As they tried to nail four Black teenagers for the 1976 killing of a Buffalo man, prosecutors in Erie County, New York, withheld two crucial crime scene photographs that undermined their theory of the case.

One showed footprints in the snow leading to the home two doors down from the victim's, pointing to the potential involvement of a different suspect. The other photo contradicted the testimony of the prosecution's star witness, a fifth boy, who claimed that the victim's body had been dragged down his driveway after the murder.

The prosecutors knew the photos could help the defense — yet they disclosed them to only one defendant, who was acquitted. The other three, Darryl Boyd, John Walker Jr. and Darryn Gibson, were convicted and sent to prison. The news media had dubbed the kids the Buffalo Five.

Gibson died in 2009, months after his release. He had spent 32 years behind bars.

Walker and Boyd served out their sentences, and were both released on parole in the late 1990s. Then, in August 2021, a state judge tasked with assessing the withheld evidence vacated their convictions. A month later, Erie County District Attorney John Flynn moved to dismiss the indictments against them, saying he lacked the evidence to retry them.

Since then, Boyd and Walker, who have continued to profess their innocence, have fought in court to get compensation for the time they've been deprived of their freedom — 28 and 22 years, respectively. In July 2022, the two childhood friends filed separate civil rights lawsuits accusing the Erie County District Attorney's Office and the Buffalo Police Department of violating their constitutional rights and engaging in a yearslong pattern of misconduct that went well beyond their criminal cases.

Despite opting not to retry the men, the county has fiercely contested their civil rights claims and refused to settle, their attorneys told Law360. Boyd died on Feb. 26, less than two weeks before his and Walker's civil rights cases were set to go to trial.

But on April 8, at the end of a 15-day trial in federal court in Buffalo held before U.S. District Judge Meredith A. Vacca, a unanimous jury delivered a $28 million verdict in favor of Walker and against the county.

"This was an incredibly hard-fought battle," said Ross E. Firsenbaum of WilmerHale, who represented Walker pro bono.

In a motion filed on May 20, Erie County asked the judge to order a new trial, or alternatively, to lower the award. The county plans to appeal the verdict to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit if the motion fails.

"The verdict makes me feel like my fight for justice for 47 years was worthwhile, but the justice system still failed me, and it's failing me to this day," Walker told Law360 through his attorneys. "Erie County wouldn't admit their prosecutors did anything wrong in my case and is appealing. It's a disgrace."

In addition to the amount of damages awarded to Walker, the verdict was notable because it marked a rare civil rights trial in which a jury held a local government liable under the Monell doctrine — a legal theory that allows municipalities to be sued for damages for constitutional violations resulting from official policies or long-standing practices.

Legal experts say litigation involving Monell claims is difficult and trial wins are rare.

To prevail in court, Walker had to prove that entrenched practices within the district attorney's office directly caused the violation of his constitutional rights.

His legal team — led by Joel B. Rudin, a prominent Manhattan civil rights attorney and seasoned Monell litigator, along with Spencer L. Durland of Hoover & Durland LLP and Firsenbaum — accomplished that by uncovering court records that revealed decades of prosecutorial misconduct by the Erie County District Attorney's Office, including around the time the Buffalo Five case unfolded.

The office and attorneys representing it declined to comment.

Lawsuits Targeted Conduct by Buffalo Cops and Prosecutors

Boyd and Walker filed their initial complaints on July 6, 2022, alleging that prosecutors and police detectives violated their constitutional rights by engaging in a decades-long pattern of investigative and prosecutorial misconduct that led to their wrongful convictions for the 1976 murder of William Crawford, who was robbed and bludgeoned to death in the early hours of Jan. 3, 1976.

There was no physical evidence tying Walker or Boyd to the crime. The case was built entirely on the testimony of two teenagers, Andre Hough and Tyrone Woodruff, who had initially denied any knowledge of the crime.

Invoking both the federal civil rights statute — Section 1983 of Title 42 of the U.S. Code — and state law, the plaintiffs accused prosecutors of withholding the pivotal crime scene photos in violation of U.S. Supreme Court precedent set in 1963 in Brady v. Maryland , which says that prosecutors have an obligation to turn over all potentially exculpatory evidence in a case to defense attorneys. The complaints alleged violations of due process and fair trial rights, unreasonable seizure and malicious prosecution, and included state tort claims.

The twin suits also named and accused a group of Buffalo detectives, some of whom are now deceased, of coercing false statements — through intimidation and threats of life imprisonment — from Hough and Woodruff implicating Walker, Boyd, Gibson and their friend Floyd Martin.

But the most penetrating claims in the suits were the ones invoking the Monell doctrine.

