The Washington, D.C. government announced it will pay $16.6 million to a man who spent 27 years in prison after being framed by two police detectives for the 1981 rape and murder of a local college student.
It’s the largest settlement the District of Columbia has made in a civil rights case, according to defense lawyer Peter Neufeld.
DNA testing in 2012 confirmed Ronald Gates was not the killer. Earlier this week, a federal court jury found two retired detectives, Ronald Taylor and Norman Brooks, altered evidence in the case of a Georgetown University student’s killing in a way that imposed guilt on Gates, despite him being in jail for a different crime at the time of the murder.
Neufeld told the Washington Post he will ask federal authorities to look into hundreds of other homicide cases the detectives worked in over the past three decades to see if other suspects have been wrongfully charged.
“If they were willing to fabricate evidence in this murder case, then you really need to review the other murder cases on which they worked to see if they engaged in misconduct on those, too,” Neufeld said.
