BALTIMORE (AP) - A federal judge who ruled that a Baltimore man convicted of killing a 16-year-old girl forged the document that helped get him out of prison tossed out the man’s wrongful arrest lawsuit and ordered him to pay attorneys fees that could amount to thousands of dollars.
U.S. District Court Judge Deborah Chasanow ordered Tony DeWitt to pay as much as six figures in attorneys fees to the city of Baltimore, The Baltimore Sun reported Tuesday.
DeWitt was freed from prison in 2015 and sought to be compensated. Instead, the judge ordered that he should pay the city’s legal fees after attorneys uncovered evidence of a forged document and jail calls in which DeWitt was recorded trying to organize payments to witnesses.
DeWitt always maintained his innocence in the 2002 killing of a 16-year-old girl and wounding of another man. A court listened in 2015 after he produced a police memo showing a witness identified someone else as the shooter and told detectives at the time. DeWitt’s conviction was thrown out by a judge, city prosecutors dropped his case, and he walked free after 13 years.
DeWitt remains free. He could not be reached by the newspaper for comment.
The city’s lawyers retrieved the original form used to document the witness interview from police and prosecutors. The back of that form was blank, according to the city’s filing.
The back of DeWitt’s copy of the form is filled in and contains typographical errors - the detective purportedly misspelled “homicide” as “homocide.” The detective’s signature is also not even close to a match, the city attorneys argued. The forensic document examiners also determined that a supervisor’s signature was forged, they wrote in their report.
The city’s attorneys also listened to DeWitt’s recorded phone calls from jail and found conversations in which DeWitt could be heard arranging to bribe the surviving shooting victim and the victim’s brother, according to the city’s filing. In another call, they say, he discussed bribing the purported witness and coaching him for his testimony, the filing alleges.
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