The Detroit Police Department said it’s “fully committed to cooperating” with prosecutors to review cases handled by a former police detective who terrorized young Black men for nearly two decades.
The former detective, Barbara Simon, was featured in a two-part series in Metro Times that revealed she had confined young suspects and witnesses to small rooms at police headquarters for hours without a warrant. She elicited false confessions and witness statements that were later recanted.
So far, four men have been exonerated for murders they didn’t commit, and a fifth was released from jail after DNA showed he wasn’t the killer.
Attorneys for the Michigan Innocence Clinic, which handled the cases, say many more people are likely imprisoned for murders they didn’t commit because of Simon’s investigative misconduct.
“If true, the allegations against retired Detective Simon are concerning,” Detroit police spokesperson Dayna Clark told Metro Times in a statement. “The Department is fully committed to cooperating with the Wayne County Prosecutor’s Office’s Conviction Integrity Unit, which is empowered to examine the legitimacy of convictions.”
However, Wayne County Prosecutor Kym Worthy, who is running unopposed for reelection this year, wasn’t as enthusiastic.
“It would be irresponsible of me to respond at this time without gathering more information,” Worthy said in a statement.
In the series, Metro Times found multiple people still imprisoned who say Simon either coerced them into making false confessions or were convicted based on statements from witnesses who were threatened. Defense attorneys, activists, and private investigators say evidence is strong that more Black men are behind bars after getting interrogated by Simon.
Only a prosecutor or judge has the authority to reexamine cases involving potentially innocent people. In each of the exoneration cases involving Simon, Worthy’s office tried to prevent the men from getting free, despite overwhelming evidence that they were innocent.
Worthy launched the Conviction Integrity Unit (CIU) in 2018 to review old cases to determine if people were wrongfully convicted. Since then, 38 inmates were either exonerated or their cases were dismissed as a result of the CIU. A disproportionate number of those cases – 13 – occurred in 2020, the year Worthy was running against a reform-oriented opponent.
But this year, Worthy is running unopposed, and the CIU has only been involved in getting new trials for two men. Valerie Newman, head of the CIU, acknowledged the unit is understaffed, though she said there were plans to hire more attorneys.
None of the cases that the CIU intervened in involved Simon, who worked closely with Worthy’s office in the 1990s and early 2000s.
Simon, who was known as “the closer” because of her knack for gaining confessions and witness statements, was a detective in the 1990s and early 2000s, when the U.S. Department of Justice found that homicide detectives trampled on the constitutional rights of suspects and witnesses for decades to get confessions. According to the DOJ, the department had a history of subjecting suspects and witnesses to false arrests, illegal detentions, and abusive interrogations. Despite what was at stake, the detectives weren’t properly trained, and bad cops were rarely disciplined, the DOJ concluded.
In 2003, to avoid a massive civil rights lawsuit claiming suspects and witnesses endured false arrests, unlawful detentions, fabricated confessions, excessive force, and unconstitutional conditions of confinement, the Detroit Police Department agreed to DOJ oversight in 2003. Because of the harsh interrogation tactics, DPD agreed in 2006 to videotape interrogations of all suspects in crimes that carry a maximum penalty of life in prison.
After 13 years of federal government scrutiny, the DOJ finally ended its oversight, but only after DPD agreed to sweeping changes in a consent decree to overhaul its arrest, interrogation, and detention policies. Detectives could no longer round up witnesses and force them to answer questions at police precincts and headquarters.
At no point since those findings have prosecutors or police tried to reexamine the cases during that troubling period.
And, it’s unclear why Worthy is not pursuing those cases. Other cities, including New York and Chicago, have conducted wholesale investigations of corrupt detectives, leading to numerous exonerations.
In response to the Metro Times series, the Detroit Board of Police Commissioners called on the police department to conduct a thorough investigation of all of Simon’s cases. Detroit Police Deputy Chief Tiffany Stewart responded that it’s ultimately the CIU’s responsibility to review the cases.
Worthy told Metro Times on Monday, “With all due respect, DC Stewart is not in a position to task the CIU with work.”
Mark Craighead, who was exonerated in 2022 after spending more than seven years in prison for a murder he didn’t commit, says Worthy has a moral responsibility to review Simon’s cases.
“I think it’s important for both the police department and prosecutors to work together to get this done,” Craighead tells Metro Times. “Those entities have the capability to right the wrongs, and the police can’t do it alone. They have to get the prosecutors involved.”
In June 2000, without a warrant, Simon confined Craighead to a small room at police headquarters for hours, denying him access to an attorney, phone call, food, or water, he said in a lawsuit against the city. When he refused to speak, he was forced to spend the night in a vermin-infested jail cell.
The next morning, Simon claimed she had evidence tying Craighead to the murder, which turned out to be untrue, and she coerced him into falsely confessing to accidentally shooting his friend during a fight, according to his lawsuit. The false confession was contradicted by forensic evidence, which showed his friend was shot four times in the back execution-style from a distance of at least two feet.
Phone records later showed Craighead was nowhere near his friend when he was murdered.
Craighead says he’s disappointed with Worthy.
“She’s unwilling to budge, and that’s a problem,” he says. “For the young guys in prison, they need this. The evidence is indisputable that they are innocent. Why can’t the prosecutor see this? She’s unwilling to.”
Craighead and the Metro Times series were featured in a nearly 90-minute episode this week on ML Soul of Detroit, a podcast by Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter M.L. Elrick.
Detroit police say they have cleaned up the homicide division when they signed an agreement with the Department of Justice in the early 2000s.
“Many of the issues underlying the practices of concern were addressed by the city in the course of its two consent judgements,” Clark says.
