(WWJ/AP) - A wrongfully convicted man accepted a multi-million dollar settlement with Detroit after he said bullets swapped by cops were used to connect him to a murder weapon 30 years ago.
Desmond Ricks spent 25 years behind bars for a 1992 fatal shooting of a friend outside a restaurant, the Associated Press reported. The 56-year-old man was freed in 2017 and will now receive a $7.5 million pay out thanks to gun experts, law students at the University of Michigan and his unwavering insistence that he was innocent.
“I’m not greedy. I’m thankful,” Ricks, 56, told The Associated Press after the City Council approved the settlement Tuesday.
"It's a blessing to be alive with my children and grandchildren. It was a blessing to not lose my life in there," Ricks said of prison.
Detroit police used a gun belonging to Ricks' mother to tie him to the fatal shooting.
In 2016, the Innocence Clinic at University of Michigan law school asked a judge to reopen the case. Photos of two bullets recovered from the victim, Gerry Bennett, raised questions when it was discovered that they did not resemble the bullets that were examined by a defense expert before trial decades earlier.
The bullets were still sitting in Detroit police storage -- an examination proved they did not match the .38-caliber gun that cops said was the murder weapon.
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Ricks' was granted a new trial, but prosecutors dropped all charges.
"It was layer upon layer upon layer of police misconduct. It was a truly egregious case," said David Moran, director of the Innocence Clinic.
During depositions in the lawsuit, even the city's expert acknowledged that the bullet analysis by the police lab decades ago was flat-out wrong, the AP reported.
"It's one of two things. It was a horrible mistake or it was deliberate — I don't know," said Jay Jarvis, who worked for 32 years at the Georgia State Crime Laboratory.
Separately, Ricks received more than $1 million from the state for his wrongful conviction, $50,000 for each year in custody. He'll likely have to repay it now that Detroit has settled the lawsuit.
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