A man freed 16 years into a life sentence was targeted and framed by North Miami Beach police — leading to his wrongful conviction, according to a new lawsuit filed in Miami federal court.
Emmanuel Jean, 37, is suing the City of North Miami Beach — along with former detectives Edward Hill and Richard Rand, who later rose the department’s ranks to police chief. In the Thursday filing, Jean claims that he was falsely arrested as a teenager, maliciously prosecuted and his civil rights were deprived.
He’s seeking more than $16 million in damages.
“Emmanuel served 16 years and 9 months for a crime that he did not commit,” the complaint filed by attorneys Joseph Klock and Thomas Cobitz states. “He spent from age 19 until his 36th birthday incarcerated.”
In July 2006, Jean, then 19, was arrested after being accused of gunning down and robbing a shopkeeper in North Miami Beach. Mohammad Ayoub, a 60-year-old Saudi Arabian immigrant and father of four, was shot in the head that May.
Jean was just days away from starting his studies at College of the Canyons in California on a football scholarship.
At 23, Jean was sentenced to life in prison. He maintained his innocence from the time he was arrested — a declaration that few paid attention to until a Miami judge reversed his conviction.
After years of appeals, Miami-Dade Circuit Court Judge Miguel De La O ordered Jean freed after evidence surfaced that Hill pressured witnesses to lie to link Jean to the crime, the complaint states. Jean was released on his 36th birthday after striking a deal with prosecutors and pleading guilty to conspiracy to commit robbery.
His life sentence was reduced to five years, and then he was immediately released after nearly two decades in prison.
“He put a kid in jail and prison for 16 years and nine months,” Klock told the Miami Herald on Sunday. “And [city officials] didn’t care.”
The Miami Herald reached out to the City of North Miami Beach for comment but hasn’t received a response as of Sunday evening.
Since his release, Jean has focused on rebuilding his life. He’s attending paralegal school and using his story to help guide troubled young people.
But he also looks back at all he lost all over the years. His community, as stigma followed upon his release. A promising football career. And his father, who died in 2012 last seeing his son in handcuffs.
“Football was my passion… I saw people I grew up with and played with make it to highest level,” Jean told the Miami Herald on Sunday. “On the other hand, I ended up going in another direction because of a detective that decided to take matter into his own hands.”
‘More important… to win’
At 19, Jean came to the attention of Hill — a now-disgraced detective who’s a key character in his story.
Hill testified at Jean’s trial, though by that time, he was already being investigated for having an improper sexual relationship with the wife of a murder suspect he was investigating, according to the lawsuit. In 2011, Hill was accused of forging documents connected to that case.
Miami-Dade prosecutors dropped the murder charge against the man after handwriting experts concluded that key evidence provided by Hill was bogus, according to the Miami Herald archives. Hill wasn’t charged but was forced to resign and give up his law enforcement certification.
While investigating Ayoub’s murder, Hill convinced a witness to misidentify Jean as the shooter — even though the witness specifically told Hill that Jean wasn’t the shooter, the filing says. Hill told the witness Jean committed the murder because the same gun had been used to kill another person, and all detectives needed was an identification to “put him away.”
That account, however, was fabricated to pressure the witness, according to the lawsuit. The gun used to kill Ayoub was never recovered.
Jean’s brother Nahum Jean testified at the trial that Richard Petit, one of the two others charged in the murder, had called him and confessed to shooting Ayoub. Police, the filing says, never investigated those allegations.
North Miami Beach, the complaint alleges, let Jean sit in prison — and didn’t review his conviction — to shield itself from bad publicity and “cover up the handiwork of their disgraced detective, whose conduct was known to the top echelons of the City….”
The document even speculated that charges weren’t brought against Hill because they “might lead to the further investigation of convictions achieved through the false testimony of Hill.”
“It was more important to the City and the State to win than it was to provide justice and freedom for Emmanuel,” Klock and Cobitz write in the filing.
History of misconduct?
After Jean’s conviction, prosecutors turned over to codefendants Petit and Lazaro Esteban Cortes Jr. almost 100 pages of records outlining Hill’s history of alleged misconduct, according to the complaint. The state also removed Hill from its witness list.
Cortes accepted a plea deal for 10 years, and Petit was sentenced to eight years in prison in exchange for testifying against Jean.
“…The entire sordid tale is detailed in the internal affairs files of the North Miami Beach Police Department, which contained the signatures of the City Manager, the Police Chief, and Hill’s supervisors, starting in 1988 and continuing straight through the date when Hill was fired and stripped of his law enforcement credentials,” the filing says.
The damage to Jean’s reputation stemmed beyond the murder case, the lawsuit shows.
While behind bars awaiting trial, Hill tried to link Jean to another murder, alleging that it was a jail-ordered hit, according to the complaint. Jean’s mugshot appeared on local news channels running the story.
“It was only after the actual shooter was caught, that it was determined that the shooting was totally unrelated, but, despite the false and public accusations made against Emmanuel, [neither] Hill, Rand or the City ever cleared Emmanuel’s name,” the lawsuit states.
Even years after Jean’s conviction, his mugshot appeared on a photo lineup that the department used to help its sniper team practice marksmanship, the complaint states.
The police chief suspended the training program in 2015 after outrage from the community over officers using real photos for target practice.
Rand, who also investigated Jean’s case, allegedly verbally accosted Jean after his arrest and told the Haitian American teen that Haitians were “f—king up” the city, the complaint says.
“It’s absolutely clear that the entire mindset of North Miami Beach… was biased against Haitian Americans,” Klock told the Miami Herald. “They had police officers using photos of Black adolescents for target practice, and they had not done anything about it [until the outrage.]”
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