🧨 The Gutter Report: What Syracuse.com Didn’t Tell About Landrous Hills
How an abandoned alibi, an undocumented claim, and prosecution-aligned reporting shaped a 25-to-life sentence
Onondaga County, New York — There is no recording.
There is no writing.
There is no contemporaneous memo.
There is no corroboration.
There is no confession in the record.
Yet Landrous Hills is serving 25 years to life, while the public has been encouraged to accept a story that appeared years after his conviction — a story repeated by local media without ever being tested against the actual record.
This is the story Syracuse.com didn’t tell.
🧱 The Story the Jury Was Never Allowed to Hear
No jury ever heard a confession in this case.
No jury ever heard an alibi either.
What the jury did hear was a prosecution narrative built almost entirely on credibility-challenged witnesses, while the people who could say where Landrous Hills actually was the night of the homicide were kept off the stand.
That wasn’t because the alibi didn’t exist.
It’s because it was never allowed to exist in court.
Landrous Hills went to trial with:
no DNA
no fingerprints
no gunshot residue
no surveillance placing him at the scene
And yet the jury was never told that witnesses were prepared to testify that he was home, not at a crime scene.
That omission matters.
🕳️ How the Alibi Disappeared — and a New Story Took Its Place
⛓️ Landrous Hills — convicted without forensic evidence tying him to the crime
At a 2021 post-conviction hearing, Hills’ former girlfriend testified under oath that:
she was with Hills the entire night of the homicide
she arrived by taxi after work around 11:15 p.m.
Hills’ parents and sister were present
food was ordered and delivered
Hills never left the home
she learned of the shooting hours later
She testified that she told Hills’ lawyer early.
Police never interviewed her.
The jury never heard her.
The alibi was not disproved.
It was abandoned.
Only after Hills challenged his lawyer’s effectiveness did a new explanation surface — not from evidence, not from a witness, and not from the trial record.
It came from the lawyer himself.
🚨 There Is No Confession — Only an Undocumented Claim
👨🏻⚖️ Paul Carey — trial defense attorney whose post-conviction claim reshaped the narrative
Years after the verdict, Paul Carey claimed that Landrous Hills had privately confessed to him.
That claim:
• was never recorded
• was never written down
• was never disclosed before trial
• was never raised at sentencing
• was never mentioned on direct appeal
• appears nowhere in the trial record
It surfaced for the first time in October 2021, during a CPL §440 hearing — after Hills alleged ineffective assistance of counsel.
That matters.
Real confessions change defense strategy when they happen.
They leave trails.
They create safeguards.
This one left nothing — until it was needed to explain why the jury never heard the alibi.
That is not evidence.
That is a post-conviction justification.
👥 The Codefendant Issue Syracuse.com Glossed Over
📸 GaJuan Richardson (left) and Landrous Hills (right), prosecuted together under an acting-in-concert theory
Hills was tried alongside GaJuan Richardson under an acting-in-concert theory. The State alleged both men participated together in a 2013 drive-by shooting.
If Hills truly confessed — as later claimed — that confession would necessarily implicate Richardson as well.
Yet:
the alleged confession appears nowhere in the joint trial record
it was never used to separate responsibility
it played no role in trial strategy
it was never tested before a jury
A genuine confession involving a codefendant does not behave this way.
This one exists only in hindsight.
⚠️ Witness Credibility: What the Conviction Actually Rests On
With no forensic evidence, the case depended on witness testimony, including:
a witness who admitted she loaned her car in exchange for drugs
a witness with his own criminal exposure who claimed both men confessed
These are incentivized witnesses — the most error-prone category in criminal prosecutions.
Yet the jury was never allowed to weigh those witnesses against a live alibi.
That imbalance distorts the truth-finding process.
📰 How Syracuse.com Missed the Real Story — Again
⚖️ Paul Carey representing another client in court — credibility afforded, scrutiny withheld
Instead of interrogating the record, Syracuse.com framed this case around an alleged ethical dilemma faced by the defense lawyer.
In its 2021 coverage —
👉🏾 Lawyer: Syracuse murderer secretly confessed to me before I defended him at jury trial —
the outlet centered Carey’s account of a private confession and asked readers to consider how difficult it must be to defend someone you “know” is guilty.
Earlier reporting —
👉🏾 Two prison inmates sentenced to possible life after murdering teen 5 years ago —
similarly emphasized the prosecution’s theory and verdict while minimizing unresolved credibility issues.
What Syracuse.com did not ask:
why there is no documentation of a confession
why the claim surfaced only after conviction
why police never investigated the alibi
why the jury never heard it
why incentivized witnesses were treated as reliable
This is not reporting for the people.
It is reporting in concert with the prosecution, where police narratives become headlines and contradictions fade into the background.
⚖️ Why This Matters Beyond One Case
This is not about legal technicalities.
It’s about who controls the story:
the people, or
the system that already secured a conviction
When alibis are abandoned, undocumented claims are elevated, and media repeats the State’s framing, wrongful convictions don’t just happen — they survive.
🧱 The Bottom Line
The jury never heard the full story.
The public never got the full truth.
What they were given instead was a narrative that appeared after the verdict, repeated without scrutiny, and used to explain away a defense that never happened.
There is no confession in the record.
Only unanswered questions — and a man still in prison.
Not for clicks — for clarity.
— Elliott Carterr, LFTG Radio
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📺 YouTube: @lftgradio ↗
🌐 Website: LFTGRadio.com ↗
⚖️ The Gutter Justice Project ↗
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