A Detroit man is now free after spending exactly 27 years in prison for a murder he didn’t commit.
Roy Blackmon was released from a state correctional facility in Ionia on Tuesday, after a judge agreed to vacate his convictions from a 1998 murder. His lawyers with the University of Michigan Law School’s Innocence Clinic say his convictions rested solely on the testimony of witnesses who were coerced into implicating him by Detroit police officers at the time.
“This case had a total absence of physical evidence, so it all came down to the witnesses,” said Blackmon’s lead attorney Olivia Vigiletti. “But all of them faced significant police coercion to lie about Roy Blackmon being the shooter.”
All of the adult witnesses to the shooting on Detroit’s Woodmont Street described the shooter as being no taller than 5 feet, 6 inches, with a slim build, Vigiletti said. Blackmon is 6-foot-1, “so it was always pretty clear that he didn't match any of the initial descriptions,” she said.
But Detroit police officers intimidated and coerced witnesses into changing their story to implicate Blackmon, Vigiletti said. An officer told one witness he would have her children removed from her if she didn’t change her story; another witness, who had been held in jail herself for at least 12 hours, was told she would be charged with the murder herself if she didn’t do the same thing.
The case against Blackmon came at a time when there were not only known to be a number of rogue officers with the Detroit Police Department — many of whom come up repeatedly now in wrongful convictions lawsuits filed against the city for cases from that era — but in which the department was known to regularly use intimidating and unconstitutional policing tactics against citizens. The U.S. Department of Justice filed two consent decrees against the department in 2003; federal oversight officially ended in 2016.
Another troubling fact in Blackmon’s case, Vigiletti said, involved not only police, but prosecutors. After the shooting, a man called one of the witnesses and told her not to mention his name to police. The witness testified at trial that the man who called her was Blackmon.
But Vigiletti said prosecutors had a police report showing that another man had confessed to making the call. “That police report never came out at trial,” she said. “It was never discussed. The prosecution put forth that Roy Blackmon made the call despite having that information.”
But on Tuesday, it was the Wayne County Prosecutor’s Office Conviction Integrity Unit that agreed to dismiss all charges against Blackmon, leading to a judge vacating his convictions. Later that day, Blackmon, now 49, stepped out of prison and into the waiting arms of his family, former attorneys who have worked on his case throughout the years, and members of the Organization of Exonerees.
“It was beautiful,” Vigiletti said. “We’ve been talking to him about what he might want to eat [after his release], and he really wanted seafood. So we took him to J. Alexander's, and then he ordered chicken.”
Vigiletti said Blackmon started taking college courses in prison, and now has just a year left to complete his degree.
“He really wants to be a social worker. He wants to work with youth,” Vigiletti said. “He took his wrongful conviction and made the absolute most of his time in prison.”
