He Spent 28 Years Behind Bars for a Murder He Didn't Commit and Died Before Seeing JusticeThe police officers who allegedly framed William Virgil were denied qualified immunity. But they're still trying to delay a trial.
By BILLY BINION
3.30.2022
William Virgil spent almost three decades behind bars for a murder he didn't commit. That guilty verdict came down after police in Kentucky withheld evidence that may have exonerated him during trial.
Yet Virgil won't see any justice for that police misconduct, as he is now dead—the government roadblocks to his lawsuit so long and winding that they outlived him.
Such is the case with qualified immunity, the legal doctrine that allows local and state actors to violate your rights without fear of having to pay for it in civil court if the government misbehavior in question has not been "clearly established" in a prior court ruling.
But the cops at the center of Virgil's story did violate "clearly established" law.
* * *
Whether or not Virgil would have spent time in prison were it not for government malfeasance is impossible to say. But the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 6th Circuit ruled in 2018 that it should have been plainly obvious to any reasonable police officer—even in 1988—that withholding evidence from a defendant is unconstitutional. Specifically, former Newport Police Department officer Norman Wagner declined to disclose that he paid a jailhouse informant named Joe Womack to testify against Virgil after Wagner allegedly fed Womack details about the crime and promised to put in a good word with the parole board if Womack obliged. What's more, Wagner, along with former officer Marc Brandt, failed to tell the defense about a serial killer investigation possibly connected to Welch's murder, and that other suspects had been identified as a part of that effort.
"[Virgil] alleges, for example, that the officers tried to frame him; that they coerced an inmate to testify falsely that Virgil had confessed to the murder; and that they then deliberately suppressed exculpatory evidence regarding alternative suspects," wrote Judge Joan Larsen for the 6th Circuit in December of 2018. "Such conduct, if proved, would surely amount to bad faith or its functional equivalent; and there can be little question that it was well established before September 1988 that police officers could not deliberately conceal material, exculpatory evidence."
* * *
Source:
https://reason.com/2022/03/30/william-virgil-spent-28-years-prison-murder-he-didnt-commit-newport-police-qualified-immunity/
