This Friday, Philadelphia District Attorney Larry Krasner announced that charges have been filed against three former homicide detectives whose false statements contributed to the 25-year imprisonment of an innocent man over a rape and murder charges, HuffPost reports.
Manuel Santiago, Martin Devlin and Frank Jastrzembski helped with the 1993 conviction of Anthony Wright, who has since been exonerated by DNA evidence. In a retrial decades later, the trio repeated their false claims.
“After hearing testimony from key witnesses and reviewing evidence, the Grand Jury recommended that Santiago, Devlin, and Jastrzembski be held accountable for lying under oath to condemn an innocent man and cover up their wrongdoing, and for perverting the integrity of law,” Krasner said Friday.
From HuffPost:
Wright, who is Black, was wrongfully convicted in 1993 of the 1991 rape and murder of 77-year-old Louise Talley. According to the grand jury presentment, Santiago and Devlin, who were Philadelphia homicide detectives at the time, coerced Wright into signing a false confession less than 24 hours after Talley’s body was found. The confession was “fabricated by the detectives based on their incomplete knowledge of the crime scene and the crime itself,” the presentment read. The confession included claims that would later be disproved by DNA evidence, including that Wright raped and stabbed Talley repeatedly but did not ejaculate.
The detectives used illegal coercive tactics including threatening to “pull [Wright’s] eyes out of and skull-f**k” him, promising that he could go home if he signed the confession, and instructing him to sign the confession without allowing him to read it first, according to the presentment.
…
After Wright signed the confession, then-detective Jastrzembski searched Wright’s home for the jeans, Chicago Bulls sweatshirt and Fila sneakers that Wright supposedly confessed to wearing at the time of the crime. He claimed to have found the jeans and the sneakers on the floor and the sweatshirt under the mattress.
Wright was convicted in 1993 based on his coerced confession and the clothes that Jastrzembski falsely claimed he found. But in 2014, The Innocence Project eventually got Wright’s conviction overturned using DNA evidence, which linked a man named Robert Byrd to the crime. Byrd was no longer alive when the new evidence was uncovered. But despite Wright’s clear innocence, the Philadelphia District Attorney’s office decided to try Wright again in 2016, where Santiago, Devlin, and Jastrzembski “testified falsely under oath about both the evidence used to convict Wright and their knowledge of the DNA evidence that ultimately exonerated him,” according to the grand jury presentment.
Santiago and Jastrzembski testified that the prosecution did not tell them about the results of the DNA testing ahead of the retrial — though they later reversed this claim in depositions for a civil suit. Santiago and Devlin testified that Wright willingly admitted to the crime and that Devlin had transcribed Wright’s oral confession word-for-word as he delivered it.
During cross-examination, Wright’s defense counsel read the confession aloud and asked Devlin to attempt to transcribe it. Devlin was only able to get down six words.
Wright was acquitted of all charges after the jury deliberated for less than an hour.
