The City of Detroit reached a multi-million-dollar settlement, ending a lawsuit claiming three decades ago members of its police force switched out bullets taken from a the body of a murder victim to link the evidence to a suspect. The convicted man, who was initially sentenced to 30 to 60 years, always maintained his innocence and says he is “thankful” for the agreement.
The recently exonerated Desmond Ricks spent the majority of his adult life in jail for a crime he did not commit.
On Sept. 23, 1992, the then-21-year-old was convicted of second-degree murder and illegal use of a firearm, pinned to the death of his friend Gerry Bennett, who was fatally shot outside of the Top Hat restaurant in Detroit in March of that year, as described by research compiled by students from the University of Michigan’s Law School.
Knowing he did not commit the crime, he and his legal team appealed the decision. It was denied. It would be 25 more years before a court would concede to review old evidence with new eyes.
In 2017, he was released from prison after years of hard work from students at the Michigan Innocence Clinic at the University of Michigan Law School and gun experts combed through the state’s evidence and crafted a defense that would be irrefutable to any judge.
Now, after Ricks filed a lawsuit claiming that DPD officers switched evidence crucial to his innocence, lawyers from the city have agreed to settle for $7.5 million.
After the City Council approved the settlement on Tuesday, July 13, Ricks, now 56, says he is pleased with the outcome.
“I’m not greedy. I’m thankful,” he said of the compensation The Associated Press reported.
During the case, police made these .38-caliber bullets central to the case, stating the murder weapon was Ricks’ mom’s gun and he stole it from her to kill Bennett. Experts testified that the bullets the police presented in the Wayne County Circuit Court in 1992 could not be the two “small lead slugs” a medical examiner retrieved from Bennett’s brain and spine.
But the road to vindication was not quickly achieved.
In 2008, the Michigan State Police shut down the Detroit police crime lab after an audit exposed the agency’s ballistics testing was wildly erroneous. Two years later, armed with this information, Claudia Whitman, founder of the National Capital Crime Assistance Network, agreed to take on Ricks’ case.
A part of their discovery was a change of opinion by David Townshend, a ballistics expert from his original trial, that testified to Ricks’ culpability at trial. In 2010, after meeting Ricks in prison, Townshend now believes the bullets he examined during the trial were in “near pristine condition,” making them impossible to have been fired from the actual firearm. He noted that the bullets had no blemishes usually associated with ammunition removed from a murder victim’s body. Nor was there any hair, blood, bone, or human material on the bullets he was asked to review.
Townshend not only reversed his testimony, but he helped Whitman and her team locate the records from the trial and discovered that he even messed up with his notes on the case, further damaging Ricks’ original case.
Another extraordinary finding by the expert was that the evidence was not sealed in the case, making him believe the actual bullets the medical examiner extracted from Bennet may have been swapped out.
The students started working on the case in 2012, and in 2015 they received digital photographs of the actual bullets from the crime. They sent them to Townshend, and he compared them to the ones he was given during the trial and saw that they were radically different.
The bullets in the photo were “severely mutilated,” and he assessed that they were so damaged from being fired and hitting Bennett, it would have been impossible for the ballistics team or police agency to link them to a weapon.
To drive his theory home, the Innocence Clinic contacted Dr. Ljubisa Dragovic, chief medical examiner for Oakland County, for him to re-exam the autopsy report. His finding was that because the original ME describe the slugs as “small,” they probably were .22- or .25-caliber bullets, canceling the narrative that Ricks used his mother’s .38-caliber gun to murder Bennett.
As a result of their diligent work, the late Judge Richard Skutt of the Third Circuit Court granted Ricks another trial, CBS Detroit reports.
The city, after reviewing the evidence, agreed that the bullet analysis from 1992 was not accurate and the prosecution decided to drop all the charges.
The director of the Innocence Clinic, David Moran, said of the case, “It was layer upon layer upon layer of police misconduct. It was a truly egregious case.”
Separately from the recent settlement, Ricks received over $1 million from the state for the wrongful conviction, receiving $50,000 for each year he was incarcerated.
Ricks says he is happy to be free and around his family.
“It’s a blessing to be alive with my children and grandchildren,” he said. “It was a blessing to not lose my life in there [prison].”
“I’m not bitter. I’m not angry. I’m just relieved. I want to get a job. I want to pay taxes,” he stated in an interview after the approval. “I just want to be a normal citizen.”
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