July 5th 2023.
Kenneth Nixon, a Black man from Detroit, has been through a harrowing experience. After being wrongfully convicted of a murder he didn't commit, he served a staggering 16-year prison sentence. Now that a Wayne County judge has overturned his conviction, Nixon has filed a lawsuit against the Detroit Police Department for its life-altering actions.
The now 37-year-old is suing the city's police department for the time he lost away from his two young children, and the years he spent behind bars for a crime he did not commit.
The story starts on the night of the fire, when Nixon was at home with his then-girlfriend, a fact that many witnesses corroborated during his trial. Naomi Vaughn, the victim, alleged that Nixon had thrown a Molotov cocktail into her home, resulting in a fire that claimed the lives of two of her children. However, her boyfriend's story was inconsistent, and police heavily relied on a statement from Vaughn's 13-year-old son that was deemed inconsistent by one of the chief detectives on the case at the time.
Despite the fact that there wasn't enough evidence to support the allegations, Nixon was found guilty of the murders and sentenced to life in prison without parole, all because of fabricated evidence and the testimony of a "jailhouse informant" who police promised to reduce the sentence of in exchange for his statement.
Now, Nixon is suing to receive compensation for the years he spent in prison, and to hold police departments accountable for their problematic practices that often cost Black and Brown people their freedom and futures. His lawsuit states that the constitutional violations that caused his wrongful conviction were not isolated events, but rather the result of the city of Detroit's longstanding policies and practices of using the testimony of jailhouse snitches without any regard to the accuracy of their statements.
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