City pays $8M to falsely convicted Oklahoma man

Published 6:30 pm Thursday, October 29, 2015

TULSA, Okla. – A man who served 17 years behind bars after being falsely accused won a multi-million dollar suit against the northeastern Oklahoma city responsible for his unlawful incarceration.

Sedrick Courtney of Comanche, Oklahoma, suffered a great injustice, which cost him nearly 20 years of his life behind bars for a crime he didn’t commit.

The falsely accused man sued the City of Tulsa, Oklahoma, and was awarded $8 million last week.

“No amount of money will ever make up for the time I lost, but I am grateful that the (City of Tulsa) took this step, and I hope they will look hard at their old cases to make sure other innocent people are found and freed,” Courtney said.

Courtney’s attorneys praised the settlement, but asked city officials to conduct a complete audit of the case work of lab analyst Carol Cox, whose manufactured evidence helped convict Courtney and whose faulty analysis resulted in at least one other wrongful conviction of Timothy Durham, who was exonerated in 1997.

“Sedrick Courtney and Tim Durham were by one measure the unluckiest guys in the world, and by another, two of the lucky ones because DNA testing eventually proved their innocence, and in so doing, proved Cox’s lies,” said Emma Freudenberger, a partner with the law firm Neufeld Scheck & Brustin, LLP in New York.

Courtney, 43, was arrested for armed robbery at the age of 23 in 1995. The only eyewitness had duct tape over her eyes and sustained brain damage during the attack, and several witnesses corroborated Courtney’s alibi. Courtney was convicted after Tulsa Police Laboratory analyst Carol Cox testified that a hair found at the crime scene bore unusual similarities to one of Courtney’s hairs.

During Cortney’s trial, Cox testified about examining ski masks the burglars wore, and found a single bleached red hair fragment among numerous African American hairs that matched hairs collected from Courtney’s head. Lawyers from the New York-based Neufeld Scheck & Brustin law firm discovered during the civil case that the supposed red, bleached hair Cox pulled from his head was neither red nor bleached.

“Making up lab results to get a conviction is, incredibly, something we see again and again in our wrongful conviction cases,” said Neufeld Scheck & Brustin partner Nick Brustin. “Police and prosecutors have a weak case on their hands, and laboratory personnel step in to be heroes and get the conviction. It’s reprehensible, and yet it happens all the time.”

The lawyers said in a press release, evidence suggests that fabricating results was a pattern for Cox. She had given similar testimony to shore up another shaky prosecution.

“Had an audit of her work been conducted after the Durham exoneration, Sedrick Courtney might have spent over a decade less behind bars,” the release stated. “Courtney began requesting the physical evidence in his case as soon as his direct appeals were denied, but was repeatedly and falsely told it had been destroyed. In 2011, more than 10 years after he first requested the evidence, Tulsa officials located the hairs from the ski masks, and Courtney was able to secure DNA testing.”

Instances of falsified evidence leading to wrongful convictions have become anything but sporadic nationwide. A 2015 Slate article showcases several individuals who’ve jeopardized the lives of thousands of men and women, detailing the scandal surrounding Massachusetts chemist Annie Dookhan, who was sentenced to at least three years in prison in 2013 for falsifying thousands of drug tests.

Dookhan, whose career spanned nearly a decade, tested about 60,000 samples involved in roughly 34,000 criminal cases resulting in the incarceration of more than 1140 individuals, Chemistry World reported back in 2012.

While defendants sentenced based on Dookhan’s fabricated test results have been offered the opportunity by Massachussets state court to have their cases re-examined and retried, none has been as fortunate as Courtney.

Supporting his suit, Brustin noted in the release that a larger issue in Courtney’s case is that hair comparison evidence has long been considered unreliable and has proven inaccurate for positive identification.

A local jury convicted Courtney in the burglary and robbery of Shemita Greer, who was home in Tulsa, Oklahoma on April 6, 1995, when two men wearing ski masks kicked in her apartment door and attacked her at gunpoint.

Greer was robbed almost $400 in cash and was severely beaten. Courtney was sentenced to 30 years in prison.

Betancourt writes for the Duncan (Oklahoma) Banner