At the age of 19, Emmanuel Jean was two days away from attending college on a full football scholarship when an alleged corrupt police officer accused him of murdering a store clerk, pressuring two other young men to testify against him, resulting in Jean being sentenced to life in prison.
The Black Haitian-American from South Florida ended up spending 16 years in prison before he was exonerated in 2023 and released from prison after a Miami-Dade judge determined there was no evidence connecting him to the crime. No gun. No DNA. And no video.
Last week, the 37-year-old man filed a lawsuit against the North Miami Police Department as well as the two cops who arrested him, accusing them of false arrest, false prosecution, malicious prosecution and deprivation of his civil rights. He is seeking more than $16.9 million in damages – a million dollars for each year he served.
The North Miami Beach Police Department is the same agency that made national headlines in 2015 for using mug shots of Black males for target practice. One of the mugshots used was a photo of Jean when he was 14 years old after he had been arrested for trespassing.
Once Jean was incarcerated, the main cop who arrested him, North Miami Beach Detective Ed Hill, then tried to frame him for another homicide outside a nightclub even though Jean was imprisoned at the time.
But Hill was forced to resign in 2013 and give up his law enforcement credentials after it was revealed he was having a sexual affair with the wife of a man he had arrested on murder charges. He even took over the man’s driveway-pavement business, according to the Miami New Times.
Eventually, it was revealed that Hill had forged the man’s signature on a Miranda witness waiver.
However, Hill was never arrested because the Miami-Dade State Attorney’s Office was dependent on him to prosecute several other cases unrelated to Jean’s case, according to the lawsuit, which was filed by attorney Joseph P. Klock Jr. of Coral Gables, who has also employed Jean as a legal assistant.
The evidence suggests the city and the state knew that Hill’s testimony was unreliable and subject to challenge but nonetheless did nothing to uncover the perjury that he had orchestrated in Emmanuel’s case. The city actually fired Hill but did not prosecute him for the very actions that constituted a crime under Florida law, which Jean’s complaint attributes to officials’ reluctance to be exposed to the review and reversal of other cases where Hill’s testimony and investigation were key.
The second cop listed as a defendant in the lawsuit is Richard Rand, who was a detective and testified against him in the trial, and later became police chief before retiring in 2022.
The Shooting
On May 30, 2006, 60-year-old Mohammed Ayoub was working at his family convenience store when a youth entered the store and attempted to rob it, leading to a physical struggle between the two, resulting in Ayoub being shot to death.
Hill determined that Emmanuel was the shooter along with two other youths, Lazaro Esteban Cortes, Jr., and Richard Petit, and proceeded to pressure a witness to the shooting to testify against him — despite the lack of gun, DNA and video evidence connecting him to the crime.
The witness, Enderson Joseph, had previously told Hill that Jean was not the suspect when shown a photo of him, but Hill pressured him to change his mind. Joseph later recanted his testimony, according to the lawsuit.
Joseph later testified that he had not identified Emmanuel as the shooter, that the person in the photo that he initialed was not the shooter, and that he was only able to identify Emmanuel at trial because Joseph saw Emmanuel sitting next to defense counsel.
The only evidence connecting Jean to the scene was circumstantial, a partial palm print on the door to the store, but Jean was a regular at the store, having pushed that door open multiple times prior to the murder.
Jean was arrested more than six weeks after the shooting on July 18, 2006, two days before he was to start attending College of the Canyons in Santa Clarita, California, on a full football scholarship.
He remained behind bars until April 29, 2023, after Circuit Court Judge Miquel de la O ordered his release following a deal he struck with the state, which allowed him to plead guilty to conspiracy to commit robbery, reducing his life sentence to five years, which he had already served, according to the Miami Herald. It was his 36th birthday.
The lawsuit states that Hill was allowed to testify against Jean despite being under investigation for having a sexual affair with the wife of the man he had arrested on murder charges.
Hill even went as far as trying to charge Jean for the murder of a confidential informant committed while he was incarcerated, telling WSVN News that Jean ordered the hit from jail and then released Jean’s mugshot as the suspect.
“It was only after the actual shooter was caught, that it was determined that the shooting was totally unrelated, but, despite the false and public accusations made against Emmanuel, none of Hill, Rand or the City ever cleared Emmanuel’s name,” the lawsuit states.
The lawsuit also states that everyone working for the city of North Miami Beach was well aware that Hill was a “bad cop.”
“Ed Hill had a long history of corruption, lack of credibility, lack of Integrity, and perjury, which existed before Emmanuel was incarcerated and continued thereafter. The City knew about it. The state knew about it. The police chief knew about it,” the lawsuit says.
The entire tale is detailed in the internal affairs files of the North Miami Beach Police Department, which contained the signatures of the city manager, the police chief, and Hill’s supervisors, starting in 1988 and continuing straight through the date when Hill was fired and stripped of his law enforcement credentials.
The lawsuit states that Ayoub’s real killer was Petit, one of three people arrested following the shooting. Petit, who was 16 years old at the time of the shooting, testified against Jean and was sentenced to only eight years and five months in prison — “his reward for false testimony against Emmanuel,” according to the lawsuit.
