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| Freed Man Sues Florida Sheriff's Office |
| By South Florida Sun-Sentinel |
| Published: 09/30/2002 |
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A mentally disabled man who spent 22 years in prison for rapes and murders he did not commit is suing the Broward Sheriff's Office and the former deputies whose interrogation led to his conviction. DNA evidence freed Jerry Frank Townsend from prison in June 2001, after he had already served 22 years of a life sentence for the murders of six women in Broward and Miami-Dade counties. In a lawsuit filed Wednesday in Broward Circuit Court, Townsend's lawyer charged that the Sheriff's Office investigators should have known from evidence available to them at the time that the real killer was Eddie Lee Mosley, who is now in a state mental institution in Chattahoochee. Mosley was implicated by the DNA evidence that led to Townsend's release. The Sheriff's Office and its deputies 'fabricated evidence, concealed exculpatory evidence, tampered with witnesses, and coerced a false confession by intimidation and deception from [Townsend], who they knew was a mentally challenged person,' according to the civil suit, which seeks unspecified compensatory and punitive damages. The lawsuit specifically names Sheriff Ken Jenne, although he was not sheriff at the time of the investigation or Townsend's conviction. It also names then-Deputies Anthony Fantigrassi and Mark Schlein, who obtained Townsend's now-discredited taped confession. The lawsuit also invokes the name of Frank Lee Smith, who died on Death Row in January 2000 after being convicted of murders later attributed to Mosley. Smith's name was cleared 11 months after he died of cancer, making him 'another victim of these criminal actions' of the Sheriff's Office, the lawsuit states. In its harshest language, the lawsuit holds the defendants responsible for the deaths of women killed by Mosley after Townsend was arrested in 1979. Those murders, said Townsend's lawyer Barbara Heyer, should have been enough to convince investigators they had the wrong man. 'Instead of arresting Mosley, defendants allowed him to go on killing while they continued with the conspiracy to maliciously prosecute [Townsend] for Mosley's crimes, and withheld this new known information from the prosecutors, plaintiff's counsel and the public,' Heyer wrote in the lawsuit. 'These five young women, victims of Mosley, are also the innocent victims of defendant's criminal actions.' Fantigrassi, now a Sheriff's Office major, and Schlein, now an assistant attorney general in Tallahassee, could not be reached for comment. The Broward Sheriff's Office declined comment. |
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