Chanel Lewis, who is currently serving a life term for the murder of Queens jogger Karina Vetrano, is attempting to have his conviction reversed in new court records.

In the recent update, according to his lawyers, the police improperly targeted black men with a “racial dragnet” before singling him out as the main suspect, and as a result, his conviction ought to be annulled.

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Who is Chanel Lewis?

Chanel Lewis is 27 years old. In 2016, Chanel Lewis was found guilty of the murder of Karina Vetrano, a 30-year-old speech pathologist who worked with autistic children. Vetrano committed the act while jogging in a park close to her Queens residence. According to police and prosecutors, Vetrano’s fingernails and other pieces of evidence uncovered at the Howard Beach crime scene matched Lewis’s DNA.

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The first jury assigned to the case was unable to reach a verdict when Lewis was arrested. A juror on the ensuing jury, which finally found Lewis guilty, claimed that certain jurors had broken the norms meant to guarantee a fair trial. This included a jury who, on the second day of the trial, declared in advance that they thought Lewis was guilty.

Lewis’s legal team claimed in a recent motion filed this week that the NYPD and the Queens district attorney’s office were forced to use any means necessary to secure a conviction, possibly subverting Lewis’s constitutional rights in the process, due to the intense public and media pressure to solve the high-profile case.

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According to the defense, Lewis’s rights were allegedly violated by the police when they searched him and took samples from him without a valid warrant. In addition, they argue that he was unfairly singled out for attention because of his color, along with other Black men, and that there was not enough evidence to implicate him in the crime.