The award to the estate of Darryl Boyd, one of five Black defendants accused of robbing and murdering William Crawford, a 62-year-old white man, surpasses the $60 million awards given to John Fulton and Anthony Mitchell in their wrongful conviction case against the city of Chicago in March.
Boyd died from pancreatic cancer in February after a nearly 50-year battle to clear his name, less than two weeks before his civil rights case and that of a co-defendant who was also wrongfully convicted, John Walker Jr., were set to go to trial. On April 8, a jury in Buffalo awarded $28 million to Walker.
Pro bono lawyers from WilmerHale led by Ross Firsenbaum, along with co-counsel The Law Offices of Joel B. Rudin PC and Spencer L. Durland of Hoover & Durland LLP, represented Boyd and Walker throughout their cases against the Erie County District Attorney's Office, which prosecuted them when they were still teenagers.
Another one of the Buffalo Five, Darryn Gibson, was also convicted and spent 32 years behind bars before dying in 2009, months after his release. A fourth man, Floyd Martin, was acquitted. Tyrone Woodruff, the fifth one, was coerced by police to falsely confess and implicate his friends in exchange for immunity, his attorneys said.
Wednesday's verdict came after just 50 minutes of deliberation at the end of a 2.5-week trial in which Walker and Woodruff testified, telling jurors they were manipulated by police and prosecutors, and turned against each other out of fear — life stories that the justice system had suppressed for years, their attorneys said.
Firsenbaum told Law360 that representing Walker and Boyd, who had their murder convictions overturned in 2021, has been the "honor of a lifetime."
"I told both of them when I first met them that I appreciated that in 1976 they felt like the government had all the power and that they never had a fair fight, and I promised them that in these civil cases we would do everything we could to uncover the real facts and help them clear their names," he said. "Yesterday's verdict completed that process."
Beyond the historic amount of damages awarded, the Buffalo Five case is emblematic of prosecutorial and law-enforcement misconduct — coerced testimony, suppression of exculpatory evidence, failure to disclose Brady material, and systemic issues in the DA's office — all of which came to the surface during the litigation, the attorneys said.
It also displays the power of civil rights litigation under the Monell doctrine, a legal theory that permits plaintiffs to hold municipalities responsible for constitutional violations stemming from their official policies or entrenched practices. Monell litigation is notoriously complex and time-consuming, and bringing "practice or pattern" claims involves deep investigations and a high legal standard. Legal experts say very few Monell claims go to trial.
Joel B. Rudin, the principal at his namesake Manhattan-based boutique firm who has pioneered Monell litigation in New York, said in Boyd's case, in addition to proving that the Erie County DA's office engaged in misconduct, the legal team had to show that the type of actions prosecutors took in prosecuting Boyd and Walker were part of a wide pattern of unlawful policies and practices.
Rudin and his colleagues poured through decades-old court records and interviewed former prosecutors and defense attorneys from the 1970s to identify policies and practices in use at the time the Buffalo Five case played out, finding dozens of reported cases where the state and federal courts chastised misconduct by Erie County assistant DAs.
After Crawford was bludgeoned to death in the early hours of Jan. 3, 1976, as he walked home from a bar directly across the street, police questioned the five kids. Detectives then coerced confessions from Woodruff and a 15-year-old boy, Andre Hough, by falsely telling them their friends had accused them of the murder.
Then, the Erie County DA's office, led by a prosecutor named Timothy Drury, suppressed at least 19 pieces of evidence that would have exposed the police misconduct, showed their innocence, and pointed to two other more likely suspects, the attorneys said.
The evidence included two crime scene photographs that undermined prosecutors' theory: One of them showed a single set of footprints made by a heavyset man in the snow in Crawford's backyard, leading toward the home of his neighbor two doors down, Larry Watson. The other one showed no signs in the snow that Crawford had been dragged along his driveway, as Woodruff testified at trial against his friends.
Under the U.S. Supreme Court's ruling in Brady v. Maryland
and subsequent cases, prosecutors were obligated to turn over the evidence to the defense attorneys representing the accused teenagers, but didn't, except in the last case to be tried, the one involving Martin, who was eventually acquitted."Erie County prosecutors knew all five boys told the same story and corroborated its truthfulness, but then they threatened one of them with prosecution unless he implicated the group, in which case he would receive complete immunity," Rudin said. "Based essentially on that, and covering up all the evidence of innocence that was in the police file, the prosecutors destroyed the lives of our client and his codefendants. The scary thing this trial showed is that such behavior was routine at the Erie County DA's office at the time."
Erie County did not return a request for comment Thursday.
Firsenbaum said Rudin's expertise with Monell litigation was crucial in winning both Walker's and Boyd's cases.
Three days before the jury awarded damages to Boyd's estate, the legal team submitted a brief asking the court to instruct the jury about the Monell claims in the case. Nearly all the cases the brief cited were litigated by Rudin.
"It really is just an honor to be working with the lawyer who literally is responsible for the case law in this area, who's developed a whole area of civil rights law," Firsenbaum said.
The civil cases brought by Boyd and Walker were a massive team effort, according to the lawyers involved.
WilmerHale has devoted about 15,500 pro bono hours and involved several associates and "countless staff." Rudin's son and associate in his firm, David Rudin, spent hundreds of hours with the two clients reliving their stories to flesh out the damages part of the case, but also helping them emotionally get through the litigation.
"This is the sort of case that I went to law school to work on," said Gideon Hanft, counsel at WilmerHale.
Wednesday's verdict was hailed by other attorneys who specialize in Monell litigation.
Nick Brustin, a partner at Neufeld Scheck Brustin Hoffmann & Freudenberger LLP, called the verdict "extraordinary"
"It's a testament to a group of lawyers who worked extraordinarily hard, took no shortcuts, and achieved an extraordinary result, particularly given that they were able to prove a 'pattern or practice' claim against the DA's office, which is hard to get to trial on, let alone to prevail on," Brustin said. "That sends an important message about the ramifications of this kind of systemic misconduct."
The Estate Of Darryl Boyd is represented by Joel B. Rudin and David Rudin of Law Offices of Joel B. Rudin PC, Ross E. Firsenbaum, Gideon A. Hanft, Erin Hughes, Phoebe Silos, Trena Riley, and Associate Melissa Zubizaretta of WilmerHale, and Spencer Leeds Durland of Hoover & Durland LLP.
The County of Erie is represented by James Peter Blenk, Harrison Louis Hartsough, Anthony Joseph Masse and Alexander Warfield Eaton of Lippes Mathias LLP.
The case is Kathleen Weppner, As Executor Of The Estate Of Darryl Boyd V. County Of Erie, case number 1:22-cv-519, in the U.S. District Court for the Western District of New York.
--Editing by Kelly Duncan.