He Spent 25 Years In Prison For A Crime He Didn’t Commit. Retired Police Officers Were Just Charged With Lying.

Anthony Wright spent 25 years in prison for a rape and murder he didn’t commit. When he was finally retried in 2016, three Philadelphia police officers provided testimony against Wright. Last week, those officers, now retired, were charged with perjury for allegedly giving false testimony.

The New York Daily News reported that former homicide detectives Frank Jastrzembski, Manuel Santiago, and Martin Devlin were charged with perjury and false swearing for the testimony they provided in Wright’s retrial. In a statement, the Philadelphia District Attorney’s Office said the three former officers had lied “both in and out of court about their on-duty roles in the investigation, interrogation, and wrongful conviction of an innocent man.”

From the Daily News:

Wright was only 20 years old when he confessed to the 1991 killing of 77-year-old Louise Tally. He was convicted in 1993, but he and his legal time have long argued he was coerced into making the admission.

Years later, additional DNA testing placed a different man, Ronnie Byrd, at the scene of the crime and ultimately proved that he raped and killed Talley, according to the court filing. Despite this newfound evidence, prosecutors continued to pursue Wright as a potential accomplice.

Wright said during his retrial in 2016 that he “only signed the alleged confession, which the police wrote out, after the interrogating detectives threatened him with bodily harm,” reported the Innocence Project, which helped Wright get exonerated.

In Wright’s 1991 trial, two of the original witnesses for the prosecution were crack dealers who claimed Wright committed the crime alone. The witnesses provided conflicting details and didn’t mention Byrd, even though his DNA was found at the crime scene.

Two of the prosecution’s original witnesses have died since Wright’s first trial, but Pennsylvania law allowed their testimony to be used at the 2016 retrial even though defense attorneys wouldn’t be able to cross-examine that testimony. “The prosecution was also allowed to enter the original testimony of three other witnesses, who [were] then teenagers and known to the police, after they testified at the retrial that they had no recollection of their earlier testimony,” the Innocence Project wrote.

Wright testified again at this retrial, saying he worked at his construction job on the day of Talley’s murder and went to a night club after work.

Wright was found not guilty during his second trial and released from prison. As the Daily News reported, three former police officers have since been charged with lying during Wright’s second trial.

“The three former detectives testified falsely under oath about both the evidence used to convict Wright and their knowledge of the DNA evidence that ultimately exonerated him,” court documents say.

Brian McMonagle, an attorney for the three former officers, told CNN that his clients were innocent.

“These good men dedicated their careers to fighting for justice for victims of crime,” McMonagle said. “They are innocent of these charges and will be vindicated at trial.”

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