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View Full Version : Exonerated Man Wins $13.2M Award Against Police Who Built Case




presence
03-13-2013, 08:00 AM
http://thinkprogress.org/justice/2013/03/11/1700251/exonerated-man-wins-132m-award-against-police-who-built-case-against-him/



By Nicole Flatow (http://thinkprogress.org/author/nflatow/) on Mar 11, 2013 at 5:00 pm


An Ohio man exonerated after 11 years in prison
for a murder conviction won a $13.2 million jury award (http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-201_162-57573454/exonerated-ohio-man-wins-civil-rights-suit-$13.2m/) Friday
against the police detectives who built the case against him.

David Ayers, now 56, alleged

police conspired to fabricate a confession he never made,

and that they coerced a jailhouse informant whose testimony a federal appeals court found was “both inconsistent and unreliable.” After the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit ordered a new trial, a newly assigned prosecutor opted not to file new charges against him and Ayers was released from jail in 2011. Additional DNA testing, which prosecutors refused to conduct until a court order, linked the DNA evidence to another man, but prosecutors insisted (http://blog.cleveland.com/metro/2011/09/cleveland_man_released_from_pr.html) that even the DNA test was not the reason they dropped charges against Ayers.

Ayers was a security guard in the building where victim Dorothy Brown lived, and was found shaking and bawling shortly after the crime occurred, which caused police to question him. He and another woman said they had helped Brown earlier that day after she had fallen down in her apartment, but police suspected him of lying because they misinterpreted building video footage.

In a ruling rejected the police officers’ attempt to claim immunity from the civil suit, U.S. District Judge James S. Gwin described the officers’ apparent attempts to manipulate the evidence, flagging their particularly alarming focus on the sexual orientation of Ayers:


First, [Ayers] says that Cleveland Defendant Detectives Cipo and Kovach coerced Ken Smith to give false testimony. The Defendants interviewed Smith, and Smith then signed a statement saying that Ayers called him and spoke about Brown’s murder before Brown’s body had even been discovered. Actually, police had records showing that Smith called Ayers, and not that Ayers had called Smith. During the trial, Smith said the written statement was false and testified that Cipo and Kovach pressured him to say that Ayers phoned him prior to the discovery of Brown’s body. Witness Smith now gives an affidavit that states:

the detectives showed me a statement they wanted me to sign. I didn’t want to sign it because I was not sure that it was the truth. The detectives told me that the statement was what I said yesterday, and that if I changed what I said I could be charged with a crime, I think it was perjury. . . . I was afraid to say anything else because they had threatened to charge me with a crime.

Ayers’s alleged confession also raises questions. In her deposition, Detective Kovach testified that on March 14, 2000, Ayers said something to the effect of, “if I say I hit her, can I go home?” Inexplicably, neither Detective Cipo nor Kovach made mention of Ayer’s incriminating question in their contemporaneous report. Then neither Cipo or [sic] Kovach mentioned anything about the confession to a prosecutor until shortly before Ayers’s trial was set to begin. Then, two days after the confession, Defendants Cipo and Kovach again interviewed Ayers yet their notes and reports show no mention of the previous confession, and the interrogation notes suggest that Ayers maintained his innocence. And perhaps most concerning: Defendant Cipo did not mention the confession in his March 17, 2000, affidavit for a search warrant. The inference that the confession was concocted grows even stronger after considering what did make its way into the police reports.

Defendants consistently made notes about Ayers’s sexual orientation, his friends’ sexual orientations, and whether people they questioned appeared “gay like.” They noted that certain witnesses “sat like a gay male.” Whatever the police officers meant to imply by sitting “like a gay male,” it surely is less material than an extremely inculpatory statement that Cipo and Kovach say was made by the investigation’s primary suspect during an early interrogation.




This case exemplifies several of the
most alarming problems
that lead to wrongful convictions.

