Making A Murderer: Detroit Edititon

[BlaKcMoney]

Detroit — The lengthy battle to free a man who was convicted of a quadruple homicide at age 14 continued Wednesday with a team of attorneys filing a motion in Wayne Circuit Court seeking a new trial.

Advocates for Davontae Sanford, now 22, point out that convicted hit man Vincent Smothers confessed to the 2007 murders in a known drug house on Runyon Street on the city's east side. Smothers even told investigators where the murder weapon, a .45 caliber pistol, could be found.

While Smothers has insisted on several occasions Sanford has nothing to do with the murders, Wayne County prosecutors have steadfastly insisted they convicted the right man, citing Sanford's confession and guilty plea to the Sept. 17, 2007, slayings.

On Wednesday, attorneys for the Michigan Innocence Clinic at the University of Michigan Law School and Northwestern University School of Law's Center on Wrongful Convictions of Youth filed a 45-page motion for a new trial.

"How many more days must Davontae Sanford and his loving family wait for justice?" Megan Crane of Northwestern's Bluhm Legal Clinic said during a press conference Wednesday outside the Frank Murphy Hall of Justice.

"Justice has not been done in this case ... a young Detroit man, then just a child, was wrongfully convicted, sent to an adult prison as a child, and now has lost eight years of his life for a crime he did not commit," Crane said. "The injustice will continue until the Wayne County Prosecutor's Office faces the truth and does the right thing."

Assistant Wayne County Prosecutor Maria Miller said in a statement: "We are aware that a new brief will be filed in the case. At the appropriate time, we will file a response and argue our legal position in court."

University of Michigan law professor David Moran said a judge will be assigned to the case within a few days. Prosecutors will then have 56 days to respond to their motion, he said.

In 2012, Sanford's attorneys filed a motion to withdraw his guilty plea, although Wayne Circuit Judge Brian Sullivan denied the motion. Sullivan's decision was overturned by the Michigan Court of Appeals. The case went to the Michigan Supreme Court, which ruled in April 2014 that Sanford couldn't withdraw his guilty plea, but allowed him to pursue his appeal.

Sanford, who is serving a 37-year sentence in the Ionia Correctional Facility, is locked in a cell 23 hours a day, his mother, Taminko Sanford, said Wednesday.


"He's been away for eight years for a crime he didn't commit — that would give anyone a bad day," Sanford said, adding that she will continue to fight to free her son. "If we give up, he'll give up, and we're not going to allow him as a family to do that."

After the four victims were killed inside the Runyon Street drug house, Sanford's mother said her son, who was illiterate and blind in one eye, was arrested after he walked up to police at the crime scene and claimed he knew what had happened. He was 14 at the time.

Prosecutors say Sanford later confessed to killings, although his attorneys say police coerced the confession, adding Sanford didn't have an attorney or a parent present during the interrogation. Crane pointed out that Sanford told the police he'd used a weapon that hadn't been used in the killings.

Since Sanford's 2008 conviction, the case has taken several turns. Despite Smothers' confession that he killed 12 people, including the four victims on Runyon Street, and Rose Cobb, the wife of Detroit Police Sgt. David Cobb, who later committed suicide, prosecutors cut a deal with Smothers for the reduced charge of second-degree murder. Prosecutors said they entered the plea deal to save taxpayers money on a lengthy trial. Smothers was sentenced to 50 to 100 years.

Crane said part of Smothers' plea deal was an agreement to stay silent about the Runyon slayings of Michael Robinson, Deangelo McNoriell, Brian Dixon and Nicole Chapman — even though he'd given police a detailed description of the killings during his videotaped confession, even leading investigators to the murder weapon.

"Despite Smothers' uncannily accurate, highly detailed and perfectly corroborated confession, he was never charged for the Runyon murders," Crane said.

In a March 6 affidavit, Smothers reiterated Sanford had nothing to do with the killings.

"Davontae Sanford is being wrongfully incarcerated for crimes that I know he did not commit," Smothers said, adding that he and his partner, Ernest "Nemo" Davis, were hired to carry out the hit by a rival drug dealer.

Davis was never charged with the killings, although he later was convicted for shooting a security guard in December 2012 and is serving up to 15 years in prison.

