Maurice Sykes spent most of his time behind bars trying to convince anyone who’d listen that he was wrongfully imprisoned.
After 11 years, the D.C. Appeals Court agreed. A three-judge panel found in 2006 that the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the District of Columbia withheld evidence until the last moment that could have proven Sykes’ innocence in the slaying of diplomat’s son outside the Bulgarian Embassy in Northwest Washington.
Prosecutors subsequently dropped the charges.
Now, Sykes, 42, of Capitol Heights, is suing the District for $10 million, saying he was denied his constitutional right to due process and falsely imprisoned.
And the case that landed him in prison, then was thrown out for prosecutor errors, is changing the way criminal law is practiced in the District.
“It was a lesson to prosecutors: If you sit on exculpatory material until the last moment, it’s coming back to bite you,” said one former assistant U.S. attorney for the D.C. office.
“Good Superior Court criminal defense attorneys have known about the Sykes decision from the day it was announced and have been relying on the precedent that it set ever since,” said Michael Starr, of Akin Gump Strauss Hauer & Feld.
For Sykes, the pain of his incarceration has not abated years after his release.
“I went from a college guy to somebody in prison,” Sykes said.
A former member of the Bowie State University band, Sykes says he suffers from depression, anxiety and post-traumatic stress disorder. He says he can’t find meaningful employment and believes police are still out to get him.
Prosecutors said they could not comment about Sykes’ criminal trial or lawsuit.
The appeals court’s decision to free Sykes turned on a legal principle known as the Brady rule, which requires that prosecutors hand over any evidence that might clear the defendant of guilt. The Sykes opinion meant that the timing of handing over the material mattered.
“There’s not a person in the defense bar in D.C. that doesn’t know about the Sykes case,” said Bernie Grimm, who represented Sykes at trial. “It resulted in a structural change in the way the assistant U.S. attorneys provide Brady information.”
Sykes was one of three men who were tried together in the 1995 murder of 21-year-old Evgeny Mihailov, who was shot and killed at the steps of the Bulgarian Embassy at 22nd and R Streets. Sykes’ family testified that he was in North Carolina for his great-grandmother’s funeral at the time of the killing.
All three men were found guilty of multiple charges, and Sykes was sentenced to 30 years to life.
According to appeals judges, prosecutors relied heavily on the testimony of a paid informant named Ralph Williams.
At the trial, Williams testified that he was gambling with two men at a Capitol Heights boarding house on the night of Mihailov’s slaying when Sykes and two other men showed up and bragged about the killing. Williams said the two men he was gambling with could confirm his story.
But nearly a year earlier, the other two men provided testimony to a grand jury that the appeals courts said contradicted Williams’ statements.
Prosecutors didn’t mention these two witnesses to the defense until two days before the trial, but the judge allowed the trial to continue. And the transcripts of their testimony weren’t turned over to the defense until two weeks into the trial after the prosecution revealed that it could not find either witness, including one who had accidently been released from jail.
