A scathing $120 million lawsuit accuses two police detectives and a Manhattan prosecutor of railroading an innocent man jailed for nearly two decades in a 1989 double homicide ordered by a murderous druglord. Click below to find out more.
Danny Colon, 48, seeks roughly $7 million for each of the 17 years he spent behind bars — a stretch that saw the wrongfully convicted man spend more than one-third of his life inside a cell.
“There’s no amount of money that could compensate for being in a cell for 17 years — especially because I didn’t know if I would ever come home,” Colon told the Daily News.
Colon’s conviction was “caused by the pervasive misconduct of New York City police detectives and the Manhattan district attorney’s office. . . . Defendants engaged in a continuous pattern of extreme and outrageous conduct directed at the plaintiff,” says the suit filed Wednesday.
The 57-page complaint details how an NYPD detective known as “Rambo” pushed the case against Colon, even though he was aware — and wrote as much in a memoir — that a drug dealer responsible for dozens of murders was behind the drive-by slayings.
The dealer, Daniel (Danny Green Eyes) Core, actually testified against Colon at his 1993 murder trial, the lawsuit said.
The stunning suit also accuses an assistant district attorney of knowingly allowing witnesses to commit perjury while withholding evidence that could have established Colon’s innocence.
Officials with the NYPD and the Manhattan District Attorney’s Office declined comment Wednesday.
Prosecutors cut a secret deal with one key witness to insure his cooperation by offering a lenient plea bargain, giving him a pass on weapons charges and relocating his grandparents to better city housing, the suit charges.
