A Chicago Black man who was pardoned by the governor of Indiana in 2017, after spending seven years in prison for a robbery he didn’t commit, has reached a $7.5 million settlement with the city of Elkhart, Indiana and some of its former police officers, according to the Associated Press.
It is the largest wrongful conviction settlement in the history of Indiana. Keith Cooper, the man who was pardoned, is getting the bag from the officers who did him wrong.
Elliot Slosar, the attorney of Cooper, said the lawsuit “exposed the systemic pattern of police and prosecutorial misconduct that exists in Elkhart, Indiana,” according to the Associated Press.
Elkhart officials hope that the settlement ends the injustices that have been targeted toward Cooper. But what about the injustices targeted towards others in the future?
More from the Associated Press:
Cooper was pardoned in February 2017 by Gov. Eric Holcomb, who said he believed Cooper had been wrongly convicted in a 1996 armed robbery in Elkhart during which a teenager was shot and wounded. Holcomb cited the state parole board’s support for the pardon, along with the backing of the prosecutor and witnesses in the case.
Cooper was sentenced to 40 years in prison for the robbery, but advances in DNA testing and a nationwide offender database excluded him as the attacker and identified another person.
The Indiana Court of Appeals overturned his co-defendant’s conviction in 2005, and Cooper was given the choice of being released with a felony record or facing a new trial before the same judge who convicted him. He elected to be released in 2006.
Cooper’s pardon by Holcomb was followed in March 2017 by a judge’s approval of the expungement of his armed robbery conviction.
Since 2009, Cooper had been seeking a pardon. In 2015, the deputy prosecutor in Cooper’s case asked then-Gov. Mike Pence to remove the felony conviction and approve the pardon, according to the Associated Press.
But, in 2016 Slosar, Cooper’s attorney, was notified by Pence’s general counsel just two months after he became Donald Trump’s Vice Presidential running mate, that he thinks Cooper needed to try every option available in court to get the conviction overturned before asking for a pardon.
More from the Associated Press:
Cooper sued Elkhart, its then-police chief and three officers in November 2017, alleging that the officers framed him for the crime and “nearly destroyed his life.” Two of those officers are no longer Elkhart officers and the third is dead, Slosar said.
At the time of his arrest, Cooper had no criminal convictions, was a married father of three and was employed and providing for his family, according to his suit. But after he was wrongfully incarcerated, his wife was forced to sell their belongings and had “to live in shelters to survive,” it states.
In Cooper’s lawsuit, he accuses the Elkhart Police Department of pursuing wrongful convictions on a regular basis. Through investigations, it was found that Cooper’s case included false and coerced evidence and reports, according to the Associated Press.