In a tangential development, the Detroit police investigator in charge of the Smothers case, Ira Todd, filed a federal whistle-blower lawsuit in 2008 claiming he was ordered to refrain from asking Smothers certain questions and told to purge the name of former mayor Kwame Kilpatrick from his report, after Todd's investigation took him to Lexington, Kentucky, where he said Smothers and Davis would hide after carrying out murders for hire.

Todd said in the lawsuit, which is ongoing, that Lexington police officials told him Davis' brother, James Davis, claimed he had ties to Kilpatrick. James Davis is serving a 30-year prison sentence after pleading guilty in 2010 to wire fraud.

In another twist, William Rice, former head of the Detroit Police Homicide Section, was convicted of lying under oath about Sanford's whereabouts at the time of the murders. Rice lied during a 2009 hearing to determine an appeal for Sanford. Rice, who wasn't a witness at Sanford's original trial, lied when he testified during the appeal that he was with the boy at the time of the murders.

In a separate case, Rice and his girlfriend, Cheryl Sanford — Davontae Sanford's great-aunt — were convicted of conducting a continuing criminal enterprise involving mortgage fraud, perjury and drug dealing. The crimes began in 2006, the same year Rice retired from the police force as a lieutenant.

Rice, 65, was sentenced last year to between two and 20 years in prison.

ghunter@detroitnews.com

An article published Tuesday by the Marshall Project takes a detailed look at the case of Davontae Sanford who at just 14 years old was convicted of a 2007 quadruple murder in Michigan. According to the Marshall Project, Sanford’s lawyers stood before a judge yesterday evening to ask for a new trial for Sanford—the latest development in his case after multiple appeals for a new trial were previously denied.


The Marshall Project writes that Sanford was taken to the police station on September 17, 2007 after four people were murdered on Runyon Street in his Detroit neighborhood. Sanford, a youth with a developmental disability, was questioned by police twice without the presence of his parents or an attorney. He eventually offered up two statements; an initial statement in which he denied involvement but suggested he may have known who committed the crime, and a later statement in which he identified details of the crime and implicated himself as one of the shooters. According to the Marshall Project, once Sanford was charged with murder, “he told a psychologist that he had made it all up because the police had told him he could go home if he would ‘just [tell] them something.’”

Incompetent/corrupt lawyer Robert Slameka
To make matters worse, at trial Sanford was represented by Robert Slameka, an attorney with a long record of incompetence who was later suspended from practicing law in Michigan, writes the Marshall Project. Slameka failed to raise questions about Sanford’s interrogation and confessions even though Sanford’s age and disability should have been enough to cast doubt upon the validity of his statements. Sanford was convicted of the murders and sentenced to four concurrent terms of 37 years to 90 years in prison.

Two weeks after Sanford’s conviction, writes the Marshall Project, 27-year-old Vincent Smothers was arrested and confessed to the murder he was brought in for as well as 11 other murders, one of which was the Runyon Street incident. In Smothers’ confession, he offered up details about the weapons used and even told police where to find one of the murder weapons that had been hidden. According to the Marshall Project, although Smothers denied Sanford’s involvement in the murders, prosecutors offered him a deal of 50 years to100 years for all of the murders if he promised not to testify in Sanford’s defense.

Sanford’s appeals have been consistently denied, but today his lawyers filed a motion for a new trial. It remains to be seen whether or not the motion is granted, but as the Marshall Project writes, “t has taken seven years just to get to this stage of this case, and there will likely be many more years of litigation to come before this excruciating process is over.”

- See more at: In Davontae Sanford Case, Evidence of Innocence is Repeatedly Ignored

Interview with his mother @ 5min mark


Davontae Tells his mother hes being tortured in prison by guards

Davontae’s mother Taminko Sanford confirmed just how miserable life in prison has been for her son, who the family calls “Man.”

“Davontae wrote me,” Ms. Sanford told VOD tearfully. “I called and talked to the counselor who just kept saying he broke the water sprinkler in his cell. I told her, what’s that got to do with taking his food, and his clothes and his money?”

Ms. Sanford said the letter from her son is dated January 13, but she just received it.

