Man sues after 7 years in jail awaiting trial for now-dismissed charges
A man named Percy Brown has filed suit against police and city officials in Louisville, Kentucky, after spending more than seven years in prison awaiting trial for a number of charges which have since been entirely dismissed.
Brown was arrested in 2008 in connection with a 2004 murder and was not released until April of this year. His lawsuit alleges that he was denied his constitutional right to a speedy trial and framed by police, who ignored the receipts he had to prove his alibi of gambling at a casino 70 miles away when the murder took place. The family of the victim, 19-year-old Jennifer Nicole French, have come to agree that Brown is not guilty.
"It pains me to revisit some of things I endured while I was there," Brown said as he filed his suit. "It is a broken system that needs to be overhauled from top to bottom."
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Bonnie Kristian was a deputy editor and acting editor-in-chief of TheWeek.com. She is a columnist at Christianity Today and author of Untrustworthy: The Knowledge Crisis Breaking Our Brains, Polluting Our Politics, and Corrupting Christian Community (forthcoming 2022) and A Flexible Faith: Rethinking What It Means to Follow Jesus Today (2018). Her writing has also appeared at Time Magazine, CNN, USA Today, Newsweek, the Los Angeles Times, and The American Conservative, among other outlets.
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