The City of Detroit agreed to pay $7.5 million to settle a lawsuit by a man who claimed police switched bullets to pin a murder on him in 1992.
Desmond Ricks was launched from jail in 2017 after 25 years, thanks to gun specialists, regulation college students on the University of Michigan and his unwavering insistence that he was harmless.
“I’m not greedy. I’m thankful,” Ricks, 56, instructed The Associated Press after the City Council accepted the settlement Tuesday.
“It’s a blessing to be alive with my children and grandchildren. It was a blessing to not lose my life in there,” Ricks mentioned of jail.
He was convicted of fatally taking pictures a pal exterior a restaurant in 1992. Police seized a gun that belonged to Ricks’ mom and mentioned it was the murder weapon.
In 2016, the Innocence Clinic at University of Michigan Law School requested a choose to reopen the case. Photos of two bullets taken from the sufferer, Gerry Bennett, didn’t resemble the bullets that had been examined by a protection professional earlier than trial many years earlier.
The precise bullets surprisingly had been nonetheless in Detroit police storage. Examinations confirmed they didn’t match the .38-caliber gun recognized because the weapon.
A choose granted Ricks a brand new trial, and prosecutors in response dropped prices.
“It was layer upon layer upon layer of police misconduct. It was a truly egregious case,” mentioned David Moran, director of the Innocence Clinic.
After he was exonerated, Ricks and his household filed a $125 million civil rights lawsuit looking for each compensatory and punitive damages for the alleged violations of his constitutional rights that led to a wrongful conviction. The swimsuit named the town of Detroit in addition to police officers David Pauch and Donald Stawiasz, who Ricks mentioned fabricated and withheld proof throughout their investigation into Bennett’s murder.
During depositions within the lawsuit, even the town’s professional acknowledged that the bullet evaluation by the police lab many years in the past was inaccurate.
“It’s one of two things. It was a horrible mistake or it was deliberate — I don’t know,” mentioned Jay Jarvis, who labored for 32 years on the Georgia State Crime Laboratory.
Separately, Ricks obtained greater than $1 million from the state for his wrongful conviction — $50,000 for every year in custody. He’ll probably have to repay it now that the town of Detroit has settled the lawsuit.
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