“Mama, I am writing to let you know that the only reason why I haven’t been calling you or nobody else is because I’ve been going through a whole lot with these officers,” Davontae wrote. “They’ve been messing over me, taking my food, my showers, and I was hogtied for days at a time. They’ve been harassing me every chance they get.”


He identified his torturers as Officers Tefft, Rutgers and Botta.

“They’ve been playing in my mail, throwing some of my letters away, and my clothes and my shoes and the money order that you sent me they threw away. Mama, I can’t take it no more. I have to get out of this unit because I can’t keep being around these officers. I need for you and everybody else to call up here every two days to check on me . . . . I can’t believe the judge denied my case. Stay in touch with my lawyer.”

Ms. Sanford said another prisoner locked up with Davontae called earlier to tell her that Davontae had been put in the worst “pod,” where guards regularly handcuff and beat prisoners. (Pods are usually four-prisoner units.) She said Davontae and other prisoners have told her that the guards have been racist and abusive for a long time.

Wayne County Circuit Court Judge Brian Sullivan and Tracy Sullivan
Davontae has been incarcerated now for five years, because Wayne County Circuit Court Judge Brian Sullivan and Prosecutor Kym Worthy have refused to acknowledge Smothers’ definitive confession as proof of Davontae’s innocence.

Kym Worthy

- See more at: DAVONTAE INNOCENT, BEING TORTURED IN PRISON; JUDGE REFUSES TO ALLOW REAL KILLER’S CONFESSION

 

[BlaKcMoney]

From the HERE AND NOW Contributor's Network, Michigan Radio's Kate Wells has our story.

KATE WELLS: If your 14-year-old kid gets picked up overnight to go talk to police, wouldn't you go down to the station? Six years later, Taminko Sanford says she asks herself that all the time.

TAMINKO SANFORD: And that's something that I'm living with now because I never went down there. And I'll always be like - you know, like, why you didn't go, why you didn't go?:jtcmonson:

WELLS: Around 1 a.m. on a September morning in 2007, cops responded to a shooting on Runyon Street on Detroit's east side. Four people were killed; one of them reportedly a drug dealer. Sanford says her son Davontae, then 14 years old, was curious about all the police activity, but Sanford says she told him to stay inside.

Still, later that night, Davontae did go out and talked to the cops. At first he told them that he knew something about whatever happened on Runyon Street. Then he said his friends were the shooters. The next night, the cops took Davontae in for more questioning. Taminko says she thought Davontae was giving them more information about his friends.

SANFORD: I assumed by talking to Davontae - Momma, I'm all right, I'm playing on a computer, they just went and brought me some Coney Island. Sergeant Russell(ph) - like, your son is in good hands.

WELLS: Davontae, who is blind in one eye and learning disabled, was with the police all night. He was interrogated without a parent or an attorney present. And by the end of it, Davontae had confessed to doing the shooting himself. That interrogation was not recorded, which now in Michigan, would be illegal. Now, you have to record any interrogation relating to a felony case. But the tape was on when around 4 a.m. an officer walks Davontae through a written confession.

(SOUNDBITE OF AUDIO TAPE)

UNIDENTIFIED MAN: Now, I'm going to read it out loud for you, and I want you to read along, and if you see anything or hear anything...

WELLS: OK, the sound is rough, but you can hear the officer reading the confession. It has Sanford and his friends planning to rob the dealer, spraying the house on Runyon Street with bullets, shooting the people inside and making a fast getaway. They throw away the guns, and then the statement takes a turn. It has Sanford going straight home, hanging up his clothes from the crime in his closet, then he feels guilty and goes right back out the door to talk to police.

(SOUNDBITE OF AUDIO TAPE)

UNIDENTIFIED MAN: Now, is there anything that you wrote down that you want to talk about, about this case on Runyon?

DAVONTAE SANFORD: No.

WELLS: Davontae Sanford was charged with the murders as an adult, and his mother Taminko says she listened when her attorney advised them to take a plea.

SANFORD: Because if you don't take this plea, Davontae will never see daylight again. My baby never wanted to take the plea. He kept telling me, momma, no, momma, no. I forced Davontae to take that plea. He was - he got 37 to 90 years.

