KLLF Wins Appeal Defeating Qualified Immunity in Wrongful Conviction Case

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit issued a precedential opinion today, determining that a firearms examiner for the Connecticut State Police can be held liable for suppressing exonerating evidence during the prosecution of Vernon Horn (represented by KLLF’s Doug Lieb and Emery Celli’s Ilann Maazel) and Marquis Jackson (represented by Kenneth Rosenthal of Green & Sklarz).

Horn and Jackson each served more than seventeen years in prison for a robbery and murder it is clear they did not commit. Their innocence should and would have been clear seventeen years ago if crucial evidence hadn’t been suppressed by law enforcement: New Haven Police officers hid exculpatory phone call records in the basement of a detective’s house for nearly twenty years before they came to light, and a firearms examiner from the Connecticut State Police Laboratory never disclosed that he scrapped his first forensic report after it indicated that the gun police were trying to pin on Horn and Jackson didn’t match the evidence.

The firearms examiner, James Stephenson, moved to dismiss Horn and Jackson’s claims that he violated their due process rights by manipulating his reports and hiding them from the defense. Stephenson didn’t argue that the reports weren’t exculpatory or critical to the prosecution’s case. Instead, he argued that he was entitled to absolute immunity because he was just following the prosecutor’s instructions, and that he was entitled to qualified immunity because the constitutional law establishing that prosecutors and police must turn over exculpatory evidence did not “clearly establish” that a firearms examiner who was not a “sworn police officer” had that same duty when he concealed his reports.

The lower court denied Stephenson’s motion to dismiss and the Second Circuit affirmed that decision, reasoning that Stephenson acted alone and that “regardless of whether the police official concealed material that he collected as a sworn officer or material that he analyzed as an unsworn forensic examiner, a contrivance by a state to procure the conviction and imprisonment of a defendant violates due process all the same.”

KLLF looks forward to continuing to litigate Horn’s claims until he and Jackson achieve the justice and accountability that has been denied to them for over twenty years.