This text was produced by the South Bend Tribune, a former member of ProPublica’s Native Reporting Community. Join Dispatches to get tales like this one as quickly as they’re printed.
Indiana
Wrongly Convicted Man Receives $7.5 Million Settlement in Indiana
A person who spent greater than eight years in jail after being wrongfully convicted of an armed theft in Elkhart, Indiana, will obtain $7.5 million in a settlement with town and with former law enforcement officials concerned within the investigation, his legal professional has introduced.
The town’s settlement with Keith Cooper is the biggest quantity paid to a plaintiff in a wrongful conviction lawsuit in Indiana, in accordance with the College of Michigan’s Exoneration Registry, and marks the top of his authorized saga, which was chronicled by the South Bend Tribune and ProPublica.
Cooper, now 54, was pardoned in 2017 by Gov. Eric Holcomb.
The record-breaking settlement follows a sequence of different wrongful conviction proceedings and lawsuits in Elkhart.
Cooper’s co-defendant within the 1996 theft, Christopher Parish, was exonerated and awarded almost $5 million in a 2014 settlement. In March, Andrew Royer filed a lawsuit saying police and prosecutors coerced him right into a false confession. A handful of different circumstances towards the Elkhart Police Division are pending.
“It’s been an extended uphill battle. I’ve been ready 14 years for today and now it’s right here,” Cooper stated throughout a press convention Wednesday afternoon in Chicago. “There’s no sum of money that may get me again the time I misplaced. But it surely helps construct a greater tomorrow for me and my household.”
Credit score:
Robert Franklin/South Bend Tribune
In a separate press convention, Elkhart metropolis spokesperson Corinne Straight learn a ready assertion by which town apologized for its dealing with of Cooper’s case.
“We hope this settlement brings to a conclusion the plain injustice that has been rendered to Mr. Cooper,” the assertion learn partially. “The present administration and present management within the Elkhart Police Division have set upon a path of accountability within the hopes that this sort of case won’t ever occur once more.
“To Mr. Cooper and his household, we remorse the struggling you skilled.”
Elliot Slosar, an legal professional who represented Cooper all through the civil litigation, stated he appreciates town’s apology, however he referred to as on Elkhart’s mayor to usher in a particular prosecutor to evaluate each case investigated by the officers named in Cooper’s lawsuit.
(Christian Sheckler, the Tribune reporter who labored with ProPublica’s Ken Armstrong on a sequence of tales printed in 2018 and 2019 concerning the legal justice system in Elkhart, started working this 12 months as an investigator for the Notre Dame Legislation Faculty Exoneration Justice Clinic. Slosar can be affiliated with the clinic.)
The Case
On Oct. 29, 1996, police have been referred to as to a housing challenge in Elkhart the place 17-year-old Michael Kershner had been shot and almost killed. Family and friends of Kershner’s stated two Black males — one brief and one tall — had pressured their approach into his residence, and the tall suspect shot {the teenager} throughout a wrestle.
Cooper and Parish have been charged within the crime after witnesses recognized them because the suspects from picture arrays. Cooper was recognized because the taller of the suspects and the alleged shooter. Each males have been convicted: Cooper in 1997, of theft, and Parish in 1998, of theft and tried homicide. Cooper was sentenced to 40 years, Parish to 30.
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Nadia Sussman/ProPublica
Cooper’s swimsuit claimed that Elkhart police officers, together with detective Steve Rezutko, framed the lads by means of false witness statements and unduly suggestive picture lineups.
Eyewitnesses who testified at Cooper’s trial later recanted and stated they’d been manipulated by Rezutko into implicating Cooper.
Moreover, an investigation accomplished within the years after Cooper’s trial concluded that DNA obtained from the shooter’s hat matched a person who had been convicted of a 2002 homicide in Benton Harbor, Michigan, after which despatched to jail.
In 2005, a state appeals court docket threw out Parish’s conviction. Afterward, a choose provided Cooper a selection. The choose may overturn Cooper’s conviction, permitting for a attainable retrial, or modify Cooper’s sentence, permitting Cooper to be launched instantly. Cooper selected the sentence modification and was freed in April 2006.
Although he was not in jail, Cooper was not exonerated of the theft. So, in 2009, he filed a petition for a pardon. In 2014, the Indiana Parole Board voted unanimously in Cooper’s favor and forwarded its suggestion to then-Gov. Mike Pence. However for almost three years, Pence allowed the advice to sit down, taking no motion. Pence’s successor, Holcomb, issued the pardon in 2017, one month after taking workplace.
Cooper is the primary Indiana man to win a pardon based mostly on precise innocence.
By the invention course of within the case, Cooper and his attorneys additionally discovered that Rezutko had been pressured to resign from the Elkhart Police Division in 2001 due to sexual misconduct with an informant.
The division didn’t disclose till January 2019 that the detective had been accused of paying an informant for oral intercourse.
Rezutko died by suicide a month after these information have been disclosed.