First, prosecutors resisted DNA testing that would have provided objective scientific evidence. Only after lawyers from the Ohio Innocence Project litigated the issue for more than a year were they able to obtain a judge’s order to perform the test. Even those few defendants who have access to the Innocence Project’s excellent legal assistance and are involved in cases where DNA evidence is even available (http://thinkprogress.org/justice/2012/10/04/943521/300th-person-exonerated-by-dna-evidence/) do not always gain access to DNA testing (http://thinkprogress.org/justice/2012/10/04/943521/300th-person-exonerated-by-dna-evidence/). And a 2009 U.S. Supreme Court decision held that even a man seeking to test his own evidence entirely with his own funds did not have a right to do so (http://thinkprogress.org/justice/2009/06/18/176644/scotus-dna/).

Second, the case exemplifies the manner in which so-called “confessions” can be manipulated (http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/metro/md/princegeorges/government/police/confess/), and while most confessions are not even recorded, even those that are can be far less reliable (http://www.nytimes.com/2003/01/10/opinion/crime-false-confessions-and-videotape.html) than most assume.

Lastly, the case shows how investigators and prosecutors who hone in on a certain suspect (http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/jurisprudence/2012/12/michael_morton_s_wrongful_conviction_why_do_police _and_prosecutors_continue.html) – often because of biases about irrelevant factors such as sexual orientation – are incentivized to continue pursuing that suspect, even when the evidence is extremely lacking. They may even feel pressure to coerce an informant so that they can claim to have solved and closed a case that might otherwise be more difficult to “solve.”

Cleaner44
03-13-2013, 08:27 AM
As AF always says, DON'T TALK TO COPS.

phill4paul
03-13-2013, 08:31 AM
So, have the detectives been arrested and charged in this case?

brandon
03-13-2013, 08:33 AM
13 Million for 11 years? Hmm... I'd probably consider doing that. I guess it would depend on the type of prison.

angelatc
03-13-2013, 08:35 AM
Think Progress - ugh. They are perfectly happy letting the government associate the word terrorist with the phrases Tea Party and Ron Paul, but then pretend to be shocked when the government begins treating people like terrorists.

aGameOfThrones
03-13-2013, 09:40 AM
"One of the fifth amendment's basic functions is to protect innocent men who otherwise might be ensnared by ambiguous circumstances. Truthful responses of an innocent witness, as well of those of a wrongdoer, may provide the government incriminating evidence from the speakers own mouth." ~ Ohio v. Reiner


..

DamianTV
03-13-2013, 12:06 PM
Dont forget that Cops can even legally lie in Court in order to trick / coerce / manipulate you into revealing information that can be used to find you Guilty.

Guilty Until Proven Innocent.

Do NOT Talk to Cops.

---

Edit:

John Adams once said:

“It is more important that innocence be protected than it is that guilt be punished, for guilt and crimes are so frequent in this world that they cannot all be punished.

But if innocence itself is brought to the bar and condemned, perhaps to die, then the citizen will say, ‘whether I do good or whether I do evil is immaterial, for innocence itself is no protection,’ and if such an idea as that were to take hold in the mind of the citizen that would be the end of security whatsoever.”

ZENemy
03-13-2013, 02:01 PM
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i8z7NC5sgik

MoneyWhereMyMouthIs2
03-13-2013, 02:10 PM
13 Million for 11 years? Hmm... I'd probably consider doing that. I guess it would depend on the type of prison.

No one is making that offer.

You also have to figure in your statistical probability of ever being paid and apply that. It's like this person won a really shitty lottery they didn't enter into. Most people will get nothing for their time incarcerated without ever being charged, let alone these other shenanigans. Many will never be exonerated after being framed.

phill4paul
03-13-2013, 02:26 PM
No one is making that offer.

You also have to figure in your statistical probability of ever being paid and apply that. It's like this person won a really shitty lottery they didn't enter into. Most people will get nothing for their time incarcerated without ever being charged, let alone these other shenanigans. Many will never be exonerated after being framed.

And then of course there is the tax. There are always the taxes.

HOLLYWOOD
03-13-2013, 03:01 PM
Title needs changing:

Exonerated Man Wins $13.2M Award Against Hard Working Taxpayers
or

Police Pawn Off Violation of Rights Onto Taxpayers



PS: Additionally, Don't forget the Prison Industrial Complex. They spend $10s of millions lobbying the legislative and judicial systems