OAKLAND — Two Bay Area men who spent years behind bars for faulty murder convictions are suing the Oakland police department and a detective who admitted he paid a key witness after previously denying she’d received financial assistance, court records show.
The lawsuit, filed Tuesday by Giovante Douglas and Cartier Hunter, accuses Oakland police Det. Phong Tran of obtaining convictions against both men by paying off a witness and committing “clear perjury” to cover it up. The suit says both men spent close to a decade in jail and prison, until their convictions were quietly overturned by the Alameda County District Attorney’s office in 2022.
In May 2016, Weber submitted a sworn declaration to the court saying that contrary to her testimony in the 2016 trial and earlier preliminary hearing, she doesn’t know who killed Butler and was several blocks away from the shooting. She agreed to testify only after Tran paid her “more than $30,000 in cash and checks” and brought her to a meeting with Butler’s family, she wrote, adding that she remains haunted by the guilt of implicating the men.
The suit accuses Oakland police of failing to turn over key details of Butler’s killing to defense attorneys, in violation of state and federal law, and of systematically paying Weber starting in 2013. It says she would meet at an East Bay Starbucks and other locations to receive payoffs in the form of $100 and checks made out to her.
The suit also alleges that Weber was a confidential informant for Tran before Butler’s homicide, but that he attempted to conceal that and play her off as someone who’d randomly come forward with information. It describes both plaintiffs as family men whose lives were seriously disrupted by wrongful incarceration.
“Mr. Douglas was snatched away from his family and left to come home to a completely fractured relationship with his children,” the suit says. “Equally as important, Mr. Douglas is still trying to get reacclimated to life outside the penitentiary.”
In February 2022, Tran responded with his own sworn declaration, admitting that in 2017 he worked with then-Capt. Ersie Joyner to authorize a $1,000 payment through the Crime Stoppers of Oakland program, which rewards tipsters after a conviction. Tran also admitted, though, that he paid her undisclosed amounts of money before the trial was over.
“This was not done in exchange for her providing information…I would estimate the total amount I provided to her was between $1,500 and $2,000, with the majority being provided after the trial,” Tran wrote, adding that he also loaned her several hundred dollars to recover an impounded car.
Prosecutors dismissed the charges against Douglas, 31, and Hunter, 34, and they were released in September 2022 and last February, respectively.
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