Appeals Court Denies Immunity To Officers Who Fabricated Evidence To Wrongfully Convict A Man For Murder

When cops decide they’ve found the right perp, very little can persuade them to look elsewhere. This tunnel vision has the tendency to take years of freedom away from innocent people. And it would be terrible enough if officers simply refused to consider exonerative evidence. But in this case (like far too many others), the investigators went beyond simply ignoring other evidence to falsifying the “evidence” they had to ensure the person they picked out for the job ended up in jail.

Hillel Aron of Courthouse News Service has the background on this decision [PDF] handed down by the Tenth Circuit Court of Appeals.

In 1999, Floyd Bledsoe, a 23-year-old farmhand, was living in Jefferson County, Kansas, with his wife Heidi, their two young sons and Heidi’s 14-year-old sister Camille Arfmann. Bledsoe’s 25-year-old brother, Tom, lived close by. Tom was “partially deaf” and had “certain intellectual limitations,” according to the lawsuit Floyd Bledsoe would later file, as well as a “history of troubling sexual behavior that included pursuing young girls.”

On Nov. 5, 1999, Camille went missing. Two days later, according to Bledsoe’s lawsuit, Tom told both his Sunday school teacher and his parents that he had killed her. Tom’s parents hired an attorney, Michael Hayes, who took Tom to the Jefferson County Sheriff’s Department that same day. Tom told investigators how he killed Camille and where her body could be found. Hayes turned over the murder weapon — a recently purchased 9 mm handgun. Tom was arrested and charged with homicide.

But Tom would soon change his story, recanting his confession and accusing his brother of the murder.

That led investigators to go after Floyd Bledsoe. And once they were focused on Floyd, they forgot all about Tom. Not only did they refuse to consider his recanting might be a lie, they falsified evidence to ensure the charges against Floyd stuck. Here’s how it started:

Shortly before Tom’s staged recantation,” Tom’s defense attorney “Hayes sought [Bledsoe] out and told him that Hayes was taking Tom off the ‘hot seat’ and putting [Bledsoe] on, or words to that effect.” On November 12, a Kansas Bureau of Investigation (“KBI”) officer, Defendant Johnson, administered lie detector tests to both Tom and Bledsoe. During his exam, Tom recanted his confession and incriminated Bledsoe. But Tom “failed the question” of whether he shot Camille, and was so overcome with guilt immediately after the lie detector test that he confessed again to killing Camille. Nonetheless, the KBI officer told Tom that he should continue lying to implicate Bledsoe.

Floyd Bledsoe, however, passed his lie detector test. KBI investigator Johnson stepped in again to interfere with the investigation.

Defendant Johnson falsified the results, however, inaccurately reporting that Tom had been truthful in denying his involvement in the murder, while Bledsoe had been deceptive in denying that he was involved. Based on those false polygraph results, the prosecutor dropped the charges against Tom…

Tom’s story was the “central piece” of the prosecution’s evidence during Floyd Bledsoe’s trial. According to Bledsoe, prosecutors withheld anything tying Tom to the crime, fabricated a statement from Floyd that undercut his alibi, did not disclose inculpatory statements made by Tom to Floyd’s lawyer, and refused to search Tom’s home or collect any other physical evidence that might have linked Tom to the murder.

After sixteen years in prison, DNA testing cleared Floyd and implicated Tom Bledsoe. Tom Bledsoe committed suicide shortly after this evidence was obtained, leaving behind a suicide note apologizing for framing his brother — a note that mentioned the county attorney (Jim Vanderbilt) “made him do it” and told him to “keep his mouth shut.”

Floyd Bledsoe sued the involved officers for violating his rights. The lower court refused to grant immunity to the officers, noting that the allegations raised by Bledsoe discussed police actions clearly established to be unlawful. The Tenth Circuit Appeals Court arrives at the same conclusion.

The officers raised several arguments for being allowed to walk away from this wrongful conviction. The court doesn’t like any of them, including this attempt to portray the railroading of an innocent man as nothing more than the good faith efforts of law enforcement officers just trying to do their job.

Appellants assert that Bledsoe’s claims are facially implausible because there is an equally possible innocent explanation for their charging Bledsoe—that they honestly, but mistakenly, believed he had killed Camille and that, at most, they were negligent in investigating the crime, which is not actionable under § 1983. […] Similarly, Appellants assert that they are entitled to qualified immunity because, at most, they were mistaken in believing Bledsoe was guilty of Camille’s rape and murder, and their investigation was at most negligent.

Wrong, says the Tenth Circuit. What Bledsoe alleges far exceeds the innocent actions of cops mistakenly going after the wrong perp.

Those arguments mischaracterize Bledsoe’s allegations. Bledsoe alleges that Defendants fabricated false evidence against him, knowingly suppressed exculpatory evidence that would have proven his innocence, and facilitated his arrest, pretrial detention and trial without probable cause to believe he was guilty. None of those alleged actions, by definition, can be done mistakenly or “innocently.”

It’s pretty tough to “innocently” ignore a suspect’s multiple confessions, failed lie detector test, and previous interactions with the murder victim. In fact, the court says, there’s enough in Bledsoe’s allegations to suggest the opposite of innocence: a conspiracy to violate his rights, one participated in by officers, investigators, and prosecutors.

Bledsoe can move forward with his lawsuit. All but one claim survives the multiple defendants’ appeal of the lower court ruling.

For the foregoing reasons, then, we conclude that Bledsoe adequately alleged that each Appellant participated in depriving him of his constitutional rights and that, except for the failure-to-intervene theory, the alleged constitutional violations were clearly established by 1999. Said another way, except for the failure-to-intervene claim, each Appellant was on notice in 1999 that their conduct, as Bledsoe has alleged it—suppressing exculpatory evidence that would have shown Bledsoe’s innocence, fabricating evidence to use against him, and using that evidence to arrest, detain and prosecute him for a crime he did not commit—was unconstitutional. The district court, thus, correctly denied each Appellant qualified immunity on Bledsoe’s substantive constitutional claims, and on his conspiracy and personal participation theories of liability.

This puts Bledsoe closer to obtaining some form of justice for the injustice he spent 16 years subjected to. And this overwhelming denial of qualified immunity to multiple law enforcement defendants on multiple counts will perhaps result in a settlement being offered before this goes much further in court — something that may force the involved entities to hand over evidence showing how much they screwed this innocent man. And that evidence may show this sort of behavior was routine. There’s no reason to believe it isn’t. Everyone sued here seemed pretty comfortable railroading an innocent man, which suggests violating rights was just considered part of the job.