In January 2013, police raided the home of a Cleveland drug dealer, saying in a search warrant that an informant had recently bought crack cocaine there.
But the drug dealer had surveillance cameras that proved the officers were lying. He gave the tapes to his lawyer, who showed the FBI. The feds then worked to uncover a massive scandal of a rogue street-crimes unit that robbed and framed drug suspects who felt they had no choice but plead guilty to fraudulent charges.
Four years later, authorities are still unwinding the damage.
Three cops who worked for the city of East Cleveland are in prison. Cases against 22 alleged drug dealers have been dismissed. Authorities are searching for another 21 people who are eligible to have their convictions tossed. On top of those injustices, there is a slim chance that any of them will be fully reimbursed, because the disgraced officers and their former employer don’t have the money.
“I always took it on the chin when I got arrested for something I know I did. But when a cop lies to get you in prison, that’s a different story,” said Kenneth Blackshaw, who was arrested in a 2013 traffic stop and spent two years behind bars before his drug conviction was overturned.
The detectives, Blackshaw said, knew just who to target: people with long criminal records who knew their word would never stand up against a police officer’s. He is trying to recoup all that he lost, including $100,000 the cops took from his home in an illegal search.
“A person like myself doesn’t stand a fighting chance for his freedom when he stands accused of something he didn’t do,” Blackshaw, 51, said.
Drugs, race and graft
The Cleveland-area victims are among thousands of people who have been exonerated in cases involving police graft over the last three decades countrywide, from California to Texas, and from New Jersey to Ohio. In Philadelphia, more than 800 people have had their convictions dismissed. The Rampart scandal in Los Angeles in the late 1990s led to at least 150 tossed cases.
Former East Cleveland Police Officers, clockwise from left: Torris Moore, Antonio Malone, and Eric Jones. FBI; Cuyahoga County Sheriff; East Cleveland Police.
These “group exonerations” are distinct from the stories of people cleared by DNA or new evidence, a movement led by crusading lawyers who dig into individual cases to expose faulty forensics, false confessions, mistaken identities and official misconduct.
Group exonerations rarely attract much attention outside of the communities where they occur. They typically involve people convicted of relatively minor crimes that resulted in short prison sentences or terms of probation. The victims often have criminal records and, if not for the corrupt methods that led to their convictions, may actually have been guilty of a crime.
There is no official record of group exonerations, and researchers believe that in some police corruption scandals, authorities don’t bother to identify tainted convictions — or tell victims they could be cleared. Even so, the number of people wrongly convicted under such circumstances likely exceeds the more than 2,000 individual exonerations recorded since 1989, according to the National Registry of Exonerations.
The vast majority of victims are black — a result that points to national trends in American drug-law enforcement researchers at the registry said in a report issued last month. “As any forger knows, the way to create convincing fakes is to make them look like the real thing,” the report’s authors wrote. “For drug cases, that means arresting mostly black suspects.”
The impact is profound. Group exonerations not only undermine crime fighting efforts, but also destroy faith in police and fuel the belief that the justice system treats poor, minority communities unfairly.
“What I saw in this case is a legitimate reason for these folks to have these feelings toward law enforcement,” said Assistant U.S. Attorney Ed Feran, who prosecuted the East Cleveland officers.
Setups and thefts
East Cleveland is a city in distress, much more so than Cleveland, its larger Rust Belt neighbor. More than 40 percent of its 17,843 residents live in poverty, almost all of them black. Mass demolitions of abandoned homes has left the 3-square-mile city pocked with vacant lots. The median household income is $19,592. The local government is near bankruptcy.
That is the atmosphere in which the rogue street crimes unit operated.
After the FBI got tipped-off in early 2013, agents had the drug dealer who caught officers lying about buying crack at his house wear a wire. His secret recordings caught one of the officers shaking him down for $3,000 during a traffic stop.
From there, investigators uncovered more frame-ups and thefts. They documented several of them in an October 2015 indictment that charged the rogue unit’s commander, Torris Moore, and two underlings, Antonio Malone and Eric Jones, with illegally searching and stealing from alleged drug dealers and faking reports to cover up their crimes.