WELLS: Here's where it gets even weirder. About a month later, a hitman named Vincent Smothers was arrested and he was charged with eight killings.

ED WHITE: At that time he also took responsibility for these four homicides on Runyon Street.

WELLS: This is Ed White. He covers legal affairs in Detroit for the Associated Press and has been following this case for years. Smothers was able to lead cops to the murder weapon from the Runyon Street crime. Now he says he wants to help free Davontae Sanford.

WHITE: He said prison is a miserable place, I'm here because I committed these killings. He said he can't imagine someone who's innocent serving time in prison.
New Chapter In Bizarre Detroit Murder Case

DETROIT, MI -- Wayne County Prosecutor Kym Worthy indicated Monday she's unmoved by an affidavit filed last week by a murder convict who claims responsibility in a quadruple homicide for which another man is serving 39 years in prison.

Vincent Smothers pleaded guilty in 2010 to killing eight people in 2006 and 2007, and he claims he killed another four at a drug house on Runyon Street in Detroit on Sept. 17, 2007.

But Davontae Sanford, who was 14 at the time of the slayings, pleaded guilty to those fatal shootings after walking up to police at the scene of the crime.

Smothers has long claimed he was hired to kill the Runyon Street victims to settle a feud between drug organizations, and that he had help that day, but not from a teen.

He signed an affidavit saying so in a detailed court document filed last week by lawyers of the University of Michigan's Innocence Clinic and Northwestern University's Center on Wrongful Convictions of Youth.

But Worthy made clear Monday the document won't change the prosecutor's position on keeping Sanford, now 22, in prison, telling reporters they do not have "all the facts."
:pacuhh:
"Our prosecutors have been in court for this case so we will file our brief shortly and put our position in that case," she said. "... Our position will be very clear, as it has been many times before... You only know what you read in the paper. We are very familiar with this case... And remember, there has already been a judicial finding as well that agreed with us."

Lawyers have tried for years to get a withdrawal of Sanford's guilty plea, calling him a troubled, illiterate teen who was trying to please police when he confessed.

The state Supreme Court denied a request to do so last year, but left the door open to more motions for relief.

Prison Guards Subdue, Strip, and Restrain a 16-Year-Old Inmate from HuffPost Highline on Vimeo.

Following, by way of background, is something that I wrote about Davontae’s case several years ago.

…Davontae, who read at a third-grade level at the time of his arrest, signed and initialed a typewritten confession given to him by a detective. No video of his questioning, which took place without the presence of his mother or legal council, exists. And, in his signed confession, Davontae claimed that he’d committed the murders with a different weapon than the one which was actually used by the killer. In spite of this, however, Davontae was convicted and sent to prison, where he’s been sentenced to serve from thirty-seven to ninety years. And, that’s not the worst of it. Just months after being sent to prison, an imprisoned hit man by the name of Vincent Smothers confessed to having committed the drug-related killings. Furthermore, he says Davontae had nothing to do with it… Everyone, it would seem, knows that this young man is innocent, and yet he remains in prison…

Sanford’s Statements

Sanford was 14 years old on the night of September 17, 2007 when four people were murdered on Runyon Street in Detroit. He heard about the shooting and was in his pajamas when the police came around canvassing the neighborhood for information. At first, Sanford refused to cooperate with the police. But then his grandmother (and later his mother) allowed him to be transported to a police station where he was promptly tested for gunshot primer residue — a test that came back negative. Twice in the next 24 hours or so, Sanford, a minor, was questioned by the police without the presence of his parents or an attorney.When he asked for a lawyer, the defense alleges, officers called him a “dumbass” and did not immediately read him his Miranda warning. And so Sanford, who was half-blind and had a moderate developmental disability that required him to take special education classes, offered up two “statements,” the second of which the police (and prosecutors and judges) later would characterize as a confession. In his first statement to the police, delivered in the wee hours of the morning, Sanford initially denied involvement but said that he knew others who might have been responsible for the murders.The second statement came that evening, and it implicated four teenagers, all of whom subsequently provided valid alibis (and were never charged). He also identified guns that he said were used in the murders, although no bullet casings from guns of that type were found at the crime scene. This time Sanford offered a narrative in which he was one of the shooters and he helped the police sketch out the crime scene on paper. At one point during the questioning, a detective told Sanford that blood was found on his shoes, although there is no record of those shoes ever being tested for blood. As soon as Sanford was charged with murder, he told a psychologist that he had made it all up because the police had told him he could go home if he would “just [tell] them something.”

