When reporters ask a person they’re interviewing to introduce themselves, we typically use a variation of this standard line: “Tell me your name and whatever title you like to go by.” By “title,” we usually mean their job title — teacher, CEO, whatever it may be — or their affiliation with some organization that’s relevant to the story we’re reporting.
On Tuesday, when I asked Duane Williams to tell me his name and title, his response was: “My name is Duane Williams. The title I want to go by —” here he paused, thinking. “It's ‘free.’ I'm free. Yeah, that's a pretty good title.”
From March 2013 until June 2024, Williams was not free because he was incarcerated for allegedly setting fire to a Detroit home, killing two people. It was determined to be a wrongful conviction, because not only was Williams innocent — the crime itself never actually happened.
“I've seen people lie. I've seen people commit perjury," said Todd Flood, one of Williams’ attorneys. “I have never, as a prosecutor or as a criminal defense attorney, ever seen or witnessed a fabrication to this extent.”
Flood is now representing Williams on the civil side of the legal system, filing a wrongful conviction lawsuit on his behalf against the city of Detroit, Wayne County, a former fire department investigator, and two Detroit police officers. It alleges a conspiracy to prosecute and wrongfully imprison Williams that’s so incredible it would be hard to take seriously — if the Wayne County Prosecutor’s Office’s own Conviction Integrity Unit hadn’t found the evidence so convincing that it persuaded a judge to throw out the convictions that kept Williams behind bars for more than 11 years.
Here are the facts, as alleged and documented in Williams’ new federal lawsuit:
On August 20, 2012, a house fire on Fielding Street in northwest Detroit killed two people. Williams was familiar with the home — it was in his old neighborhood, and his mother was living there at the time. Williams and his mother’s boyfriend, who also lived there and was one of the fire’s victims, had gotten into an altercation the night before. But for another seven months, that would be the only reason the fire was of any relevance to him.
A lighter is discovered at the scene — and then disappears from the evidence
The lead fire investigator, Detroit Fire Department Captain Patrick McNulty, investigated the scene and ultimately listed the cause as “undetermined.” The two victims of the blaze — one of whom was a cigarette smoker known to fall asleep on the couch while smoking — were ruled by the medical examiner to have died accidental deaths. And crucially, during his investigation, McNulty documented the following in his report on the fire scene: “a Zippo Style lighter was found in the debris of the east end of the couch.”
With no evidence of arson or criminal activity, the case was shelved. Until Gary Jennings entered the picture several months later.
Court documents indicate Jennings was a slight acquaintance of Williams, and according to Flood, a “habitual criminal.” At that point, Jennings was on probation, and he was facing another felony charge in an unrelated case. So — without any documented evidence to support his claim — Jennings told Detroit Police Sergeant Michael Russell that Williams had confessed to starting the deadly fire on Fielding Street.
“He didn't have any details. He didn't know anything,” Williams said of Jennings. “They said that I confessed to this guy, and next thing you know, I'm in prison.”
Russell is a familiar name to those who follow wrongful conviction cases coming out of Detroit. Most notably, he’s the officer who took the alleged “confession” of Davontae Sanford, a 14-year-old who was accused, convicted, and later exonerated of a 2007 quadruple homicide. The road to Sanford’s exoneration began when an incarcerated hit man confessed to that crime. Ultimately, it became clear that Russell had at best mishandled the teenage Sanford’s supposed confession — and at worst, manipulated and coerced it.
Russell could not be reached for comment on Williams’ case and lawsuit; he retired from the Detroit Police Department as a lieutenant. The department declined to comment on the case.
After Jennings conveyed Williams' supposed confession, this is what happened next, according to Williams’ lawsuit:
“Despite the fire being classified as indeterminate in Defendant McNulty’s Original Fire Report, with no evidence of foul play or arson, Defendants refused to accept these conclusions. Instead, Defendants acted individually and in concert to manipulate evidence and convict Plaintiff for a crime that did not occur.”
First, according to the lawsuit, court transcripts, and other supporting documents, Russell contacted the medical examiner, who changed her original finding of accidental death for the fire victims to homicide. Then, McNulty’s original investigative report — which mentioned the lighter found on the couch, as well as other smoking-related items found in the home — was altered to remove all mention of those items.
The altered report, without evidence of the lighter’s existence, “was used as a basis to assert probable cause for a crime that was never committed and bind Plaintiff over for trial,” the lawsuit contends.
The next few months were a waking nightmare for Williams. He went from being a newly-married aspiring musician to facing life in prison for arson and homicide. Sitting in the courtroom in 2013, Williams said he watched in horror and disbelief as the witnesses against him told what he called “basically fairy tales.”
