Johnetta Carr claimed in a lawsuit filed Dec. 2020 that she was 16 when police accused her of murdering her boyfriend and that during the course of the investigation, detectives fabricated and coerced witnesses into saying that she was involved with his murder.
The Kentucky Supreme Court ruled the five-year statute of limitations ran out and the city should have known Mark Handy was corrupt when the lawsuit was filed and then settled in 2012.
House Bill 178 would compensate wrongfully convicted Kentuckians for years lost to prison.
William Virgil insisted he was innocent for decades of the 1987 murder of a Veterans Administration nurse in Newport.
The ruling will allow two previously dismissed wrongful conviction lawsuits to proceed against Louisville police.
Percy Phillips was charged with the murder in 2009, immediately after Edwin Chandler was exonerated. The case has been pending ever since.
The 1993 shooting of gas station clerk Brenda Whitfield has been a travesty of justice for her family, but, finally, after nearly 30 years, the murder trial of Percy Phillips, charged in 2009, began on Wednesday.
Keith West had filed suit against former detective Mark Handy, who pleaded guilty in March of last year to tampering with physical evidence in West’s two 1997 manslaughter convictions.
Despite a request from prosecutors to put him back in jail with a bond, Percy Phillips left the courtroom a free man until his trial, now set for April 2022.
Former Det. Mark Handy has agreed to plead guilty to perjury and tampering with physical evidence and spend one year in prison.