a judge was deeply offended, and lashed out at the police and district attorney... here's a remarkable true story of cruelty, malfeasance, ineptitude, gross negligence, etc - about an innocent guy in jail for 12 years, for a crime the DA's office and Nashville PD concluded there was “no credible evidence” he had committed.

Paul Shane Garrett was incarcerated for 10 years for a crime former District Attorney Torry Johnson’s office and the Metro Nashville Police Department concluded there was “no credible evidence” he had committed. And now their actions have drawn a stinging rebuke from the bench and a $1.2 million court settlement.

Criminal Court Judge Mark Fishburn blasted both the police and Johnson for their role in the 2004 conviction of Garrett, accusing them of knowingly leaving an innocent man in jail for a decade.

“Their intentional decisions were the act of cowards to hide the truth for fear of public humiliation and legal retribution that might arise if their wrongdoing saw the light of day,” Fishburn wrote in an extraordinary six-page opinion in December

Fishburn said the case highlighted “intentional wrongdoing on so many occasions and at all levels of local law enforcement.”`

In 2021, the Conviction Review Unit of DA Glenn Funk’s office vacated Garrett’s conviction after an investigation found numerous problems with the case:

Police detectives Roy Dunaway and E.J. Bernard engaged in questionable interrogation practices to concoct a “confession” that Dunaway later testified to in court. Dunaway was later demoted for false testimony in another case and Bernard later resigned for falsifying information in a different homicide investigation.

DNA tests conducted in 2001 repeatedly excluded Garrett as a suspect.

As early as 2004, police were informed of a positive match in the national CODIS database to Atchison’s DNA in semen both in and on Tharpe’s body. Neither Garrett nor his counsel were notified of the match. As early as 2001, the DA’s office concluded that Garrett had not confessed and assistant district attorneys did not believe “we could make the case.” But based on the testimony of jailhouse informants, Garrett was indicted for murder at the direction of then-Deputy DA Tom Thurman.

In 2011, two of MNPD’s top detectives, Mike Roland and Pat Postiglione, were investigating a set of cold cases involving sex workers who were murdered in the same period as Tharpe. In the process, they reviewed the case of Garrett, a tow truck driver who had pleaded guilty after sitting in jail during a two-year investigation. According to Roland, the Garrett file was a mess because of poor documentation, shaky informants, deceptive interviews and a pair of problematic officers at the center of the investigation.

Confronted with this problem, Johnson convened what Judge Fishburn describes as a “clandestine” meeting in 2011. Roland and Postiglione presented their findings of Garrett’s innocence to Johnson, MNPD Chief Steve Anderson, Deputy DA Tom Thurman and ADA Kathy Morante. The potential fallout from the case was serious enough that the public relations leaders for the police and district attorney’s office, Don Aaron and Susan Niland, also were there.

ADA Morante investigated. Within weeks, she filed a 10-page report that reached three conclusions: First, there was “no credible evidence that Garrett murdered Tharpe.” Second, to the contrary, there was “some indication of Garrett’s innocence.” And finally, there was “evidence that Atchison murdered Tharpe.”

“There is no question that the delay was an intentional decision that was overtly made as early as January 2001, when Mr. Garrett was excluded as a contributor of the DNA found on Ms. Tharpe, yet prosecution and even persecution of him continued until he was psychologically beaten into submission by Detectives Dunaway and Bernard,” Fishburn wrote. “An intentional decision to further delay the initiation of adversarial proceedings was again emphatically made when Det. Dunaway destroyed the CODIS report received from the TBI in December 2004. But the most damning and unconscionable intentional decision to further delay indictment of Mr. Atchison occurred when the highest levels of law enforcement within Davidson County refused to take any legal action to undo an egregious affront to the entire legal system.”

In a 2021 letter to Funk at the time Garrett’s conviction was vacated, Johnson said he would change his mind if there were someone else held responsible.

“Given the history of this case, it is fair to say that I do not have confidence in Mr. Garrett’s conviction and that there are genuine concerns about his guilt, but I remain unaware of compelling evidence that he should be exonerated,” he wrote. “Of course, that could change if your office were to charge and convict another suspect for the death of Ms. Tharpe.”

Vanessa Potkin, the director of special litigation at The Innocence Project, said this kind of view of innocence by prosecutors is “a cop out” bourne of politics.

“This is an attitude that we frequently experience and it is completely misguided, this notion that there can be an exoneration if you're literally swapping out one person, the wrongfully convicted person for another,” she said. “It's not a perspective that's rooted in the law. There's no legal burden that says that in order to demonstrate innocence, you have to identify who actually committed the crime.”

Mothershead agreed.

“That is horrifying, to say that you must trade in another body in order to release this innocent man – you know, the old scapegoat: Someone has to pay the price. That's horrible,” he said.

https://www.newschannel5.com/news/judge-slams-metro-police-and-da-metro-settles-wrongful-conviction-case-for-a-record-1-2-million