The indictment included charges that the officers had arrested an alleged drug dealer identified as K.B. The following day, while K.B. sat in jail, the indictment said, the officers broke into his room at his grandmother’s house and took $100,000, keeping a third of it and turning in the rest.
Blackshaw did not know his case was under investigation. He learned of the officers’ arrest by watching the news in prison. He called home and an aunt told him she’d already talked to his lawyer. “We’re working on getting you out of there,” he recalled her saying.
A feeling of vindication washed over Blackshaw. He had agreed to go to prison even though he didn’t think his arrest was legitimate. He has a long history of drug offenses, and his charge, possession of more than 100 grams of cocaine, carried a mandatory minimum sentence of 11 years behind bars. He maintains he did not have any drugs on him when he was busted.
He’d told his lawyer he wanted to go to trial. But his lawyer, Terry Gilbert, had advised against it, reminding him that it would be his word against the officers’. So Blackshaw pleaded guilty to a lesser charge and received a five-year prison sentence.
“Neither of us ever dreamed that these cops could be crooked enough to steal money and lie about it, and even if they did, who would believe Kenneth Blackshaw?” Gilbert recalled. But, as it turns out, the officers lied in the police report and to prosecutors while defending their illegal search.
‘Legally innocent’
Most of the victims mentioned in the federal indictment didn’t have private lawyers to push for their release. But the Cuyahoga County Prosecutor’s Office had just formed a Conviction Integrity Unit, which helped make sure all of the convictions were vacated. Blackshaw was released from prison in February 2016.
All three officers were sentenced to prison: Moore got nine years, Malone six and Jones nearly four. In a tearful courtroom apology, Moore said she’d turned rogue in 2011.
That revelation prompted the Conviction Integrity Unit to review all of the officers’ work since 2011. They came up with dozens of suspect cases. In some, the officers cited the use of confidential informants without proving their existence. In others, money used for undercover drug purchases, or money seized in arrests or raids, was not properly logged, raising questions about where the cash ended up.
Each of the defendants, like Blackshaw, had pleaded guilty. Now they were all eligible to have their cases dismissed.
Some of the victims had likely committed drug offenses. But because the entire process was corroded, the cases could no longer be defended in court. Justice required their dismissal.
“We didn’t go all the way to determine whether they were factually innocent or not,” Jose Torres, who heads the unit, said. “We were convinced that they were legally innocent, and that’s enough for us.”
Search for victims
So far, authorities have identified 43 people whose convictions deserved to be tossed. But in order for that to happen, they or a lawyer representing them needs to appear in court to ask a judge to dismiss the charges.
Working with the county public defender’s office, they’ve only been able to dismiss convictions for 22 people, Torres said. They’ve tracked down a couple of others who are expected to appear in court soon. The rest either haven’t been found or don’t want to come forward.
In each case, defense lawyers have insisted on protecting the victim’s right to sue for damages. But whether they get any award remains to be seen.
Blackshaw, out of prison for more than a year, says he’s trying to start a commercial cleaning business. He is grateful to be released, but he lost two years of freedom.
And he is still fighting for the rest of his money.
In states that legalized medical marijuana, U.S. hospitals failed to see a predicted influx of pot smokers, but in an unexpected twist, they treated far fewer opioid users, a new study shows.
Hospitalization rates for opioid painkiller dependence and abuse dropped on average 23 percent in states after marijuana was permitted for medicinal purposes, the analysis found. Hospitalization rates for opioid overdoses dropped 13 percent on average.
At the same time, fears that legalization of medical marijuana would lead to an uptick in cannabis-related hospitalizations proved unfounded, according to the report in Drug and Alcohol Dependence.
As Doctors See Benefits of Medical Marijuana Treatments for Seniors, Calls for Changes in Policy
“Instead, medical marijuana laws may have reduced hospitalizations related to opioid pain relievers,” said study author Yuyan Shi, a public health professor at the University of California, San Diego.
