Posted on 03/20/2019 11:21:59 AM PDT by MeganC
SAN FRANCISCO – San Francisco's Board of Supervisors voted unanimously Tuesday to pay $13.1 million to a man found to have been framed by city police in a murder case.
Jamal Trulove, an aspiring actor and hip-hop artist, spent more than eight years behind bars after being sentenced to life in prison in 2010 in connection with the 2007 slaying of a friend and neighbor of his at a city housing project.
Trulove was kept in prisons hundreds of miles away from his family and was also stabbed, Alex Reisman, one of his lawyers, told the Associated Press.
“He endured a lot,” Reisman said.
The conviction was overturned in 2014 and Trulove was acquitted in a 2015 retrial.
Then a federal jury determined last year that two homicide detectives fabricated evidence, coerced a key eyewitness and withheld vital information that may have exonerated Trulove.
After Trulove filed a civil rights lawsuit against four police officers and the city, a federal jury awarded him $14.5 million. The city sought to appeal that award, but dropped its appeal after reaching this week’s deal on the lower payout.
(Excerpt) Read more at foxnews.com ...
He was factually innocent of the charges.
Same thing happened to a friend of mine. Was wrongly accused and convicted of killing his wife. The police and coroner fabricated evidence to convict him.
He was finally freed after spending 23 years on a life sentence.
Cops are all angels and criminals are all demons.
Ri-ight...
“Those cops should finish out his sentence for him.”
Yup.
It's not about rewarding the plaintiff, but about punishing the wrong-doer.
In this case, the people hold the leashes of the elected officials, who in turn, hold the leashes of the police.
If the elected officials, who represent the interests of the taxpayer, are lax in their oversight of the police when the police commit a crime, then the taxpayer can pay for their own lack of oversight of their politicians and police through higher taxes or fewer civil benefits.
What happened to your friend is one of those recurring stories that really galls me about cops and prosecutors.
Someone is *proven* innocent and these bastards won’t let go of the person just because of their precious ego. Or because they were “sure” they had the right person even though the evidence may actually point at someone else altogether!
A friend of mine calls this “cop bias” where the cops make a knee-jerk emotional decision as to who their suspect is and then they collect evidence to support that decision and then actively dismiss, suppress, and even destroy evidence that proves the person is innocent.
These criminals who happen to have badges should be held criminally accountable when they falsify evidence, repeatedly perjure themselves in court, and then try to keep someone in prison even when they’re proven innocent.
It is truly disgusting that the people we entrust to uphold the law break it so callously.
After you spend eight years in prison wondering if you will ever get out alive for something the police knew you didn’t do, then get back to me on what you think is a fair settlement.Sorry...that’s BS. Should the cops who did this go to prison? Absolutely! Should the guy have gotten *some* restitution for what happened? Absolutely! Should he have gotten $13 million? No way,Jose! - Gay State Conservative
I do agree that it’s a lot of money - but it’s a large imposition, too. You might say, “I’ll gladly go to prison for 8 years for that kind of money,” but that leaves out the fact that you expect to be out, and rich, after 8 years. This guy didn’t have that luxury.
“Right. It’s not enough.”
I agree. Cases like this are just so fundamentally wrong on every possible level. And it happened in good old liberal San Fran.
100% agreement.
Unfortunately San Francisco is broke and had to issue the innocent man an IOU.
8 plus years of your life for being framed, stabbed & God knows what else. I think it’s appropriate. Quite.
Not enough info in the article to form an opinion on the matter.
>>8 plus years of your life for being framed, stabbed & God knows what else. I think it’s appropriate. Quite.
For sure. But beyond the restitution issue, this is punishment for a city who hired those miscreant cops. Bureaucrats care about two things - their budgets and their retirement. Ethics is something they abandon starting their first day on the job. Logic does not penetrate their skulls, so the fall back is pure Pavlovian - hurt them. I hope the $12 million hurts like a snake bite to the face.
It won't. A judge in Texas convicted a guy who he knew was not guilty when he was a prosecutor. Spent a couple of decades in prison before he had his conviction reversed. The former prosecutor was disbarred and got a week in the local jail.
When caught, prosecutors only get a slap on the wrist.
Count me in with the 13 million isn’t enough crowd.
Good point. As long as it’s just the taxpayer getting dinged, lessons won’t be learned. Still, big settlements do shake up the system — at least enough to incite those responsible to engineer a cover-up. Well, this half-full glass seems to be emptying fast.
“Cops are all angels and criminals are all demons.”
You think that?
Weird.
That was sarcasm.
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