The
government of Washington, D.C., has agreed to pay $16.65 million to a man after
a federal jury found that two police detectives had framed him for the 1981
rape and murder of a college student, a crime for which he was wrongly
imprisoned for 27 years.
The
amount was the largest in a civil rights verdict in the history of the District
of Columbia, said a lawyer for the man, Donald E. Gates, and raised the
possibility that the retired detectives, Ronald S. Taylor and Norman Brooks,
might have committed similar misconduct in hundreds of homicide cases going
back three decades.
