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A Black man who spent 16 years in prison for a murder he didn't commit is suing the Detroit Police Department.
Kenneth Nixon, now 37, was found guilty of murder after being accused of throwing a Molotov cocktail into the home of Naomi Vaughn, resulting in the death of two children, HuffPost reports. Nixon was sentenced to life in prison without parole despite a number of witnesses corroborating that he was at home with his former girlfriend on the night of the fire.
After spending 16 years in jail, a Wayne County judge overturned Nixon's conviction and he was exonerated. Nixon has now filed a lawsuit against the Detroit Police Department seeking compensation for his time behind bars and alleging a pattern of botched police practices.
In the suit, Nixon alleges that the Detroit Police Department framed him and relied on the falsified testimony of a "jailhouse informant" who was seeking early release. The suit also accuses police of using fabricated evidence to help support claims from one of Vaughn's teenage sons and her boyfriend, who alleged Nixon started the fire.
“The constitutional violations that caused Plaintiff’s wrongful conviction were not isolated events,” the lawsuit states. “To the contrary, they were the result of Defendant City of Detroit’s longstanding policies and practices of pursuing wrongful convictions through reliance on profoundly flawed investigations and fabricated ‘informant’ testimony. (Detroit police have) a long history of using the testimony of jailhouse snitches without any regard to the accuracy of their statements.”
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