“This study and a few others provided some evidence regarding the potential positive benefits of legalizing marijuana to reduce opioid use and abuse, but they are still preliminary,” she said in an email.
Dr. Esther Choo, a professor of emergency medicine at Oregon Health and Science University in Portland, was intrigued by the study’s suggestion that access to cannabis might reduce opioid misuse.
“It is becoming increasingly clear that battling the opioid epidemic will require a multi-pronged approach and a good deal of creativity,” Choo, who was not involved in the study, said in an email. “Could increased liberalization of marijuana be part of the solution? It seems plausible.”
However, she said, “there is still much we need to understand about the mechanisms through which marijuana policy may affect opioid use and harms.”
An estimated 60 percent of Americans now live in the 28 states and Washington, D.C. where medical marijuana is legal under state law.
Meanwhile, the opioid epidemic – sparked by a quadrupling since 1999 in sales of prescription painkillers such as Oxycontin and Vicodin – kills 91 Americans a day.
Shi analyzed hospitalization records from 1997 through 2014 for 27 states, nine of which implemented medical marijuana policies. Her study was the fifth to show declines in opioid use or deaths in states that allow medical cannabis.
Sessions: ‘We Don’t Need To Be Legalizing Marijuana’ 1:15
Previous studies reported associations between medical marijuana and reductions in opioid prescriptions, opioid-related vehicle accidents and opioid-overdose deaths.
In a 2014 study, Dr. Marcus Bachhuber found deaths from opioid overdoses fell by 25 percent in states that legalized medical marijuana.
Since last year, when New York rolled out its medical marijuana program, Bachhuber has included cannabis in a menu of options he offers his patients who suffer chronic or severe pain from neuropathy and HIV/AIDS, he said in a phone interview. Bachhuber, a professor at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine and Montefiore Medical Center in the Bronx, was not involved in the new study.
Many of Bachhuber’s patients ask for help quitting highly addictive opioids, and some have used marijuana to taper off the prescription painkillers, he said.
Nonetheless, a 1970 federal law puts cannabis in the same category as heroin, Schedule 1 of the Comprehensive Drug Abuse Prevention and Control Act, and finds it has no medicinal value. Consequently, doctors can only recommend, not prescribe, marijuana, and physicians who work for the federal government cannot even discuss the weed.
Federal prohibition also has led to severe limitations on marijuana research.
In January, a National Academies report found conclusive or substantial evidence that cannabis can effectively treat chronic pain, chemotherapy-induced nausea and spasticity. The report, written by an independent panel of medical experts, found no evidence of cannabis overdose deaths.
It did, however, find links between cannabis use and an increased risk of vehicle accidents as well as the development of schizophrenia or other psychoses, particularly among the most frequent users.
Bachhuber lamented the dearth of research on the best ways to use marijuana as medicine.
“We have information that it works based on the National Academies’ report,” he said. “But we don’t know who it works best for, at what dosage, for how long.”
Last week, U.S. Attorney General Jeff Sessions, the nation’s top cop, reiterated his concerns about marijuana and heroin, an illegal opioid.
“I am astonished to hear people suggest that we can solve our heroin crisis by legalizing marijuana,” he told law enforcement officers in Virginia, “so people can trade one life-wrecking dependency for another.”
A case alleging two Livingston County men operated a collective marijuana-grow operation is on hold while their attorneys appeal a District Court judge’s decision not to dismiss felony charges.
In October, Judge Carol Sue Reader dismissed multiple manufacture marijuana counts lodged against Darryl Scott Berry, of Howell Township, and co-defendant Jeffrey Allen Michael, of Fowlerville, after learning Michigan State Police destroyed more than 500 marijuana plants without a judge’s order. She reversed her ruling March 3, prompting the defense attorneys on Wednesday to request a stay in the case to appeal.
Officers executed search warrants at five properties in Livingston County where they seized an estimated 545 plants as well as about 15 pounds of marijuana, 7 pounds of processed marijuana and suspected marijuana edibles, and more than $195,000 in cash.
