Federal lawsuit against SF in wrongful conviction

A man who spent 18 years behind bars after being wrongfully convicted of double murder has filed a federal civil rights lawsuit against the city, saying police built a case against him through perjured testimony.

Caramad Conley, 41, was released from custody last year after a judge ruled that San Francisco police and prosecutors had failed to reveal to Conley's defense team before his 1994 trial that the city had paid thousands of dollars and provided the use of a house to the star prosecution witness, police informant Clifford Polk.

Conley was sentenced to two life terms without parole. He had been housed until his release from San Francisco County Jail at Calipatria State Prison in Imperial County.

"In addition to stealing 18 years of Caramad Conley's life, and consigning him to spend his youth and early adulthood in physical confinement in a prison cell with no legal justification, the sort of flagrant and deliberate misconduct at issue in this case threatens the legitimacy of the American system of justice," said Conley's suit, filed Friday in U.S. District Court in San Francisco.

In December 2010, Judge Marla Miller of San Francisco Superior Court cited what she called "voluminous evidence" that Polk, who is now dead, had lied on the stand when he said he was not in a city witness protection program and therefore receiving benefits.

Polk, an unemployed transient with a history of drug dealing, testified that Conley had confessed to him about the April 1989 drive-by shooting on Third Street that killed Roshawn Johnson and Charles Hughes and injured 13 others.

Miller also found that then-homicide investigator Earl Sanders, who would later become police chief, had stood by in court while Polk lied. "I find that Sanders knew the testimony was false and did not correct it," Miller wrote.

In his suit, Conley said police "unconstitutionally and maliciously sent him to prison for a crime he did not commit" by "willfully suppressing a mountain of exculpatory evidence showing that the linchpin witness against him, Clifford Polk, had been paid thousands of dollars and received other benefits in exchange for his testimony."

The 97-page suit, which seeks unspecified damages, names the city of San Francisco and Sanders as defendants. They have not responded to the suit in court.

San Francisco prosecutors said last year that they would not retry the case, based on a decision by District Attorney George Gascón.

The case bore strong similarities to court findings that led to the release of Antoine Goff and John Tennison in another botched San Francisco murder case that resulted in a record civil settlement in 2009 of $7.5 million for the defendants. They were both freed in 2003 after spending more than 10 years in prison.

In that case, the courts found that prosecutors and police had information that another person might have committed the crime but did not disclose it during the trial. Both cases involved the same investigators, the late Napoleon Hendrix and Sanders, who retired in 2003.

Original report here




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