Murder of Wallie Howard Jr.

On October 30, 1990, Syracuse police officer Wallie Howard Jr. was murdered in Syracuse, New York, during a botched robbery that took place during a drug deal gone wrong. Howard, who was working undercover as a narcotics investigator, was waiting in a vehicle in a parking lot to buy four pounds of cocaine when two drug dealers approached him. One of them, 16-year-old Robert "Bam Bam" Lawrence, fatally shot Howard in the side of the head. It was later discovered that a man named Jaime Davidson had planned the robbery to target a rival drug dealer. Both Lawrence and Davidson were sentenced to life in prison for Howard's murder. In 2014, Lawrence's life sentence was reduced to 31 years following a U.S. Supreme Court ruling that life imprisonment for anyone under the age of 18 was unconstitutional. In October 2020, Lawrence was released from prison two days before the 30th anniversary of Howard's murder.

The case received renewed attention and controversy in 2021 when then-president Donald Trump commuted Davidson's life sentence on the final day of his presidency. The decision was met with outrage by Howard's family, the Syracuse Police Department, and the prosecutors who tried Davidson. In total, Trump granted clemency to 143 people, with Davidson being the only one convicted of murder. Further controversy arose in 2024 when it was revealed that Davidson had since been charged with beating and strangling his wife. In May 2024, Davidson was convicted of misdemeanor domestic battery and sentenced to three months in jail. Assistant U.S. Attorney John Duncan has since pointed out that, while both Davidson and Lawrence have been released from prison, the three accomplices, who neither pulled the trigger nor ran the drug ring, remain in jail for life.

Howard was the first Syracuse police officer to be killed in the line of duty since 1929. Since 1994, the DEA and FBI have used a reenactment video of Howard's murder for agent training. Provided by Wikipedia