The star witness was Jennings, the man who told police Williams had confessed to him. Initially, he didn’t show up for the trial; however, according to Flood, that prompted police to “go out and detain him. After they detain him, what do they do? They pay him $5,000 [as an arson-related tipster] prior to Duane being sentenced.”
Williams and his defense attorney never saw the evidence of the lighter found on the couch, nor McNulty’s original report that had no mention of potential arson or foul play (McNulty, who retired from the Detroit Fire Department in 2021, could not be reached for comment on this story. The Department, through the city’s corporation counsel, declined comment on pending litigation.) And according to Williams’ attorney Todd Flood, his testimony in court didn’t mention them either.
McNulty “got on the stand, and when asked whether or not he found a letter or anything that could start this fire by ignition, he said no: coldly, blatantly, with a stare [at] that jury,” Flood said. “He lied.”
Williams was found guilty, and in October 2013, he was sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole.
Suppressed evidence is found: "I knew it was so big, and nobody had ever mentioned it"
Williams continued to maintain his innocence. From the start, he told his story to anyone who would listen, and wrote letters to people on the outside he thought might help. He had no attorney at this time. Eventually, after a fellow inmate doing some jailhouse lawyering for him botched an appeal, Williams started studying the law so he could take on that role himself.
That turned out to be a welcome distraction from everyday prison life, which was violent, constantly perilous, and yet also incredibly mundane. Poring over books in the law library and filing Freedom of Information Act requests for materials related to his case, Williams said he got his first indication that he was on the right track in 2018, when he received a copy of his arrest warrant and saw that “there was a lot of lies in [it]. And so it gave me a little bit of hope because I started realizing okay, I'm not crazy here.”
But the really big break didn’t come until 2021, when — via another FOIA request he filed himself — ”I got the [original] fire report with the line mentioning the Zippo lighter,” Williams recalled. “At that moment I knew it was so big, and nobody had ever mentioned it.”
Things started to move fairly quickly at that point. The Cooley Law School Innocence Project got involved, along with other outside experts and investigators, and Williams finally got an attorney through the State Appellate Defender Office. Then, in 2022, the Wayne County Prosecutor’s Office Conviction Integrity Unit, which reviews old cases for evidence of possible wrongful convictions, took up Williams’ case.
This led up to the most meaningful date of all: June 18, 2024. That’s when Conviction Integrity Unit Director Valerie Newman “stated that her office’s investigation found that the errors and Brady violations in Plaintiff’s case were so significant as to undermine the integrity of the trial,” Williams’ lawsuit recounts. “In the same hearing, Judge [Bradley] Cobb agreed that the state had failed to disclose exculpatory evidence at trial, and granted the motion to vacate Plaintiff’s sentence. Judge Cobb ordered Plaintiff to be immediately released on bond.”
And just like that, after more than 11 years behind bars, Duane Williams was a free man again.
“People think that the court systems work. ... They don't work when you're the person in the system."Duane Williams
It wasn’t official until October, when the prosecutor’s office finally dismissed the charges against him once and for all, but it was a taste of what life was like outside prison walls again. And Williams said despite the elation at winning his freedom, and some other successes to boot — a house, a car — it’s been a bumpy, often painful adjustment. He’s still constantly aware of his surroundings, sometimes to the point of paranoia, a fear response he attributes to having to be constantly on guard in prison.
“Being present in those types of environments … it does something to you,” Williams said.
Williams said he also has a near-compulsion to stay busy. He works a lot with Firefly Advocates, a non-profit group that provides ongoing support to people impacted by the criminal justice system, including him. And he finds tremendous comfort in the support of many of his fellow exonerees, who form a kind of tight-knit brotherhood no one wants to belong to — but that Williams is grateful for nonetheless.
“They've been through what I've been through,” Williams said. “They're a little bit further, they've been out longer than me, and they can relate. And it is important to be able to have people around — good people who can relate to what I've been through, and they can.”
Near the end of our interview, I asked Williams a question I wasn’t sure had an answer: What would justice, or something resembling justice, look like to him at this point? After insisting that it absolutely does not look like money — though his civil lawsuit seeks over $100 million in damages, similar to the claims of many other exonerees, among other remedies — Williams pondered for a moment, then landed on something that might at least come close.
“Accountability,” he said. “I want other people in law enforcement to look and say, ‘hey, I'm not going to do that because that's what happens.’ I would prefer them to say, ‘I’m not going to do it because it's wrong’ … but accountability, something to stop it from happening in the future."
“People think that the court systems work. People think that the systems that are in place — the appeals process and all these other things — work well. [But] they don't work when you're the person in the system. And that's sad. And I pray that we'll find a way to fix that.”
