Court Tells Cops Who Got A Man Wrongly Imprisoned For 25 Years That Of Course Framing People For Crimes Is A Rights Violation

Legal Issues

from the just-wrecking-up-people's-lives-and-walking-away-from-it dept

There’s a constitutional right not to be framed by cops for a crime you didn’t commit. This shouldn’t even need to be argued in court once, much less twice. But “framed by cops” is exactly what happened to James Dennis, who spent 25 years in prison after being falsely accused of murdering a high school student back in 1991.

After having his wrongful conviction vacated in 2013 (and this decision affirmed by the Third Circuit Appeals Court in 2016), Dennis sued the cops that took 25 years of his life away by hiding exculpatory evidence and creating a narrative that put him behind bars.

Back to the Third Circuit goes Dennis again, with the Appeals Court handling an attempt by two detectives to escape Dennis’ lawsuit [PDF]. The district court stripped immunity from the detectives who built the case against Dennis. The detectives appealed but they’re not going to be able to walk away from this one.

The allegations are severe. According to Dennis, detectives Frank Jastrzembski and Manuel Santiago hid evidence that would have cleared Dennis and worked together to railroad him into a murder conviction. Buckle up, there’s a lot to take in here.

First, Dennis alleges that the detectives concealed information about other individuals, who had confessed their involvement with the murder or who knew who was involved, and that the detectives coerced/concealed certain other witnesses. Specifically, Dennis alleges that the detectives never followed up on inconsistencies in statements made by Zahra Howard, who was with Williams on the day of her murder. Ms. Howard originally told the detectives that she never saw the assailants but later told her aunt and uncle that she recognized the assailants from Olney High School, a school that Dennis had never attended. Howard’s aunt and uncle informed the detectives about her statement; it was also corroborated by the victim’s aunt. This information, which was recorded in the detectives’ activity logs, was concealed from Dennis for ten years.

In addition, Dennis alleges that several days after the murder, Montgomery County law enforcement advised the Philadelphia Police Department that an inmate in their County Prison spoke with a man who confessed his involvement in Williams’s murder. A signed statement from the inmate included details about all three men involved in the murder and identified the source of the information. However, defense trial counsel never received any materials relating to the investigation of these three individuals; the information was only revealed 10 years later during Post Conviction Relief Act (PCRA) discovery.

Second, Dennis alleges that the detectives fabricated evidence to secure his conviction. Specifically, Dennis alleges that the detectives falsely claimed to have found certain clothing items that matched those of the shooter, as described by eyewitnesses to the murder. He further alleges that Detective Jastrzembski falsely testified that the clothing was found at Dennis’s residence but later “disappeared” from police headquarters prior to trial…

Third, Dennis alleges that the detectives concealed evidence that would have supported his alibi. Specifically, Dennis’s alibi that he was elsewhere at the time of the murder would have been corroborated by a witness’s time-stamped welfare receipt. When questioned by the detectives, the witness based her time estimates on the receipt’s military-style timestamp of 13:03 (1:03 PM), which she mistook to mean 3:03 PM. The detectives did not correct the witness when she misread the receipt’s military-style timestamp while they were interviewing her; instead, they took the only copy of the receipt and never shared it with Dennis or the prosecutors…

Dennis also alleges that only four of the nine eyewitnesses identified by Philadelphia Police had selected him from the lineup; three of those four testified for the Commonwealth at Dennis’s trial. After learning this information, Dennis’s counsel requested a new lineup with all nine eyewitnesses. The new lineup never occurred.

The detectives argued that even if they were in the wrong, they were not unreasonably wrong and could not have possibly known from court precedent that hiding information from accused criminals and framing them for a murder was a violation of his rights.

Wrong, says the Third Circuit. It’s not even a close call. There’s plenty of precedent and it dates back decades — long before the detectives’ actions in 1992.

[C]iting McDonough v. Smith, the detectives contend that a fabrication of evidence claim has been recognized under the Fourteenth Amendment only where the government officer involved in fabricating evidence was a prosecuting attorney. Not so. In Halsey v. Pfeiffer, we concluded that it was axiomatic that “those charged with upholding the law are prohibited from deliberately fabricating evidence and framing individuals for crimes they did not commit.” Halsey involved an evidence fabrication claim under the Fourteenth Amendment brought against police officers. We emphasized that the Supreme Court decades ago had established that the Constitution forbids those tasked with upholding the law from knowingly using falsified evidence to secure a criminal conviction.

[…]

[A] case that is directly on point is not required so long as the precedent placed the constitutional question beyond debate. Halsey did so, recognizing prior precedent that held the fabrication of evidence by law enforcement officers violates the Fourteenth Amendment and that such a right had been established since at least 1985.

The next argument by the detectives was also off by several decades.

[T]urning to Dennis’s deliberate deception claim, the detectives contend that this claim is based on the right not to be framed by law enforcement agents, which is too broadly worded and was not established until 1995, when the Supreme Court decided Kyles v. Whitley.

The right not to be convicted on perjured testimony used by prosecutors at trial has been clearly established by the Supreme Court since at least 1935 in Mooney v. Holohan. Seven years later, in Pyle v. Kansas, 317 U.S. 213, 216 (1942), the Court extended this right by recognizing as a due process violation the conviction of a defendant through perjured testimony and the deliberate suppression of evidence favorable to the accused.

Even if this precedent did not exist, the court says the due process violations are so blindingly obvious that there’s no plausible excuse for the detectives’ actions.

We conclude that the constitutional rule that framing criminal defendants through use of fabricated evidence, including false or perjured testimony, violates their constitutional rights applies with such obvious clarity that it is unreasonable for us to conclude anything other than that the detectives were on sufficient notice that their fabrication of evidence violated clearly established law.

That’s what qualified immunity has done to the judicial system. The Supreme Court’s alteration of the contours of the doctrine it created has made it more difficult for lower courts to address the rights violations, shifting focus to judicial precedent instead. Fortunately, there’s plenty of it here. But more than that, it’s good to see a court tell officers attempting to raise their qualified immunity shields that the stuff they did was so obviously wrong they’d still be denied immunity even if there wasn’t any precedent to rely on. That needs to happen more often.

Filed Under: 3rd circuit, due process, framing people, frank jastrzembski, james dennis, lying cops, manuel santiago, police, qualified immunity, wrongful conviction