Men imprisoned for 15 years for crime they were later exonerated of sue Cleveland police officers, county

CLEVELAND, Ohio — Two men who each spent 15 years in prison for a crime that they were later acquitted of committing have sued the Cleveland police officers who put them behind bars.

Michael Sutton and Kenny Phillips accused Cleveland police officers Daniel Lentz and Michael Keane, as well as former detective Carl Hartman, of violating their civil rights by conspiring to fabricate and suppress evidence to pin the shooting on them.

The lawsuit, filed Tuesday in U.S. District Court in Cleveland, also accuses the Cuyahoga County prosecutor’s office of instituting and defending a decadeslong policy that allowed police to withhold police reports and witness statements favorable to defendants.

Sarah Gelsomino, an attorney at Friedman and Gilbert, announced the lawsuit at a news conference on Wednesday to mark the one-year anniversary that a jury acquitted Sutton and Phillips of the crime.

Phillips and Sutton toasted with champagne.

“I’m hoping we’re gonna get some justice,” Sutton said in an interview. “What we’ve been through is traumatizing. We got kidnapped for 15 years.”

Phillips said the convictions stole their lives and ripped them from their family members.

“We walked out our doors one day, and we didn’t come back until 15 years later,” Phillips said.

The men said that after spending their entire adult lives defending themselves against the accusations of being attempted murderers, they were excited to put the officials who pinned that label on them on the defense.

“They’re in the drivers’ seat now,” Gelsomino said, referring to her clients. “It’s a powerful shift in dynamics.”

Lexi Bauer, a spokeswoman for the prosecutor’s office, said in a statement that the office does not have a policy of withholding evidence.

“The Cuyahoga County prosecutor’s office has prosecuted more than 200,000 cases since the Sutton and Phillips case was tried in 2006,” the statement said. “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 federal filing comes after the men in November filed a lawsuit in Cuyahoga County Common Pleas Court asking a judge to declare the men wrongfully imprisoned. If successful, they each would be able to collect more than $56,000 for each year they spent behind bars.

Ohio Attorney General Dave Yost’s office has filed a response opposing the declaration, and the two sides are in negotiations.

A jury found Sutton, now 36, and Phillips, now 35, not guilty on Sept. 27, 2022, after a weeklong trial. Justin Herdman, the former U.S. attorney in Cleveland and now a lawyer at Jones Day, and Diane Menashe, then at the Columbus firm Ice Miller, represented the men for free.

Sutton, Phillips and two other men were arrested on May 29, 2006, after Lentz and Keane said they witnessed someone shooting from Sutton’s car into another car in heavy traffic on Woodland Avenue. Two men in the other car were shot in the head. They later survived.

The officers said they chased the car through the traffic until it stopped on a side street where the people inside bailed. Lentz said he chased Phillips and another man behind some houses when Phillips shot at him.

Police gathered no physical evidence that tied Sutton or Phillips to the crime. Prosecutors relied on the testimony of Lentz and Keane to convict Phillips and Sutton of attempted murder and other charges. The jury found the other two men arrested at the scene not guilty.

A judge sentenced Sutton and Phillips to spend a combined 138 years in prison.

The Ohio Public Defender’s Wrongful Conviction Project and the Ohio Innocence Project began investigating the men’s cases and discovered that there were two other Cleveland police officers who were at the scene. Their accounts of the shooting differed from those of Lentz and Keane.

One of the officers, Gregory Jones, wrote in a letter to Phillips that he told a prosecutor on the case what he saw, and the prosecutor elected not to call him as a witness. Jones was later fired after he was convicted of rape. He is serving a prison sentence.

Both Jones and the other officer said they relayed their version of events to Hartman, the detective, who told them that a prosecutor said they didn’t need to file a report, the lawsuit claims.

The state never told defense attorneys in 2007 that any officer other than Lentz and Keane witnessed the shooting.

Defense attorneys say the men’s convictions are among several that courts have overturned since the 1970s. The issue, the attorneys say, stems from Cleveland police and county prosecutors withholding evidence that called someone’s guilt into question.

The men’s lawsuit pointed to a 1973 Cleveland police policy that quoted a letter from then-Prosecutor John T. Corrigan. The policy said that police and prosecutors were required to hand over to defense attorneys evidence favorable to a defendant, but written police reports and statements from witnesses or potential witnesses to state agents were exempt from that policy.

The 6th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in 2019, in another wrongful conviction case, ruled that a jury could find that the policy led to constitutional violations.