Walker and Boyd alleged that the Buffalo Police Department, through its officers and detectives, maintained unconstitutional customs and policies that caused the violation of their constitutional rights.

Specifically, the suits accused the city of Buffalo of failing to properly train, supervise or discipline detectives in the lawful handling of suspects and witnesses, particularly regarding coercive interrogation and fabrication of evidence.

Buffalo police detectives routinely used coercion, threats and deceit to obtain false statements from witnesses and suspects, and deliberately failed to disclose key exculpatory information to prosecutors. This included evidence that could have cast doubt on the prosecution's theory or undermined its witnesses' credibility — a practice known as impeaching the witness. The misconduct was part of a pattern or practice that affected other prosecutions and persisted over many years, according to the complaints.

The Monell claims against Erie County alleged that prosecutors systematically failed to disclose exculpatory and impeachment material in violation of the Brady rule. The suits also accused the office of failing to implement training, supervision or disciplinary systems to ensure compliance with disclosure obligations. Prosecutors routinely accepted and used coerced and recanted witness statements, and presented testimony they knew to be false or unreliable, the complaints say.

Walker and Boyd had each sought ​​$84 million in compensatory damages, plus $28 million in punitive damages for the years they wasted in prison.

"I lost the best years of my life and don't want this to ever happen to anyone else," Walker said after the suits were filed.

The litigation switched onto higher gear in March 2023, when the legal team representing Boyd and Walker filed amended complaints that beefed up the Monell claims, provided more evidence of coercion and suppression, included new witness statements and named additional defendants.

The amended complaint included a statement that Lawrence "Larry" Watson, the man living two doors down from Crawford and the last person known to have seen the victim before his murder, gave to police detectives who were reinvestigating the case in 2019.

"They didn't do it," said Watson, referring to the Buffalo Five. The statement, which was never provided to either Walker or Boyd before they filed their civil rights suits, was ultimately determined to be inadmissible.

Altogether, prosecutors failed to turn over 21 pieces of exculpatory evidence to Walker's defense attorney. In addition to the crime scene photos and Watson's statement, they included police documents pointing to suspicions that Watson and a 37-year-old man named Jerome Boyd — no relation to Darryl Boyd — were the actual killers. Prosecutors also failed to hand over evidence that police coerced Hough to implicate his friends, and a statement in which he then recanted his testimony, among other things.

In July 2022, after the litigation began, Flynn called the plaintiffs' allegations "blatantly false."

"The prosecutors didn't do anything wrong at all," Flynn told Law360 then. A representative for the current district attorney, Michael J. Keane, declined to comment. The office plans to challenge the trial verdict on appeal.

Firsenbaum said he was stunned that, even today, the office continues to defend the actions that led to the teenagers' convictions.

During Walker's civil rights trial, Firsenbaum said, attorneys for Erie County articulated views about the Brady rule that reflect the continued misunderstanding of the Supreme Court precedent.

"They defended the case as though the conduct in the 1970s was perfectly fine," he said. "The fact that they're taking positions that are inconsistent with what the rule of Brady is today, I think, is very troubling."

A Rare Monell Trial Win

The claim at the heart of Walker's trial was based on Monell v. Department of Social Services , the landmark 1978 U.S. Supreme Court decision that allows municipalities to be sued for constitutional violations caused by official policies or widespread practices.

Monell claims are often filed but almost never succeed.

Steve Art, a partner at Loevy & Loevy and expert Monell litigator, told Law360 that the outcome in Walker's civil rights trial is significant because it forces the Eric County District Attorney's Office to take "a fresh look" at its policies and consider whether it needs to reform them.

"Verdicts like this provide an opportunity for reflection that is critically important and much too rare in our society," he said.

Art said holding municipalities accountable through the Monell doctrine involves steep challenges. Plaintiffs must show that a municipality knew that its practices had a potential for harming somebody, but was deliberately indifferent to that risk, and that such indifference resulted in a violation of civil rights in the specific plaintiff's case.

"You don't get a lot of these claims taken to trial, and you certainly don't get many of them taken all the way to verdict," Art said.

In an article titled "Municipal Immunity" published in 2023 in the Virginia Law Review, UCLA School of Law professor Joanna C. Schwartz said it was "far more difficult" for plaintiffs to prove Monell claims against municipalities than it was for plaintiffs to defeat qualified immunity, a legal doctrine commonly used to shield police officers from civil suits. Her paper was based on a study of 1,200 police misconduct lawsuits filed in five federal districts across the country.

"Very few Monell claims made it to trial; even fewer succeeded," Schwartz wrote. "If popular commentary has overstated the harms of qualified immunity doctrine, it has understated the challenges of Monell."

