Four years into his 154-year prison sentence, a violent sex fiend — dubbed the “Crackhead Casanova” by Manhattan prosecutors — is trying to overturn his conviction for a pair of 2006 attacks in an East Village apartment building.
John Hamlett, a violent rape convict and unemployed crack addict who infamously told his jury, “i had a lot of women and I spread myself thin,” is now asking the same judge who threw the book at him to set him free.
His former defense lawyer, Seema Iyer, improperly helped prosecutors secure the cooperation of Hamlett’s girlfriend, he complains.
“She should not have done anything to help the girlfriend become a prosecution witness,” Hamlett’s court appointed appellate lawyer, Richard Greenberg told reporters after a hearing on the matter today.
“She showed more concern for the well-being of a prosecution witness than her own client,” Greenberg said.
Prosecutors concede that Iyer did talk to the girlfriend, and accompanied the woman to the DA’s office for one meeting.
But the girlfriend only really opened up to prosecutors during a subsequent interview in the middle of Hamlett’s trial, the fiend’s prosecutor, Robert Ferrari, testified today before Manhattan Supreme Court Justice Maxwell Wiley.
Iyer had nothing to do with the girlfriend’s ultimate cooperation, Ferrari told the judge.
“She was horrified by the newspaper accounts of what had happened to these two women,” Ferrari said. “She said her primary motivation to come forward and be truthful to us was because she was outraged and upset by what had happened to those women.”
The victims, next-door neighbors sodomized two weeks apart in their East 3rd Street apartments, had both testified to having the sweating, foul-mouthed monster blindfold them, rub knives along their necks and threaten to slit their throats.
By the time the second woman testified, Hamlett demanded to act as his own attorney, cross-examining her personally. “I forced you to have oral sex, right?” he asked her, grotesquely. “Did I slap you hard?” he taunted. Hamlett took the stand a week later, telling jurors the woman was his girlfriend, and the sex was consensual.
The judge is expected to rule on Hamlett’s application in April.