Man Wrongly Convicted of Murdering Parents to Get $10 Million.
'Martin Tankleff, who was imprisoned for 17 years after being wrongly convicted of murdering his parents, has reached a $10 million settlement with Suffolk County, N.Y.
The Ways and Means Committee of the Suffolk County Legislature voted Thursday to approve the settlement with Mr. Tankleff, who also reached a $3.4 million settlement with New York State in 2014. Jason Elan, a spokesman for the Suffolk County executive, declined to comment. . .
Though the settlement felt like vindication, he said that even in the moments after he heard it had been approved, he was “more interested about what was happening tomorrow than about the settlement.”
What is happening Friday is the last session of a class he has been teaching at Georgetown University with a lifelong friend, Marc Howard, who decided to go to law school because he wanted to help overturn Mr. Tankleff’s conviction. Mr. Tankleff himself recently passed the bar exam and expects to be admitted to the bar this year.
In the class, called “Making an Exoneree,” students have re-examined the cases of four imprisoned men. They have interviewed the prosecutors and defense lawyers; spoken with experts in forensics, ballistics, witness testimony and false confessions; and created websites and documentaries explaining why they believe the men’s convictions were wrongful.
This is the first time Mr. Tankleff and Mr. Howard have taught the semester-long class, but Mr. Tankleff — now an adjunct professor at Georgetown — said he hoped to teach it once a year.
It was nearly three decades ago that Mr. Tankleff, then 17, woke up on a September morning in 1988 to find that his parents, Arlene and Seymour, had been slashed and bludgeoned in the family’s Long Island home. In 1990, Mr. Tankleff was convicted of killing them and sent to prison, where he would remain until 2007.
His conviction was based on a confession that was written by a detective and then attributed to Mr. Tankleff. The detective had told Mr. Tankleff during his interrogation that investigators had found forensic evidence incriminating him, and that his father had woken from a coma and accused him of the killing. In fact, his father had never woken up. According to the lawsuit, Mr. Tankleff was “encouraged by the detectives to believe he could have experienced a ‘blackout’ and killed his parents without remembering it.”
The detectives then described their version of events to Mr. Tankleff, convinced him to acknowledge it, and wrote out a confession that made it seem as though Mr. Tankleff had volunteered the account, according to the lawsuit. Mr. Tankleff never signed the confession and quickly renounced it, but was still convicted.
Seventeen years later, an appellate court overturned his conviction on the basis of new evidence, and New York officials decided in 2008 not to retry Mr. Tankleff.
The settlement the committee approved Thursday stems from a lawsuit Mr. Tankleff filed nearly a decade ago, in 2009. In the lawsuit, Mr. Tankleff and his lawyers alleged “a widespread practice of coercing confessions among the homicide detectives of the Suffolk County Police Department” and argued that his imprisonment was “a direct result of gross misconduct by Suffolk County law enforcement officials that violated his constitutional rights.”'>>>
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/04/20/nyregion/martin-tankleff-settlement.html?