DETROIT– A jury awarded $10 million to a Detroit-area man who spent nearly six years in prison for the murder of a 15-year-old girl before his conviction was thrown out at the request of prosecutors.
The jury found that Alexandre Ansari’s constitutional rights were violated by a Detroit police detective who concealed evidence in the fatal shooting.
The sentence, handed down Thursday in federal court, “restores some of Mr. Ansari’s dignity and will allow him to recover from the terrible experience of being wrongfully convicted of a heinous crime he did not commit.” ,” said attorney Wolf Mueller.
Mueller argued that police had crucial information about another suspect, but it was not shared with the prosecution or defense during the 2013 trial in Wayne County Court.
The information allegedly showed that the fatal shooting of Ileana Cuevas and the wounding of two more people in 2012 were likely arranged by a heroin dealer angry about drug thefts, he said.
Failure to disclose the information would be “egregious,” U.S. District Judge Stephen Murphy III said earlier in the lawsuit.
The detective denied the crime. But prosecutors found he feared for his family in Texas and Mexico if the drug dealer knew he was investigating him for murder, according to evidence in the case.
In 2019, prosecutor Kym Worthy agreed to a “full exoneration” of Ansari, freeing him from a life sentence, Mueller said.