Detroit to pay $7.5M to man who claims cops switched bullets

By ED WHITE
Associated Press

DETROIT (AP) — Detroit has agreed to pay $7.5 million to settle a lawsuit by a man who claimed police switched bullets to pin a murder on him in 1992. Desmond Ricks was released from prison in 2017 after 25 years, thanks to gun experts, law students at the University of Michigan and his insistence that he was innocent. Ricks was convicted of fatally shooting a friend outside a Detroit restaurant in 1992. Police seized a gun that belonged to Ricks’ mother and said it was the murder weapon. The Innocence Clinic at University of Michigan law school asked a judge to reopen the case. Photos of two bullets taken from the victim did not resemble the bullets that were examined by a defense expert decades earlier. The actual bullets didn’t match the gun.