The state’s attorney general’s office objected, saying the defendants are “not harmed” by proceeding with the preliminary exam Wednesday, but Reader noted she has a duty to protect a defendant’s rights.
The judge, however, noted that she stands by her opinion that it’s not a medical marijuana case, which was the state’s argument when it asked Reader to reconsider her earlier decision that dismissed the charges.
Defense attorney Michael Komorn, who represents Berry, said the attorney general’s office does not get to decide whether it’s a medical marijuana case because his client’s doctor has already made that determination.
Attorney Shyler Engel, who represents Michael, said the case should be dismissed because the evidence has been destroyed.
As a result, Engel argues, he cannot effectively assert what is known as the Section 4 defense of the Michigan Medical Marihuana Act.
That section gives qualified, registered patients broad immunity from arrest and prosecution.
“I want to tell the court there was only this number of plants but because they’ve been destroyed, I’m unable to do that,” Engel said. “That’s why this case must be dismissed.”
Assistant Attorney General Dianna Collins told the court the state has clippings from each of the plants seized.
Engel countered that the state’s attitude of “just trust us” that the evidence destroyed was a marijuana plant is inappropriate.
Collins further argued that the defendants “were not operating within the medical marijuana” statute.
Contact Livingston Daily justice reporter Lisa Roose-Church at 517-552-2846 or lrchurch@gannett.com. Follow her on Twitter @LisaRooseChurch.
CLIO, MI – The attorney for the owner of a medical marijuana facility faced with the possibility being padlocked for a year questions why prosecutors are trying to have the business declared a nuisance.
Attorney Michael Komorn said he doesn’t understand why prosecutors are trying to close the Clio Caregiver Connection as a nuisance even though the community hasn’t come forward with complaints.
“It appears that the main allegation regarding ‘a nuisance’ comes from the drug task force and not the local police agency or community leaders or citizens,” Komorn said.
Genesee County Prosecutor David Leyton filed a nuisance ordinance violation March 3 against the business after an investigation by the Flint Area Narcotics Group alleged the business at 105. N. Mill St. was acting outside of the state’s medical marijuana act.
FANG began its investigation into the facility Sept. 22, after receiving information that the facility was acting as a dispensary, according to the violation complaint.
“It appears as if FANG and FANG alone are the persons complaining of the behavior and will testify about that behavior justifying any injunctions,” Komorn said. “Instead, FANG warrants an injunction for their behavior, and the complaint of nuisance in this case.”
State law allows officials to padlock a property for up to a year over complaints of drug dealing.
Three separate controlled purchases of marijuana were conducted at the business, according to the complaint. The purchaser was a medical marijuana patient, but no person present at the facility was the registered caregiver for the buyer, the complaint claims.
State law allows individuals to serve as caregivers for medical marijuana patients, allowing them to possess up to 2.5 ounces of useable marijuana or 12 marijuana plants for each of their registered patients. Caregivers are allowed to have up to five registered patients.
Search warrants were obtained for the facility and executed Feb. 18. Officials claim they discovered multiple jars of marijuana in cases listed for sale, edible marijuana items, THC wax, suspected psychedelic mushroom cultivation, suspected LSD tabs in the business owner’s vehicle, 12 marijuana plants and $860, according to the complaint.
Komorn also took issue with Leyton filing the complaint, claiming it contradicts prior statements from the prosecutor.
“The restraining order action seems absurd in light of David Leyton’s declaration that he will only review cases where the ‘community’ brings it to him or his office,” Komorn said.
Leyton said Komorn took his statements out of context, and said he would review any case brought to him by law enforcement.
A temporary restraining order was issued this month against the business by Genesee Circuit Judge Archie Hayman after authorities alleged the business continued operating even after the warrants were executed.
On Monday, March 28, Hayman agreed to continue the restraining order until a hearing is held on the padlocking of the business.
The business’s owner did not appear in court for Monday’s hearing. His name is not being released because he has not yet been arraigned on the suspected crimes.
The case will return to court April 25 when Hayman will be asked to decide if the business can be padlocked for up to a year.
