Wrongly Imprisoned for 40 Years
JS: It's hard to believe and imagine to whom wrongly convicted by justice system. They've been waiting a real justice for 40 years imprisonement with great pain and sorrow. With millions worth of compensation, Ricky Jackson is becoming new millionaire in his hometown of Cleveland. But compensation won't pay anything, but financial matters. His life, social and familyship, has already vanished decades ago.
Imagine if it happens to you, your relatives or your close friends. Imagine if this wrong conviction happens to a convict with death penalty. It might have violated very basic of human civil right. Code of conduct for the police to investigate a suspect must be reevaluated under correct supervision and cross-examinations in order to prevent from wrong doing. Then the judge and jurymen have to listen and elaborate witnesses and evidences.
Recently, in the US seen many wrongly convicted cases coming from weak eye witnessing and lack of evidence. Trial proceed with this kind of situation will put justice in question. In some cases of rape and homicide charges in the past, the convicts are being freed due to the new evidence that exonerates them from their conviction.
For example, DNA examination didn't match with sperm evidence of the suspect being convicted. Some times true cast or doer of the crime comes up and bring down the case but the convict has been already imprisoned for years, even decades. Or in Ricky Jackson's case, weak witness from a boy imprisoning him until the weak testimony recanted after 40 years in prison.
Man Wrongly Imprisoned for Nearly 40 Years Sues Detectives
CLEVELAND — May 19, 2015, 2:38 PM ET
By MARK GILLISPIE Associated Press
Ricky Jackson, 40 years wrongly imprisoned
A man who spent nearly 40 years in prison for a murder he did not commit filed a federal lawsuit on Tuesday against the city of Cleveland and the police officers whom he says helped frame him in 1975.
Ricky Jackson was convicted at age 18 along with two others because of the testimony of a 12-year-old boy. Jackson, 58, was exonerated in November after that witness, a man now in his early 50s, recanted his testimony.
The witness, Eddie Vernon, said in 2013 that police detectives threatened to put his parents in jail and coerced him into implicating Jackson and brothers Wiley and Ronnie Bridgeman in the slaying of salesman Harold Franks outside a corner store.
Jackson and the Bridgemans received death sentences that were later commuted to life in prison. Jackson's attorneys say their client is believed to have served the longest prison term in the U.S. for someone wrongfully convicted.
The lawsuit alleges that eight officers, including detectives and their supervisors, were involved in framing the three. Some of the officers are now dead.
A statement from the Chicago law firm that filed the lawsuit said Jackson's mother, father, stepfather and other relatives died while he was incarcerated and that he was assaulted and injured physically while behind bars.
"This lawsuit seeks compensation for that grievous injustice," attorney Jon Loevy said in the statement. "We now know substantially more about the fallibility of eyewitness identifications. Too many people have been sent to prison wrongfully based on bogus identifications."
A spokesman said Tuesday that the city of Cleveland doesn't comment on pending litigation.
In March, the state of Ohio paid Jackson just over $1 million in compensation for the decades he spent in prison.
The lawsuit details how officers coerced Vernon into implicating the men. Vernon has stated, and the lawsuit repeats, that he was on a school bus and heard the fatal gunshots but did not see the shooting itself. Detectives ignored a suspect who had been implicated by informants and his own mother, the lawsuit said. That suspect was convicted a few years later of multiple counts of armed robbery.
Jackson was roughed up during a police interrogation, the lawsuit said. Two detectives "repeatedly put a phone book on Mr. Jackson's face and other areas of his body and hit him through it so that it would not leave any marks," the lawsuit said, but Jackson continued to deny he killed anyone.
After Vernon had failed to pick out Jackson and the Bridgemans from a lineup, detectives yelled and screamed at Vernon and threatened to put his father and his ill mother in jail unless he identified the men as Franks' killer, the lawsuit said.
The lawsuit alleges that detectives helped fabricate Vernon's trial testimony and falsified investigative reports.
