Growing up in Detroit, Kenneth Nixon often saw police harassing people, mostly Black people. At 19, Nixon, a father of two, opened a towing business and began to fulfill his dream of attending college.
All of that changed on Sept. 21, 2005, when Nixon was convicted of a murder he did not commit. He served 16 years until a Wayne County judge dismissed all his charges and vacated his sentence in February 2021.
Nixon filed a federal lawsuit against the Detroit Police Department last week, saying the police department framed him for murder and used fabricated testimony against him from an inmate seeking early release.
“The emotions surrounding the filing of the lawsuit was partly excitement, partly frustration. I feel like it is sad we have to ask a judge to force systemic change, to disrupt the DPD,” Nixon told HuffPost.
He said he continues to be haunted by his conviction even though he’s out of prison.
“It took me months to finally get my record cleared up,” he said. “Every time you apply for a job, you have to explain why this conviction shows up in your background. Every time you apply for housing, you have to explain why this is there.”
The Detroit Police Department declined to comment, citing pending litigation.
According to local reports, Naomi Vaughn and her five children lived at a home with her boyfriend. Someone threw a Molotov cocktail into the home, causing a fire that killed two of the children.
Nixon was at home with his girlfriend when the incident happened, according to the lawsuit and media interviews with Nixon’s family members. Vaughn’s boyfriend and Nixon’s girlfriend had once had an affair, and Vaughn’s family claimed Nixon was seeking revenge out of jealousy.
Vaughn’s boyfriend told officers that Nixon started the fire, but details of his account changed multiple times, according to the lawsuit. For example, he told police that he had seen Nixon’s girlfriend driving a getaway car, although he previously had denied being able to identify the driver.
Police largely relied on a statement from Vaughn’s 13-year-old son, who also said Nixon had started the fire. But the statement was so inconsistent that Det. Kurtiss Staples acknowledged in a memo to Cmdr. James Tolbert that the boy may have been influenced by family members and that there was a “desperate need” for more evidence to connect Nixon to the fatal fire.
“So fraught were these inconsistent statements that Defendant Staples admitted in a memo to Defendant Tolbert that it was ‘obvious’ that Brandon had been ‘coached by family members.’ Defendants Staples and Tolbert withheld this memo from the prosecutor and the defense,” the lawsuit says.
The lawsuit adds that police fabricated information and evidence in order to corroborate Vaughn’s son’s account, including presenting false information while they interrogated one of Nixon’s family members and giving prosecutors inaccurate information about where Nixon and his family members were when the fire occurred.
“I was happy to be free for sure. I was glad we were finally able to prove my innocence. I think overall police departments across the country could do a better job of ridding the bad actors, but they don’t.”
– Kenneth Nixon
Nixon passed a polygraph test, the lawsuit says, but detectives falsely submitted that he failed. (Nixon took another polygraph from an independent examiner a few years later and passed again.)
Officers found evidence pointing to someone else being involved in the fire, but the information was never disclosed during criminal proceedings, the lawsuit states.
During Nixon’s trial, officers relied on a statement from a jailhouse informant who allegedly falsely claimed Nixon confessed to him that he had started the fire. One of the detectives cited in the lawsuit allegedly promised the informant a reduced sentence if he gave a statement relevant to the case.
Years later, after multiple appeal filings in the court after his conviction, the Cooley Law Innocence Project took on Nixon’s case. After a re-investigation, all his charges were dismissed and his sentencing was vacated.
“I was happy to be free for sure. I was glad we were finally able to prove my innocence,” Nixon told HuffPost. “I think overall police departments across the country could do a better job of ridding the bad actors, but they don’t.”
Nixon’s lawsuit accuses the Detroit police of bad practices and relying on “flawed investigations and fabricated ‘informant’ testimony” as a means to put people in jail.
Detroit entered a federal consent decree in 2003, after the Department of Justice and a local media investigation uncovered excessive use of deadly force and illegal detentions. The federal government has used this type of binding agreement, which is subject to court enforcement, to monitor and rein in some of the most troubled police departments in the nation.
Concerns over transparency about bad officers in the department are still festering. Last year, the department announced it would redact misconduct records and disciplinary cases, which would make it difficult for media outlets and citizens to access police personnel files. The decision came just months after the city identified more than 100 “high risk” officers who were known for their history of misconduct.
“Overall the Detroit Police Department has a negative connotation associated with them for years,” Nixon said. “It has been a culture for years, for decades.”