MI Man Sues Officials Who Allegedly Set Him Up for Murder Conviction

  Jamie Lee Peterson, wrongly served 17 years in prison for a crime he didn’t commit.


Grand Rapids, MI – Sept. 28, 2015 – This morning attorneys for a 40-year-old Kalkaska, MI man filed suit in federal court here against the County of Kalkaska, Village of Kalkaska, and several law enforcement officers and the prosecutor involved in the deeply-flawed investigation that led to his conviction.
Exonerated by DNA in 2014, Kalkaska native Jamie Lee Peterson spent seventeen years in prison for a crime he didn’t commit.

On October 5, 1996, Mrs. Geraldine Montgomery, a 68-year-old Sunday school teacher, was brutally raped and murdered in her Kalkaska home. Investigators questioned and cleared the actual rapist / murderer. Several months later, facing tremendous pressure to solve the crime, investigators targeted then 22-year-old Jamie Peterson, a mentally ill man with intellectual disabilities who was in jail on an unrelated charge. Peterson knew nothing about the crime, but investigators fed him information and used lies, deception, threats, and false promises—that Peterson lacked the mental capacity to resist—to induce him to wrongly confess. Peterson’s initial answers to investigators’ questions were wildly inaccurate and even nonsensical, but at Peterson’s criminal trial, investigators illegally suppressed this and lied about their interrogations of the mentally disabled young man.
While the investigation was still ongoing, tests of DNA found at the crime scene showed conclusively that someone else—not Peterson—had assaulted Mrs. Montgomery. Instead of clearing Peterson and trying to find the actual perpetrator, officials invented a theory in which Peterson acted with an unknown accomplice. Aside from his wrongfully-obtained false confessions, no evidence tied Peterson to the crime.
The prosecution’s entire forensic case rested on a second sample of DNA that, due to the state of the science at the time, was too small to be tested, yet prosecutors alleged that it was Peterson’s anyway even though there was no actual proof that it was his.
READ MORE AT LOEVY & LOEVY LAW FIRM'S WEBSITE AT THE FOLLOWING LINK:http://www.loevy.com/blog/mi-man-sues-officials-who-allegedly-set-him-up-for-murder-conviction/