How Dechert Lent Muscle To Man's Forced Confession Claim

By Matt Fair | December 1, 2019, 8:02 PM EST

With the aid of Dechert LLP attorneys and the Pennsylvania Innocence Project, Willie Veasy was able to prove something he'd steadfastly maintained during the nearly three decades he spent in prison for murder: his innocence.

"I got a chance to walk out of there the same way I walked in, as an innocent man," he recently told Law360.

Dechert LLP's James Figorski and Christine Levin

In October, a Philadelphia judge freed Veasy after Dechert attorneys helped corroborate claims that his confession had been coerced by a pair of crooked cops.

Winning Veasey's freedom meant following a thread of accusations against two Philadelphia detectives unearthed during a civil lawsuit filed by another wrongfully convicted man, who said he'd been forced to sign a false murder confession following an abusive interrogation.

When discovery in the civil case revealed a trove of complaints against the detectives, who had also interrogated Veasy after his arrest in June 1992, it got the attention of attorneys with the Pennsylvania Innocence Project and their pro bono partners at Dechert.

"This pattern was never put together because no one knew the same claims were being made by different people at the same time," said James Figorski, an attorney with Dechert who signed on to help handle post-conviction proceedings in Veasy's case. He was joined on the case by retired Dechert partner Christine Levin.

Veasy was sentenced to life in prison for a January 1992 shooting in North Philadelphia that left one man dead and another injured. At the time of the shooting, however, Veasy was clocked in at a Houlihan's restaurant where he worked — 8 miles away from the crime scene.

Detectives ultimately detained and interrogated Veasy that June after a witness identified him as the triggerman in a photo array authorities showed her months after the shooting.

According to Veasy's confession, he was playing basketball when he was picked up by a friend who told him they were going to "get some dudes" who'd robbed him days earlier.

While Veasy tried to suppress the statement in advance of his trial, the motion was rejected.

"His lawyer claimed that the alleged confession was not made voluntarily," Figorski said, "but there was very little evidence of that."

Veasy said that, for many years behind bars, he saw little hope that anyone would believe in his innocence.

"Looking through a long tunnel, you can barely see any light," he said, "and looking at my case when I first got convicted, I barely saw a speck of light."

That all changed after Anthony Wright brought a civil lawsuit against the city after he was exonerated three years ago, following a quarter-century in prison for a murder he didn't commit.

As Wright's lawsuit moved forward, prosecutors in Philadelphia were forced to hand over homicide files detailing alleged misconduct on the part of one of the detectives who interrogated Veasy following his arrest in the early '90s.

Veasy's cause was further aided by discovery from a second civil lawsuit brought by another wrongfully convicted man, Shaurn Thomas, who was freed from prison in 2017 after his own murder charge was thrown out.

"We'd heard stories the last couple of years from people saying they'd been forced to confess by these two detectives, but we didn't have any corroboration," Figorski said.

In the files, however, were transcripts of the sometimes graphic testimony that multiple criminal defendants had offered throughout the early '90s detailing the physically, verbally and mentally abusive tactics the detectives allegedly used during interrogations to coerce confessions.

"We were stunned to see that people had gone on the stand, taken an oath and testified that these things had happened to them," Figorski said.

During Wright's interrogation, for example, he said one detective pressed his face into the face of another detective who threatened to pull his eyeballs out and "skull fuck" him.

Thomas' civil case, meanwhile, resulted in a deposition from a key witness who said he'd been forced to implicate Thomas after detectives hit him with a telephone book and squeezed his testicles.

"That light started getting bigger and bigger when I started reading up on these guys and what happened to them," Veasy said. "Things started to get brighter for me."

In court filings in both the Wright and Thomas civil cases, the detectives denied having engaged in any abusive interrogation techniques. 

All of the newly discovered testimony was in line with what Veasy claimed had happened to him in the windowless interrogation room where he was questioned one early morning in June 1992.

Figorski said Veasy was interviewed on less than an hour's sleep after a night out drinking with friends, and that he was slapped in the face after being left to doze off in the interrogation room when he was first brought in.

"One of them immediately slapped him in the face hard to wake him up," Figorski said. "They told him basically that they knew he had murdered someone and that they didn't want to hear any denials."

Figorski said Veasy reported hearing rumors in the neighborhood about who was responsible for the shooting but that he maintained he'd been at work at the time.

After making repeated denials of his involvement, Veasy was presented with a statement that the detectives said reflected what Veasy had told them, Figorski said.

And Veasy signed it.

In actuality, however, the statement included language that implicated Veasy directly in the murder.

"They put these papers down in front of him that the detectives had been writing on, and they said sign this and we can get you out of here," Figorski said. "He signed it because he thought it was his statement about what he'd heard in the neighborhood."

The newly unearthed information about the allegedly abusive interrogation tactics of the detectives in Veasy's case prompted Figorski and his colleagues to file a petition with the Philadelphia County Court of Common Pleas in August asking a judge to throw out Veasy's conviction and order a new trial.

The corroborating evidence unearthed as part of the Wright case was so compelling that prosecutors with the district attorney's office in Philadelphia opted not to oppose Veasy's petition.

District Attorney Larry Krasner's office said in a statement at the time that it had opted to side with Veasy's lawyers only after "careful review of all available evidence."

Patricia Cummings, who oversees the DA's conviction integrity unit, said the government had a "constitutional obligation" to turn over information about alleged misconduct on the part of the two detectives.

"Now, far too many years later, Mr. Veasy has finally received the information that corroborates what he has maintained all along — the purported confession taken by these detectives was coerced and is wholly unreliable," she said in a statement. "Finally, today, Mr. Veasy is free after serving nearly three decades in prison for a crime he did not commit."

Even with the DA's cooperation, however, it was unclear prior to Veasy's hearing in early October whether the court would agree with his position.

"There was a lot of anticipation and a lot of tension because really nobody knew what the judge was going to do," Figorski said. "There were a lot of people there, and I saw people's hands shaking as the judge was deciding what to do."

In the end, Judge Leon Tucker agreed to grant Veasy's petition, and the DA's office announced on the spot that it would decline to retry him.

"The judge said, 'You're a free man,' and the whole place erupted in applause," Figorski said. "It was beautiful."

Figorski said the trove of information gained through discovery in the Wright and Thomas cases could end up calling other convictions involving the detectives into question, and that he'd be happy to partner again with the Pennsylvania Innocence Project if called upon.

"If they have a case involving those detectives and they'd like me to get involved, I'm happy to," he said.

--Editing by Aaron Pelc.

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