Detroit To Pay $7.5M To Man Who Spent 25 Years In Jail For A Crime He Did Not Commit

Reports Suggest Police Switched Bullets In His Case.
In a just soci­ety in which the rule of law applied to every­one, the cops who com­mit­ted this egre­gious crime, if alive, would be head­ing to prison for the rest of their nat­ur­al lives. No one should be under any illu­sion that any­thing will be done, the tax­pay­ers will foot the bill, and it will be busi­ness as usu­al.

The City of Detroit reached a mul­ti-mil­lion-dol­lar set­tle­ment, end­ing a law­suit claim­ing three decades ago mem­bers of its police force switched out bul­lets tak­en from the body of a mur­der vic­tim to link the evi­dence to a sus­pect. The con­vict­ed man, who was ini­tial­ly sen­tenced to 30 to 60 years, always main­tained his inno­cence and says he is “thank­ful” for the agree­ment. The recent­ly exon­er­at­ed Desmond Ricks spent the major­i­ty of his adult life in jail for a crime he did not com­mit. On Sept. 23, 1992, the then-21-year-old was con­vict­ed of sec­ond-degree mur­der and ille­gal use of a firearm, pinned to the death of his friend Gerry Bennett, who was fatal­ly shot out­side of the Top Hat restau­rant in Detroit in March of that year, as described by research com­piled by stu­dents from the University of Michigan’s Law School.

Knowing he did not com­mit the crime, he and his legal team appealed the deci­sion. It was denied. It would be 25 more years before a court would con­cede to review old evi­dence with new eyes. In 2017, he was released from prison after years of hard work from stu­dents at the Michigan Innocence Clinic at the University of Michigan Law School and gun experts combed through the state’s evi­dence and craft­ed a defense that would be irrefutable to any judge. Now, after Ricks filed a law­suit claim­ing that DPD offi­cers switched evi­dence cru­cial to his inno­cence, lawyers from the city have agreed to set­tle for $7.5 mil­lion. After the City Council approved the set­tle­ment on Tuesday, July 13, Ricks, now 56, says he is pleased with the out­come. “I’m not greedy. I’m thank­ful,” he said of the com­pen­sa­tion The Associated Press reported. 

During the case, police made these .38-cal­iber bul­lets cen­tral to the case, stat­ing the mur­der weapon was Ricks’ mom’s gun and he stole it from her to kill Bennett. Experts tes­ti­fied that the bul­lets the police pre­sent­ed in the Wayne County Circuit Court in 1992 could not be the two “small lead slugs” a med­ical exam­in­er retrieved from Bennett’s brain and spine. But the road to vin­di­ca­tion was not quick­ly achieved. In 2008, the Michigan State Police shut down the Detroit police crime lab after an audit exposed the agency’s bal­lis­tics test­ing was wild­ly erro­neous. Two years lat­er, armed with this infor­ma­tion, Claudia Whitman, founder of the National Capital Crime Assistance Network, agreed to take on Ricks’ case. A part of their dis­cov­ery was a change of opin­ion by David Townshend, a bal­lis­tics expert from his orig­i­nal tri­al, that tes­ti­fied to Ricks’ cul­pa­bil­i­ty at tri­al. In 2010, after meet­ing Ricks in prison, Townshend now believes the bul­lets he exam­ined dur­ing the tri­al were in “near pris­tine con­di­tion,” mak­ing them impos­si­ble to have been fired from the actu­al firearm. He not­ed that the bul­lets had no blem­ish­es usu­al­ly asso­ci­at­ed with ammu­ni­tion removed from a mur­der victim’s body. Nor was there any hair, blood, bone, or human mate­r­i­al on the bul­lets he was asked to review. 

Townshend not only reversed his tes­ti­mo­ny, but he helped Whitman and her team locate the records from the tri­al and dis­cov­ered that he even messed up with his notes on the case, fur­ther dam­ag­ing Ricks’ orig­i­nal case. Another extra­or­di­nary find­ing by the expert was that the evi­dence was not sealed in the case, mak­ing him believe the actu­al bul­lets the med­ical exam­in­er extract­ed from Bennet may have been swapped out. The stu­dents start­ed work­ing on the case in 2012, and in 2015 they received dig­i­tal pho­tographs of the actu­al bul­lets from the crime. They sent them to Townshend, and he com­pared them to the ones he was giv­en dur­ing the tri­al and saw that they were rad­i­cal­ly dif­fer­ent. The bul­lets in the pho­to were “severe­ly muti­lat­ed,” and he assessed that they were so dam­aged from being fired and hit­ting Bennett, it would have been impos­si­ble for the bal­lis­tics team or police agency to link them to a weapon.

To dri­ve his the­o­ry home, the Innocence Clinic con­tact­ed Dr. Ljubisa Dragovic, chief med­ical exam­in­er for Oakland County, for him to re-exam the autop­sy report. His find­ing was that because the orig­i­nal ME describe the slugs as “small,” they prob­a­bly were .22- or .25-cal­iber bul­lets, can­cel­ing the nar­ra­tive that Ricks used his mother’s .38-cal­iber gun to mur­der Bennett. As a result of their dili­gent work, the late Judge Richard Skutt of the Third Circuit Court grant­ed Ricks anoth­er tri­al, CBS Detroit reports. The city, after review­ing the evi­dence, agreed that the bul­let analy­sis from 1992 was not accu­rate and the pros­e­cu­tion decid­ed to drop all the charges. The direc­tor of the Innocence Clinic, David Moran, said of the case, “It was lay­er upon lay­er upon lay­er of police mis­con­duct. It was a tru­ly egre­gious case.” Separately from the recent set­tle­ment, Ricks received over $1 mil­lion from the state for the wrong­ful con­vic­tion, receiv­ing $50,000 for each year he was incar­cer­at­ed. Ricks says he is hap­py to be free and around his fam­i­ly. “It’s a bless­ing to be alive with my chil­dren and grand­chil­dren,” he said. “It was a bless­ing to not lose my life in there [prison].” “I’m not bit­ter. I’m not angry. I’m just relieved. I want to get a job. I want to pay tax­es,” he stat­ed in an inter­view after the approval. “I just want to be a nor­mal citizen.”(This sto­ry orig­i­nat­ed (@ Atlantablackstar​.com)