15 More to Go Free in Ohio Drug Case Built on Informant's Lies
Only because a federal informant relented and recanted his false testimony, it appears, are 16 wrongfully convicted defendants being freed from prison.
After informant Jerrell Bray got into a fight in Cleveland in May and was arrested for allegedly shooting a man, he admitted, while in prison, that he had previously fabricated testimony. In fact, Geneva France—who had never before been in trouble with the law—had not been dealing drugs, Bray said. At that point, however, she had been convicted, based on his false testimony, and was serving time, explains the Cleveland Plain Dealer.
Her release from prison at the end of June, at the request of federal prosecutors, sparked a Department of Justice investigation of other related U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration cases in which Bray had been a crucial witness. The result: a hearing yesterday at which a federal judge told attorneys he intends to release 15 more wrongfully convicted defendants by Feb. 1, reports the Cleveland Plain Dealer in another article.
“Prosecutors refused to say that the 15 men were all innocent. They just stressed that they lacked the evidence to convict them if the cases were taken to trial,” the newspaper reports.
Most had pleaded to lesser drug charges in exchange for reduced sentences. France, by contrast, had refused to accept a plea, went to trial and was convicted when jurors believed the testimony of Bray and a DEA agent over her own claims of innocence. As a result, she was sentenced to 10 years instead of the three- or four-year term she had been offered before trial.
Such a mass release of so many defendants is unprecedented, says Dennis Terez, a federal public defender. “This does not happen, it just does not happen. But what the prosecutors did was the right thing.”
Upon her release from a prison in Kentucky, France, who is now 25, was given $68 and a bus ticket home, the Plain Dealer reports. She had lost all of her belongings when her landlord evicted her after she was imprisoned, and her youngest daughter, now 3, didn’t recognize her and wouldn’t go near her. Now stuck with a reputation as a drug dealer, despite her innocence, she is having trouble finding a job and struggling financially.
“They stole the truth,” she says of those responsible for her conviction and the 16 months she spent in prison before her release. “I don’t think I’ll ever trust people again. It’s too hard. I don’t know how a human being with a heart could stand up there and lie about another person. They stole part of my life.”
