Police And Prosecutors Allegedly Engaged In Scheme Of Using Sex And Drugs To Coerce Confessions

I knew that the Pennsylvania PD was not the best with civil rights back in the 1980s. You should too -- the MOVE bombing should have been in every American history textbook as a case example of police racial tyranny. The police response to MOVE is far from the only civil rights violation from the 1980s. Thankfully, we have a rare moment where one of those ongoing violations has been recognized not just with some kind words, but with a concrete effort to redress what was lost.

A man who spent 37 years behind bars for a crime he did not commit has won a more than $9 million settlement with Philadelphia.

The city has agreed to pay Willie Stokes $9.62 million to settle claims stemming from his wrongful conviction in connection with a 1980 murder. Stokes, now in his early 60s, was released from custody in 2022 after his conviction unraveled amid allegations that several police detectives engaged in a wide-ranging "sex for lies" scheme that led to numerous wrongful convictions based on coerced witness testimony..."This was probably one of the most egregious cases of misconduct and coercive tactics that I've ever seen," said Van Naarden, whose firm has handled several civil rights cases involving wrongful convictions.

Sex for lies sounds more like an indie punk group than a reason someone was thrown behind bars for four decades. That said, you've got to respect it when a super-illegal police practice has an easy and accurate way of referring to it:

According to the complaint, two former police detectives, Ernest Gilbert and Lawrence Gerrard, who are both dead, allegedly made their case against Stokes by offering an informant "irresistible incentives," in exchange for their fabricated statements and false testimony in a push to "clear the books" on unsolved homicide cases.

A witness, Franklin Lee, was promised and provided sex and drugs in exchange for his false testimony, the complaint said. During a preliminary hearing in May 1984, Lee testified that Stokes admitted to the murder and bragged that he was getting away with it, according to the complaint.

[W]hen Lee took the stand at trial, he recanted his prior inculpatory statement, saying "the police made me make this statement," according to the complaint. Prosecutors, however, urged the jury to reject Lee's trial testimony and to credit his preliminary hearing testimony instead.

Stokes was eventually found guilty and sentenced to life in prison without parole.

This is literally the stuff of dystopia. I remember being forced to read Fahrenheit 451 in high school. There's a section of the book where this mechanical cop called "The Hound" is made to hunt down a criminal. They couldn't find the guy they were looking for so they just made The Hound kill a man in his place. I don't think I would have believed -- rather, I would not have wanted to believe -- that the city across from mine was "clearing the books," too.

One of the most important parts of documenting civil rights abuses to come to light is the realization that they could have just as easily remained in the dark:

The defendants in Stokes' suit, which included Philadelphia, as well as the detectives and prosecutors, pushed to have the case dismissed, but U.S. District Judge Nitza Quinones Alejandro of the Eastern District of Pennsylvania rejected those efforts, finding Stokes had sufficiently established a custom of misconduct within the police department and that absolute immunity did not apply to the prosecutors.

The judge's decision to allow the cases to proceed against the prosecutors focused on steps they allegedly took after Stokes' conviction to keep Lee's perjury conviction from Stokes' case files.

According to the opinion, Stokes alleged that after the conviction, the assistant district attorneys "essentially usurped the role of the office record keepers by preventing them from including information related to the Lee perjury in Stokes' file."

...

"I don't know of any other ruling in Pennsylvania where the claims against the ADA survived motions to dismiss, so I think the city took those claims pretty seriously," he said.

Cheers to some highschooler reading about this in a history book someday. Probably won't be in Florida.

2955th EXON: Willie Stokes was sentenced to life in prison without parole in 1984 for a murder in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. After more than 37 years in prison, he was exonerated in January 2022 based on police and prosecutorial misconduct. https://t.co/MddDfaT0O4 pic.twitter.com/J1Aaodo8dM

-- Natl. Registry of Exonerations (@exonerationlist) February 15, 2022

Longest-Serving Wrongfully Incarcerated Man in Pa. Settles Civil Rights Claim for $9.6M [Law.com]

Chris Williams became a social media manager and assistant editor for Above the Law in June 2021. Prior to joining the staff, he moonlighted as a minor Memelord(TM) in the Facebook group Law School Memes for Edgy T14s. He endured Missouri long enough to graduate from Washington University in St. Louis School of Law. He is a former boatbuilder who cannot swim, a published author on critical race theory, philosophy, and humor, and has a love for cycling that occasionally annoys his peers. You can reach him by email at cwilliams@abovethelaw.com and by tweet at @WritesForRent.