2016/03/02

The Washington Post: District to pay $16.65 million to wrongly imprisoned man, attorneys say

The D.C. government will pay $16.65 million to settle a federal lawsuit after a jury found that D.C. police framed an innocent man who served 27 years in prison for a rape and murder.

The settlement in the civil rights case of Donald E. Gates, 64, will be the largest paid to an individual in city history, District officials said Thursday.

A nine-person jury on Wednesday found that two D.C. homicide detectives fabricated all or part of a confession purportedly made by Gates to a paid police informant and withheld other evidence in an attack on a 21-year-old Georgetown University student in Rock Creek Park.

The award completes for now Gates’s ill-fated encounter with law enforcement in the brutal June 1981 killing: framed by police after a case of mistaken identity, convicted on flawed FBI forensic evidence, and exonerated and freed through DNA testing in 2009.

“I’m absolutely elated. The only thing I can do is thank the Lord,” said Gates, who lives in Knoxville, Tenn. “I’m hoping the message goes around the country: You can’t violate a black man or black woman’s civil rights, or no American citizen’s civil rights, anywhere. That’s what I hope.” more