A Flushing man who was convicted last month of a 34-year-old homicide was sentenced last Thursday to 25 years to life in prison, according to Queens District Attorney Richard Brown.
Ernest Mattison, 52, was convicted on March 19 of second-degree murder after a two-week trial and three hours of jury deliberations.
According to trial testimony, Mattison lived around the corner from the Schiff family. On Sept. 10, 1980, the victim’s wife returned home from the store and found her husband, Cecil Schiff, 73, dead. The bedroom had been ransacked and the jewelry boxes emptied of their contents. Investigators found several fingerprints on the jewelry boxes, Brown said.
According to court records, the Statewide Automated Fingerprint Identification System did not go online until the early 1990s. In 2008, the machine generated several possible matches when compared to fingerprints contained in its database. Of those possible matches, a fingerprint examiner performed a forensic analysis and determined that Mattison’s prints matched those found on three of the jewelry boxes at the crime scene.
“If not for new forensic technology, which made it possible to identify the defendant and link him to the murder decades after he had committed the crime, he might have very well escaped justice,” Brown said. “He has now been held accountable for his actions and will likely spend the rest of his life behind bars.”
