugha, Ruskin and Natalie Galazka produced the 2017 Sundance Film Festival winner, which hits select theaters on August 25.
Watch the trailer below.