Sanford’s luck then went from bad to worse. He was represented by Robert Slameka, an attorney with an extraordinary record of incompetence on behalf of his clients, who has since been suspended from practicing law in Michigan (effective May 1, 2015) after he was convicted of theft. Slameka didn’t seek to suppress Sanford’s dubious confessions even though his client’s age and developmental disabilities raised questions about the constitutionality of the interrogation.Slameka also did not move to strike those statements from the case even after he was told by a psychologist, the one who had worked with Sanford in juvenile custody, about how shabbily Sanford had been treated by the police. Nor did the lawyer aggressively cross-examine the lead detective who had interrogated the young suspect throughout those two sessions. The question of the quality of this lawyer’s work, whether it constitutes “ineffective assistance of counsel” under current U.S. Supreme Court precedent, will be raised for the first time this week. There was no gunshot residue on Sanford’s clothes or hands, but there was some on a pair of pants found in a closet that the teenager shared with others. And the lone witness who testified against him, a woman who had survived the massacre on Runyon Street, said only that one of the killers “sounded like a kid.” The case turned almost entirely on the confession, and as a result of it, and a hopeless defense case, Sanford pleaded guilty during his trial to four counts of second-degree murder. Even then, however, he couldn’t get his story straight. During his plea colloquy with the judge, he offered another inconsistent account of the murders, claiming that his cousins were involved. They, too, never were charged with the Runyon murders.
A Nervous Kid. A Self-Styled Hit Man. A Detroit Whodunnit.

That someone could confess to horrific things they did not do seems outside the realm of imagination for most people. But false confessions aren't all that uncommon in our criminal justice system. According to an Innocence Project analysis of 225 wrongful-conviction cases cleared by DNA evidence, 23 percent were based on false confessions. Data from the National Registry of Exonerations places false confessions at the root of 13 percent of all exonerations, with the highest rate (22 percent) for homicide cases. False confessions were a factor in eight percent of exonerations for sexual assault.

For juveniles, the false confession rate is even higher.A 2005 analysis of 340 exonerations found 42 percent of juvenile cases involved false confessions. A 2013 analysis from the National Registry of Exonerations put the percentage of juvenile exonerations involving false confession at 38 percent.

A Huffington Post roundup of false-confession news from 2015 shows case after case where those who confessed were teenagers. There's Bobby Johnson, who in September was exonerated after falsely confessing to murder at age 16 and spending 9 years in prison. There's Davontae Sanford, who was just 14 when he confessed to a quadruple murder at a crack house and has spent nearly a decade in prison although a hitman guilty of at least eight other murders also took credit for these crimes. The Center on Wrongful Convictions and Michigan's Innocence Clinic have been petitioning for a new trial for Sanford.

In December, Donovan Allen was exonerated by DNA evidence, becoming the 334th American exonerated by DNA. In 1990, Allen, then 18, falsely confessed to the murder of his mom.

There are many psychological reasons why minors are susceptible to being coerced into false confessions, but one practical factor that shouldn't be discounted is improper interrogation practices. An 2014 paper in Law and Human Behavior analyzed 57 teen interrogations from 17 different police jurisdictions and found a parent present just 12 percent of the time and a lawyer present for none.
False Confessions Like Brendan Dassey's Are Common Among Exonerated Juveniles

 

[Prynce]

This is very upsetting to me

 

[daboywonder2002]

turns out he didnt do it and is being released.. I swear i hate this justice system. Detroit Man Wrongly Convicted of Murders When He Was 15 Freed After Serving 9 Years.

 

[Black Magisterialness]

nikka we knew he didn't do it when the story came out here.

1. the spot was well known for trap activity, that was one of the spots
2. Ain't no half-blind 14 year old runnin UP in said spot and taking out multiple nikkas
3. The hitman that actually did it was runnin his mouth/snitched on himself and others and fukk ass Kim Worthy STILL fought to keep lil duke in jail.