Detroit
City Council will consider $2.5 million settlement for wrongful conviction of
Walter Swift
Posted By Ryan Felton on Tue,
Feb 3, 2015 at 3:43 PM
Detroit City Council will soon consider a
$2.5 million to settlement in the case of Walter Swift, the man prosecutors
convicted in 1982 for raping a pregnant teacher inside her Indian Village home.
It was a crime he never committed.
At the time, the victim falsely
identified Swift, then 21-years-old, as her rapist when the Detroit Police
Department showed her dozens of photographs of black teenagers. The woman
identified seven people who resembled her assailant before she arrived at
Swift's photograph, his attorney says. For whatever reason, police brought in
only Swift from that group — and the woman wasn't able to confidently identify
him as her rapist.
Nonetheless, the woman said it
was Swift. Forensic evidence that supported Swift's claim of innocence was
never shown to the prosecutor, the jury never heard of it, and an analyst who
determined Swift's type didn't match that of the perpetrator was never asked to
testify at the trial.
And for that, Swift was
convicted.
"That's the last light of
day Walter Swift saw until May 2008," says Julie Hurwitz, Swift's
attorney, adding, "What happened to him was outrageous."
He spent 26 years in prison,
until a yearslong investigation by The Innocence Project eventually led to his
release on May 21, 2008. The prosecutor and officer on the case signed
affidavits as part of the effort, revealing the level of wrongdoing committed
by DPD. From that point on, however, similar to most exonerates, Swift
struggled with post-prison life, a fact MT highlighted in a 2009 cover story.
The following year, he filed a civl lawsuit against the city for malicious
prosecution, false arrest, and false imprisonment.
Commonly, Hurwitz explains,
wrongful convictions carries a figure of around $1 million per year. (Swift's
co-counsel Barry Scheck, for example, recently won a $40 million award for a
client that wrongly served roughly 15 years in prison.) But Detroit wasn't
willing to concede a price that high, something that became fully evident from
the onset, she says.
"The City of Detroit law
department behaved, in my opinion, they behaved shamefully," Hurwitz says.
In a nutshell, she says, the law
department refused multiple requests for documents and statements related to
the case. In turn, the suit moved at a slow pace. By 2013, an agreement on some
level of restitution for Swift still hadn't been reached.
Then, everything came to a
grinding halt: Detroit filed for municipal bankruptcy in July 2013, freezing
all pending litigation against the city.
But Hurwitz and her colleagues
determined civil rights cases aren't protected by a bankruptcy filing. They
later filed a motion asking the court to release Swift's case and let it move
forward.
The judge, Steven Rhodes,
"sat on this motion for many, many months," Hurwitz says, but later
found Detroit was 100 percent on the hook for whatever financial liability was
determined. Both sides were ordered into post-bankruptcy mediation with Judge
David Lawson of the U.S. District Court this past December.
"So we went into this
mediation with the City of Detroit knowing full well what their exposure was in
this case," Hurwitz says, "also knowing full well that our client is
as fragile as one can expect someone to be who has spent 26 years in prison for
a crime he didn't convict."
Hurwitz says she proposed a
settlement to be paid over the course of three budget cycles, rather than one
up-front sum. But the city, which by all accounts has little wiggle room in its
budget, didn't move an inch on its previous position, as Hurwitz describes.
Swift's legal team and the city went back-and-forth on a figure — at one point,
Hurwitz says, the city offered less than $1 million. Eventually, she says,
"we got to a point where we walked away."
Lawson ordered them back into
mediation early last month, Hurwitz says, "and I can tell you the numbers
they were talking about back in December weren't even close to the number we
settled on."
Eventually, it became obvious
the case needed to just be settled, rather than slog through another trial, for
the sake of Swift.
Says Hurwitz: "Here we
are, Walter is now 53-years-old, he has been struggling very, very hard to
learn how to function in the world, he's been battling a serious addiction that
he developed when he released from prison — he never had a substance abuse
problem before [he entered] prison — and ... our hands were tied. We were able
to negotiate to a point where they were willing to settle this case for $2.5
million. And, in my opinion, tragically, we had no choice."
"At the same time, $2.5
million is quite a bit of money, and it's going to change Mr. Swift's
life," she continues. "And that's all we can hope for right now. He
will now be able to move forward and that's the best outcome one can hope
for."
John Roach, spokesman for
Detroit Mayor Mike Duggan, declined to comment on the settlement or the
negotiations. "[W]e don't comment on what transpires during mediation or
on ongoing litigation," Roach says in an email.
The city council's internal
operations committee could consider Swift's settlement as early as Wednesday,
according to councilwoman Raquel Castaneda-Lopez. If the panel approves, it
could go before the full Council as early as next week.
Cops
settle civil-rights suit over '12 arrest
VINNY VELLA, DAILY NEWS STAFF
WRITER
AFTER NEARLY a year of legal
wrangling, a civil-rights case against two police officers and the city's top
cop has been settled for $85,000.
A federal judge dismissed the
case, filed in March 2014 by Rodney Handy Jr. against Officers Shane Darden and
Timothy Taylor and Police Commissioner Charles Ramsey over Handy's arrest in
2012, court records show.
The dismissal came after the
parties were able to settle their dispute out of court, according to an order
filed yesterday. The city settles out of court most civil-rights claims made
against police, according to a Daily News review last year of settled police
lawsuits. The Daily News found that Philly paid out $14 million to settle
civil-rights claims alone in 2013 — nearly four times as much as the $4.2
million just five years earlier.
Handy's attorney, David B.
Sherman, did not return a call for comment last night.
In the suit, Handy said the two
officers used excessive force, racially profiled him and retaliated against him
when he asked why they stopped him on March 19, 2012, as he was parking his car
outside his house.
The officers told Handy, who is
black, that they were looking for a suspect in a reported shooting, then
"dragged [him] out of his car," according to the complaint filed in
the case.
Handy said the two white
officers then pummeled him repeatedly with their fists and flashlights, and
also used a Taser during their assault.
He was taken into custody after
being treated for lacerations and "serious . . . head injuries,"
including a concussion, the complaint states.
However, all information
related to the incident was erased from the Police Department's database at the
request of Inspector Aaron Horne, who oversaw the Northwest Police Division at
the time.
In August 2012, Horne was
suspended for 30 days along with Capt. John McCloskey, the officers' commander,
for erasing the files, according to police sources at the time.
Those sources told the Daily
News that the duo did that as a favor to Handy's grandfather, a retired city
cop.
The alleged coverup is the
subject of a pending grand-jury investigation.
