"A man locked up for 18 years after being wrongfully convicted in a double-murder case is poised to get $3.5 million from San Francisco.
City Attorney Dennis Herrera has recommended the city settle the lawsuit by Caramad Conley for that amount, documents newly introduced at the Board of Supervisors show. The settlement still must be approved by the board, which is to take up the matter this month, but supervisors routinely approve such settlements. Police Chief Greg Suhr and the city's Police Commission have already signed off on it, the documents show.
Conley, 40, was locked up in 1992. In 1994, he was convicted and sentenced to serve two life-without-parole terms for the 1989 drive-by shooting deaths of Roshawn Johnson and Charles Hughes that left 11 others injured. Prosecutors said the shooting was gang-motivated. A judge ruled in December 2010 that he had been wrongly convicted. He was released a month later.
San Francisco Superior Court Judge Marla Miller found that police investigators knew that the prosecution's star witness, Clifford Polk, lied on the stand about whether he was being paid, but they did nothing to intervene. Miller concluded that
the lead investigator in the case, Earl Sanders - who later became police chief - knew about the perjury "and did not correct it."
Wrongfully convicted S.F. man poised to get $3.5 million - SFGate
A city can buy a lot of video cameras for officers for 3.5 million.