Two men who were found not guilty one year ago of a 2006 shooting in Cleveland in a retrial that exonerated them after 15 years behind bars have filed a lawsuit against the City of Cleveland Law Department and the Cuyahoga County Prosecutor’s Office, alleging the officers who arrested them suppressed exculpatory evidence and fabricated evidence, leading to their false conviction.
Michael Sutton and Kenny Phillips were officially exonerated by a jury in a retrial on Sept. 27, 2022, a year after they were released on bond after an appellate court reversed their convictions, citing newly-discovered evidence.
Watch our report from 2021 when the conviction was overturned:
Phillips turned 18 in 2006 when he was arrested and then convicted in connection with a drive-by shooting at East 55th Street and Woodland Avenue.
He was sentenced to 92 years in prison. Sutton was sentenced to 41 and a half years behind bars.
But then attorneys for the pair, working with the Wrongful Conviction Project of the Ohio Public Defender’s Office, discovered new evidence in the case, according to the lawsuit filed Tuesday in United States District Court.
The lawsuit alleges that the two arrested officers, Daniel Lentz and Michael Keene, fabricated evidence against Sutton and Phillips to justify an arrest, claiming they shot at Lentz after he pulled over their vehicle.
Eyewitness accounts from the two other officers at the scene, which revealed Lentz and Keane fabricated the evidence, and no one had shot at the officers, were suppressed, the lawsuit alleges, either by the officers themselves or by Cuyahoga County prosecutors.
"We know now that the two officers who testified at trial weren’t where they said they were and couldn’t have seen what they said they saw. We know that because there are two police officers who say they weren’t," said Donald Caster with the Ohio Innocence Project in 2021.
The suit alleged the prosecutor’s office had a “longstanding and official policy by which prosecutors were permitted not to disclose certain exculpatory evidence, including witness statements and police reports.”
In a statement to News 5, the Cuyahoga County Prosecutor’s Office stated they do not currently have a policy of withholding evidence, and since 2009, a year before Criminal Rule 16 was amended, their office has provided open discovery on all criminal cases.
“We were one of the first counties in Ohio to do so. In addition, this office pioneered an electronic process for open discovery utilizing a web-based system,” the office stated.
The office further stated that they have prosecuted over 200,000 cases since the Sutton and Phillips case in 2006.
“With so few cases overturned, it is abundantly clear that the Cuyahoga County Prosecutor’s Office operates in an exemplary manner in the prosecution of criminal cases,” the prosecutor’s office stated.
The prosecutor's office did not provide further comment, citing the pending litigation.
The City of Cleveland Law Department declined to comment due to its policy on pending legal matters.
The critical exculpatory evidence in Sutton’s and Phillips’s case was discovered in 2015, and last year, with the benefit of that evidence, the men were found not guilty on all counts.
Watch our report from 2022 on the not-guilty verdict:
"Yep, because I knew he was innocent. I know they were innocent," Phillips’s mother, Elaine Witherspoon, said to News 5 last year after the 2006 conviction was overturned.
“As a result of the wrongful conduct of the Defendants, Plaintiffs Sutton and Phillips spent fifteen years imprisoned for crimes that they did not commit,” their attorneys state in the lawsuit. “Only seventeen and eighteen when they were arrested, they had their freedom and their futures ripped away from them just as their lives were supposed to be starting. When they were finally released, they had spent nearly half of their lives in prison.”
The lawsuit seeks redress for the wrongs against the men and to deter future misconduct.
The lawsuit cites nine other cases between 1975 and 2001 in which prosecutors withheld exculpatory evidence, particularly in police reports and witness statements, to show an ongoing pattern.
The lawsuit states that as a result of their convictions at age 18, “Their long years of wrongful imprisonment deprived them of all things in life so many of us take for granted.”
“The Defendants robbed Sutton and Phillips of their hopes and dreams for their young lives and their futures. The Defendants destroyed their lives without any warning,” the court filing states.
Sutton had a scholarship to attend the University of Akron and lost the chance to play football and basketball in college, the lawsuit states.
“As a result of Defendants’ misconduct, Sutton and Phillips have suffered various physical, mental, and emotional injuries in prison and continue to suffer today.”
The lawsuit seeks relief from the violation of Sutton's and Phillip’s Fourth and 14th Amendment rights due to fabrication of false evidence and malicious prosecution, as well as Brady Violations, which occur when a prosecutor fails to provide evidence that is favorable to a defendant’s case.
The lawsuit seeks compensatory and consequential damages, costs, attorneys’ fees, punitive damages and any other relief the court deems appropriate.
"Ohio does have provisions in our law for people who have been wrongfully convicted to obtain monetary awards to cover their loss," said Michael Benza, senior instructor of law at Case Western Reserve University School of Law, in 2022.
Sutton and Phillips, in the lawsuit, demand a trial by jury.
