Stefon Morant is taking the city and six former New Haven police detectives to trial this week for the wrongful conviction for a 1990 double murder that led him to spend 21 years in prison. In addition to pressing particular detectives on their individual actions, Morant and his attorneys intend to make the case that the New Haven Police Department (NHPD) enabled an institutional culture of witness coercion and evidence fabrication at the time of Morant’s 1994 conviction. The federal case in question is called Stefon Morant v. City of New Haven. Originally filed in 2022, Morant’s lawsuit also names as defendants the late former Police Chief Nicholas Pastore and former Officers Vincent Raucci, Robert Lawlor, Vaughn Maher, Joseph Pettola, and Michael Sweeney. Morant is seeking both punitive and compensatory damages from the defendants. Opening arguments in the civil trial are set to take place on Wednesday in Hartford before federal Judge Sarala V. Nagala. Jury selection is scheduled for Tuesday. The full trial is expected to take several weeks to complete. Both Morant and fellow defendant Scott Lewis were convicted of a double murder in 1994 and 1995, respectively. Morant, then 21, was sentenced to 70 years in prison. Lewis, then 25, was sentenced to 120 years. Both alleged drug dealers, Morant and Lewis were accused of murdering 43-year-old former alder Ricardo Turner as well as his 23-year-old partner Lamont Fields in their Howard Avenue apartment on Oct. 11, 1990. Lewis and Morant have alleged that Raucci, a New Haven detective at the time, took the lead in framing them for the murder. They say that Raucci was himself a drug dealer motivated to frame the two of them due to an unresolved debt. Raucci, they maintain, pressured and threatened the two 16-year-old boys who formed the basis of the state’s case against them, along with other witnesses coerced into corroborating the two boys’ stories. In the years since their convictions, now-retired police lieutenant Michael Sweeney came forward to testify in Lewis’ habeas corpus lawsuit that he’d witnessed Raucci pressure one of those witnesses and told him what to say, a boy referred to in many court documents as Ovil Ruiz (although that’s not his real name). Sweeney said that Raucci ignored when Ruiz repeatedly stated he knew nothing about the murder, and that he told Ruiz what to say. In 2013, a federal judge found Sweeney’s testimony “credible” and overturned Lewis’ conviction. The allegations against Raucci have also been corroborated by the findings of an FBI investigation. Raucci, meanwhile, has repeatedly denied the claims. The two 16-year-old witnesses, meanwhile, would each eventually come forward. One, Jose Roque, recanted his statements to the police during Morant’s criminal trial. By then, Roque was 20 years old. “They told me what to say on the tape,” he said of the police. He later stated that when Raucci asked him about the murder, he “told me he was going to put me on a million dollars bond and charge me with it.” So Roque testified that when he was 16, Raucci would pause the tape recording of the police interview periodically to coach Roque’s words. The FBI investigation found that the tape of that interview had been stopped and re-started at least 11 times, and that four sections of the tape were altered with over-recordings, according to Morant’s legal filings. Ruiz, meanwhile, struggled with mental health, substance use, and crime over the many years that followed Lewis and Morant’s convictions. He recanted his original testimony and police statements in a 2023 deposition for Morant’s ongoing lawsuit. At the time, when he was 16, Ruiz said in the deposition, he and the former detective “got high together, did drugs together. And I gave him information about people who was selling drugs and stuff like that, you know.” He said he fabricated his testimony against Morant and Lewis because “I was scared of Detective Raucci. He was coercing me, you know, to say the things that I said… ‘Cause I looked up to Detective Raucci. You know, I was scared of him, but at the same time, you know, he was a police officer. You got to trust a police officer, you know. And that’s exactly what I did. I trusted him, knowing that I did whatever he wanted me to do, and I did it.” He said he considered Raucci a “friend.” In the deposition, one of Morant’s attorneys, Nick Brustin, asked Ruiz about his mental state at the time. Ruiz said that he had been hearing voices and using psychoactive drugs including cocaine. He couldn’t quite remember when his mental health began to worsen, but at one point, he attributed his decline to the moment “when I realized that I’m going to put two guys in jail for something they didn’t do.” Read more about Morant and Lewis’ cases… A 1998 New Haven Advocate expose The FBI’s report on Vincent Raucci The Independent’s coverage of Lewis’ habeas victory, his exit from prison, his lawsuit against the city, Morant’s sentence reduction, and their adjustments to freedom. The National Exoneration Registry’s synthesis of Lewis and Morant‘s stories An update on Raucci’s life since he left the police force (he was not convicted for the charges described in this story) After a 2013 habeas victory — which an appeals court affirmed in 2015 — Lewis walked free in 2014. Morant, meanwhile, was freed not through a habeas petition but through a sentence reduction that enabled him to leave prison in 2015. He subsequently received a pardon in 2021. Morant has been awarded over $5.84 million through the state’s wrongful conviction claims process. And when Lewis sued the city over the conviction, the city agreed to a settlement of $9.5 million. The city isn’t settling Morant’s lawsuit, however — at least not yet. Neither are the former detectives who are defendants in the lawsuit. In legal filings, the city has argued that Morant “cannot demonstrate municipal liability” for wrongdoing in Morant’s case, including for the actions of individual officers. As an affirmative defense, city attorney Thomas Gerarde argued that the individual detectives’ actions either “were not within the scope of employment or official duties,” were a form of “wilful misconduct,” or “were negligent acts” — and that as a result, “the City of New Haven has no liability” for those actions. Several of the police defendants, meanwhile, are arguing the exact opposite: that they are entitled to qualified immunity, protecting them from lawsuits due to their actions within the scope of their authority as agents of the New Haven Police Department. Morant’s legal team, meanwhile, plans to make the case that both individual detectives and the city itself are responsible for the wrongful conviction. They are connecting Morant and Lewis’ conviction to an array of other New Haven convictions from the same era mired in allegations of police misconduct, including those of Erik Ham, George Gould and Ronald Taylor, Daryle Breland, Troy Streater, Adam Carmon, and Daryl Valentine. In a statement on Monday, city Corporation Counsel Allison Jacobs wrote, “Every individual deserves equal and impartial justice under the law. While the City cannot comment on the specifics of this case due to pending litigation, the City is committed to cooperating with all parties and appropriately engaging in the civil litigation process to ensure there are reasonable resolutions on these matters as we do in all cases in which the City is involved.” Mayor Justin Elicker echoed this sentiment in a separate statement, and wrote, “While I was not the Mayor at the time that these events transpired in the 1990s, I am committed to supporting our officers and giving them the tools, training and resources they need to succeed in 2026.” Brustin, Morant’s lawyer, simply stated: “Stefon Morant is looking forward to finally holding accountable those who caused his wrongful conviction.” The post Wrongful-Conviction Lawsuit Heads To Trial appeared first on New Haven Independent. ...read more read less