Greenville Man Wins Settlement After Spending 2 Years in Jail on Charge that was Dropped
Published: April 29, 2018
By Daniel J. Gross The Greenville News
Unable to make bond in 2014, D. S. spent 711 days in jail for a robbery he said he never committed.
By the time the case was slated for trial nearly two years after he was arrested, the 13th Circuit Solicitor’s Office dismissed the charge and he was set free.
As he’s tried to put his life back together, D. S. was awarded a settlement of $85,000 after filing a tort claim late last year alleging due process violations with his case. Primarily, he argued that exculpatory evidence – evidence that could exonerate him – was found just three days after the alleged robbery but was never fully disclosed by prosecutors.
A six-month moratorium on that November 2017 settlement was lifted this month, allowing the case to become public and the sides to comment on it.
“There was proof I didn’t do this,” D. S. said. “That’s the real bad part. And they let me sit in jail for two years.”
A pre-litigation settlement agreement involving the Solicitor’s Office and the Greenville County Sheriff’s Office was reached, and he received $85,000 in losses along with $12,867.04 in legal fees, according to state Insurance Reserve Fund reports.
The insurance fund provides property and liability coverage to more than 1,000 government agencies in South Carolina. Greenville County has an insurance policy through the Insurance Reserve Fund, which takes care of tort claims and lawsuits through settlements and litigation.
Solicitor Walt Wilkins said ultimately the evidence wasn’t strong enough to try and secure a conviction on D. S. Wilkins said the Insurance Reserve Fund paid out the settlement to avoid litigation and retained the rights to settle it. The reserve fund conducts cost benefit analyses to find which route is cheaper, Wilkins said.
“The decision to settle any lawsuit and payout is made by the IRF,” Wilkins said. “My situation was, ‘I’m not paying you a dime.’ We didn’t do anything wrong. I never said we did.”
Attempts to reach a Insurance Reserve Fund representative were unsuccessful.
Steve Henry, who represented D. S. in the tort claim, said the Solicitor’s Office and Sheriff’s Office are still responsible. Wilkins has made it clear that no funds were directly paid out by the Solicitor’s Office.
“The Sheriff’s Office and Wilkins wanted to make it clear that the agreement said they are making no payments out of their funds so that he could later on say, ‘We had no part in this,” Henry said. “The Solicitor’s Office and Sheriff’s Office could have said, ‘We want this case to go forward’ and all they had to do was say, ‘No deal,’ which would have made me file a lawsuit and it would be made public.”
As criminal cases unfold, evidence can either strengthen or fall apart based on findings, testimony and witnesses. Wilkins said when it came time for trial, prosecutors reviewed the case and no longer felt the case was strong enough to secure a conviction.
“Once we got down the line to trial and started preparing it for trial, we had already turned it over to the defense counsel two or three times,” Wilkins said. “We didn’t feel like we could prove the case beyond a reasonable doubt. That’s our standard. It’s a culmination of everything that came together.”
D. S. went through three separate defense attorneys while facing charges. None of them were Henry.
Wilkins said if D. S.’ attorneys felt he was being held for too long, they could have filed a motion for a speedy trial but didn’t.
Henry said at the time, the evidence was not fully disclosed, which would have made it a “suicide mission” to try to get D. S. to a trial sooner. Henry argued that he should have been released on a personal recognizance bond early on and that the case should have ultimately been dropped sooner.
The Pizza Hut robbery
Greenville County deputies went to a reported robbery at a Pizza Hut at 111 State Park Road on July 27, 2014. As the store was closing, a man came up to the door and told employees he left his phone inside. Once inside, the man walked to the cash register, displayed a gun and demanded money. He left with an undisclosed amount of cash.
D. S. was arrested two days later. Investigators found his fingerprints in the store, and he was picked out of a photo lineup as a possible suspect. D. S. argued from the beginning that he was at the Pizza Hut to buy a pizza, but not during the day of the crime.
“I bought a pizza and my thumb print was left on the door,” he said. “Out of the 200 or so fingerprints, they decided I was the one who robbed it.”
D. S., 52, had just moved to Greenville from California to be closer to family after he had a stroke and went on disability.
“I wasn’t here for two months and I was put in jail for a robbery I didn’t do,” D. S. said. “I was adamant I didn’t do it.”
Key evidence in the investigation
Three days after D. S. was charged, authorities investigating a shooting searched a vehicle and found a BB gun that matched a gun grip found at the Pizza Hut robbery, along with a pair of glasses and hat that matched the description of the culprit.
Case law addresses exculpatory evidence in U.S. Supreme Court case Brady v. Maryland. The Brady rule states that prosecutors must disclose all evidence that might exonerate a defendant.
Henry argues that the Solicitor’s office and Sheriff’s Office violated this rule by withholding the detailed evidence from the vehicle search that shows a connection tied to someone else other than D. S.
“They never wrote at any point in time, ‘We think we have another suspect,’ Henry said.
Wilkins said the evidence from the car search was turned over immediately after law enforcement found a relationship between cases.
“And that could have been used to show that we had an eyewitness,” Wilkins said. “It was innocuous. There are thousands of these grips. There’s thousands of them out there. It was turned over as a piece of information. With that, we still went forward with the case.”
Wilkins said the deciding factor to drop the case came when they found D. S.’ fingerprints at the Pizza Hut but couldn’t definitively show whether the fingerprints were from the day of the crime or the previous day. The Pizza Hut employees did not know when the windows were last wiped clean.
Henry said the case came down to the evidence of the car search not being fully disclosed. Two memos disclosed what was found in the shooting case along with a case number. But the 200-plus photos and details about the items discovered were never produced until a final defense attorney got involved to review the case and made a request to see all of the evidence.
“The evidence should have been disclosed immediately,” Henry said. “Once the pictures came out, you can see the matching grip and the hat and glasses. Case law is horribly against him on that. It’s not a partial disclosure. It’s full disclosure, and they did not do that.”
In July 2016, the case was dismissed.
D. S. moving forward with life
D. S. is looking ahead in light of all that he went through. He said his time in jail changed his life forever. He became homeless when he was released, was hospitalized twice with pneumonia and was put on hospice care for heart issues.
“I’m still here,” he said.
He said he still suffers from depression and anxiety based on his time in jail, and said the settlement he was awarded was mostly spent paying back others who helped him out while he was homeless. He said he spent the rest of the money on a car and finding an apartment while getting back on disability and medical benefits.
“It was a traumatic experience,” he said. “I don’t want to sue nobody else, man. I just want to live and live comfortably. I’m hoping. I’m praying.”