In a 2024 article in the Emory Law Journal that looked at complaints that resulted in a federal appellate decision in 2019, a trio of legal scholars found that nearly 57% of civil rights plaintiffs failed to satisfy the elements of Monell liability in their lawsuits.

The nature of Monell litigation makes it a high-risk, high-cost undertaking, one that few firms are equipped to handle, Art said. The strength of evidence is crucial to a successful Monell claim. Such a factor makes litigation expensive because attorneys often have to gather plenty of evidence and hire experts to opine about what that evidence means to a specific plaintiff. Legal standards are hard to meet.

"It is the highest bar in federal civil rights litigation," Art said.

He also noted that Monell claims do not entitle a plaintiff to additional damages, so many attorneys do not pursue them.

But from time to time, lawyers who are committed to social justice invoke the Monell doctrine to expose misconduct, with the hope that the scrutiny will bring about change.

"In general, people are pursuing these claims because they want to prove that there is some pattern that extends beyond the individual case before the court," Art said. "Exposure has some effect on the system as a whole."

Brady, Giglio and 'Inner-City Witnesses': What Moved the Jury

What ultimately persuaded the jury in Walker's civil rights trial was a combination of emotional testimony and hard documentary evidence, his attorneys told Law360.

The legal team called three expert witnesses — a forensic psychologist, a law professor and a specialist in interrogation tactics — to contextualize what happened in 1977. They also meticulously reconstructed the policies that governed the district attorney's office at the time.

One of them, Steven Zeidman, a professor of criminal procedure at the City University of New York School of Law, said on the stand that the 21 undisclosed Brady documents would have "without a doubt" helped Walker's attorney mount a much stronger defense.

Zeidman also testified that constant references to race in the summation given by Tim Drury, a prosecutor in the trial against Boyd, raised issues of racial bias and racial prejudice. The testimony aimed at convincing the jury that existing policies and practice of the district attorney's office at the time of Walker's trial jeopardized his constitutional rights to a fair trial.

In that summation, Drury called Woodruff a "blithering idiot,"  "stupid, hapless" and "a ghetto kid," and said he was "as bad as the rest of them" — referring to the other members of the Buffalo Five.

"His summation should be an exhibit of something that no prosecutor should ever do," Zeidman said during his testimony. "It's just indefensible. It speaks for itself. Who would say this at a trial?"

Rudin said the legal team demonstrated at trial that the district attorney's office had adopted and maintained three unlawful Brady policies in the 1970s.

The first was that at the time of the Buffalo Five prosecutions, assistant district attorneys did not disclose Brady material to defense lawyers unless they specifically asked for it, even though the U.S. Supreme Court had ruled in 1976 in a case after Brady, United States v. Agurs , that there was no requirement for a request.

Another was excluding evidence that could be used to impeach a witness among the types of material to be turned over to the defense, although the high court had specifically required so in 1972 with its ruling in Giglio v. United States .

A third unlawful practice emerged from testimony by an expert called by the county who said Erie County prosecutors believed that they were not obligated to turn over information they believed wasn't true, contrary to the principles in Brady.

"An inner-city witness lying to the police officer that somebody didn't do something that the police officer thinks they did is not exoneration material," the county's expert, Kevin Gagan, said on the stand.

Rudin said Gagan's "inner-city witness" characterization was "a code word for African American witnesses."

"That was absolutely remarkable testimony. And it was really shocking," Rudin said.

Rudin said the overwhelming majority of Brady material concerning the Buffalo Five prosecutions involved police reports and documents — the type of material that current discovery law in New York State requires police to disclose immediately.

He said ongoing efforts by the District Attorneys Association of the State of New York and some state legislators to water down the discovery requirements enacted in 2019, if successful, could open the door to the type of violations and misconduct highlighted in Walker's and Boyd's suits. The association declined to comment.

At trial, attorneys for the county tried to deflect blame onto the police officers who handled the investigation onto Walker and his friends. The jury ultimately rejected that argument.

"We're glad that the jury thought through a really unfortunate attempt for the prosecutors to try to shift blame for their misconduct," Firsenbaum said.

The attorneys said emotional testimony by Woodruff, the 1977 prosecution's key witness, whom they called to testify in favor of Walker, helped persuade the jury of the harm Walker suffered as a result of police and prosecutors' practices.

Woodruff broke down in tears on the stand as he described being coerced by cops to testify against his friends.

"They just broke me down," he said.

As Woodruff cried, Walker was also in tears as he sat at the counsel table with his attorneys.

"You just sort of saw how two lives were ruined," Firsenbaum said.

--Editing by Jay Jackson Jr. and Karin Roberts.

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