PASSAGE OF THE DAY: "In a hearing last year, the city’s lawyer noted the department’s detective division handled an estimated 15,000 cases over a 10-year period. Cases were assigned to as many as 40 different detectives, and resulted in few known examples of misconduct, he said. In a ruling last year, however, Judge Sarala V. Nagala denied the city’s motion for summary judgment, finding the record is “replete with evidence illustrating the City’s alleged deliberate indifference to unconstitutional conduct.” Morant will seek compensatory and punitive damages at the trial, which is expected to last up to six weeks."
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BACKGROUND: "' Reporter Jim Haddasin; Connecticut Public Radio: April 29, 2026. "Wrongful conviction lawsuit puts 1990s New Haven police practices on trial." A lawsuit filed against the city of New Haven and several police officers by a man who claims he was wrongfully jailed for more than two decades because of police misconduct will go to trial in Hartford this week. Stefon Morant alleges officers coerced witnesses to testify against him, fabricated evidence and withheld key information in his case, leading to his wrongful conviction for a double homicide he didn’t commit. Morant and another man, Scott Lewis, were convicted of killing Ricardo Turner, a former New Haven alderman, and his partner, Lamont Fields, in October 1990. The two were fatally shot inside a second-floor apartment on Howard Avenue in New Haven. No physical or forensic evidence ever connected Morant or Lewis to the crime. Morant alleges the investigation initially pointed to a major cocaine dealer in the area and his brother as the perpetrators. However, Morant and Lewis became suspects following a January 1991 police interview of a 16-year-old witness. Morant alleges Vincent Raucci, a former New Haven detective who was assigned to the case, coerced the teenager and another witness to implicate him and Lewis in the shootings. During a hearing in federal court, one of the officers testified that Raucci had engaged in misconduct during the investigation, and that a key witness initially told police he knew nothing about the murders. During Morant’s sentence modification hearing in 2015, a state’s attorney then said in open court that the witness “was not honest in his testimony,” and that “it’s public information that a certain police officer involved in this had put him up to contriving a story.” The Connecticut Board of Pardons and Paroles granted Morant a full pardon in 2021 and his convictions were expunged. The state has since awarded him $5.8 million after he filed a wrongful conviction claim. In addition to clearing his name, Morant sued the city and half a dozen former New Haven police officers in federal court, including Raucci, Vaughn Maher and Michael Sweeney. The trial, scheduled to begin at 9 a.m. Wednesday, is expected to offer a window into a controversial period at the New Haven Police Department, which faces ongoing scrutiny over the integrity of policing during a previous era. More than a dozen people convicted in New Haven and the surrounding area from the 1980s through the early 2000s were later exonerated due to official misconduct by police and prosecutors, according to the National Registry of Exonerations. Some activists and lawyers have called for Connecticut to conduct a more comprehensive review of criminal cases from that time, with the goal of ensuring the integrity of past convictions. Student journalists at Yale University have extensively documented potentially problematic cases in a project called Holding Me Captive. Lewis, the co-defendant in Morant’s case, previously settled a lawsuit against the city of New Haven for $9.5 million after winning his release from prison. A spokesperson for the city and its attorneys didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment on the suit from Morant. In previous court filings, the city has argued it isn’t liable for individual officer misconduct because it says officers were properly trained and bad acts were not widespread. In a hearing last year, the city’s lawyer noted the department’s detective division handled an estimated 15,000 cases over a 10-year period. Cases were assigned to as many as 40 different detectives, and resulted in few known examples of misconduct, he said. In a ruling last year, however, Judge Sarala V. Nagala denied the city’s motion for summary judgment, finding the record is “replete with evidence illustrating the City’s alleged deliberate indifference to unconstitutional conduct.” Morant will seek compensatory and punitive damages at the trial, which is expected to last up to six weeks."
The entire post from which this background has set out can be found at:
https://ctmirror.org/2026/04/29/wrongful-conviction-lawsuit-puts-1990s-new-haven-police-practices-on-trial/
PUBLISHER'S NOTE: I am monitoring this case/issue/resource. Keep your eye on the Charles Smith Blog for reports on developments. The Toronto Star, my previous employer for more than twenty incredible years, has put considerable effort into exposing the harm caused by Dr. Charles Smith and his protectors - and into pushing for reform of Ontario's forensic pediatric pathology system. Please send any comments or information on other cases and issues of interest to the readers of this blog to: hlevy15@gmail.com. Harold Levy: Publisher: The Charles Smith Blog.
FINAL WORD: (Applicable to all of our wrongful conviction cases): "Whenever there is a wrongful conviction, it exposes errors in our criminal legal system, and we hope that this case — and lessons from it — can prevent future injustices."Lawyer Radha Natarajan: Executive Director: New England Innocence Project;
FINAL, FINAL WORD: "Since its inception, the Innocence Project has pushed the criminal legal system to confront and correct the laws and policies that cause and contribute to wrongful convictions. They never shied away from the hard cases — the ones involving eyewitness identifications, confessions, and bite marks. Instead, in the course of presenting scientific evidence of innocence, they've exposed the unreliability of evidence that was, for centuries, deemed untouchable." So true;;