Judge Advances Wrongful Conviction Lawsuit

by Laura Glesby

Adam Carmon has cleared a key hurdle in seeking to hold the city and several former detectives accountable for the wrongful conviction that landed him in prison for 28 years.

A federal judge rejected attempts from the city and two of the detectives in question to disqualify Carmon’s lawsuit — finding enough to suggest a “‘widespread pattern’ of fabricating evidence” among New Haven police officers in the 1990s.

Judge Janet Hall of the U.S. District Court of Connecticut issued a ruling to that effect on Sept. 18. The city filed a motion for the judge to reconsider, which Carmon’s lawyers challenged in a memorandum.

As of Monday, the case has been assigned to a settlement conference.

Carmon was convicted of murder in 1995 for a 1994 shooting that killed a seven-month-old baby, Danielle Taft, and paralyzed her grandmother, Charlene Troutman.

Carmon maintained his innocence for nearly three decades in prison, until a state Superior Court Judge Jon Alander overturned his conviction in 2022. Alander cited several pieces of evidence that prosecutors and police withheld from the Carmon’s defense lawyers, as well as new science calling into question the state’s eyewitness and firearm evidence against Carmon.

Carmon is now suing the city for alleged indemnification, municipal liability, and negligence, and he’s suing several detectives associated with his case for allegedly suppressing and fabricating evidence, malicious prosecution, filing a warrant affidavit with false information, coercing self-incriminating statements from Carmon, and negligent infliction of emotional distress.

The city along with two of the detectives whom Carmon is suing, James Stephenson and Peter Carusone, requested that Hall issue a “summary judgment” that Carmon didn’t have the legal grounds to sue them — which could have thrown out the case before a trial over the actual facts of the case ensued.

Both Stephenson and Carusone sought to invoke qualified immunity (among other defenses) to avert the lawsuit — a legal protection for police officers shielding them from liability for actions they’ve taken as part of their official police duty, except in cases where they have violated previously established constitutional rights.

James Stephenson, for example, claimed that qualified immunity protected him from liability for not disclosing documentation of multiple searches in a firearms database that did not yield the model of firearm that Carmon was accused of having used in the shooting. In 2022, Alander determined that those records could have led a jury to question the ballistic evidence against Carmon.

In a February motion for summary judgment against Carmon, Stephenson’s lawyers at the firm Karsten and Tallberg argued that qualified immunity applies to this situation because Stephenson did not consider the results to be part of his disclosure obligations.

The detective’s actions were, the lawyers argued, “objectively reasonable and consistent with standard practice, and did not violate any clearly established law at the time.” In other words, Stephenson was simply doing his job according to the department’s norms and policies.

The city’s lawyers, a team led by Thomas Gerarde, argued in a separate memo in support of their motion for summary judgment that municipalities can’t be held liable for the “criminal, intentional, willful, wanton or malicious acts of its employees,” if such acts are proven to have occurred.

Weighing these competing arguments about who can legally be held accountable for Carmon’s conviction, Judge Hall ruled that Carmon has a right to assert “alternative theories of liability.”

Hall rejected other arguments from the city and former detectives as well, including claims about the application of a statute of limitations on Carmon’s ability to file a lawsuit. She did limit Carmon’s ability to seek damages from the city in response to “physical harms” due to a procedural issue.

In a statement provided to the Independent for this article, City Corporation Counsel Patricia King wrote, “Every individual deserves equal and impartial justice under the law. While the City cannot comment on the specifics of this case and the related 1994 incident due to pending litigation, the City is committed to cooperating with all parties and appropriately engaging in the civil litigation process to ensure there are reasonable resolutions on matters where city employees are deemed legally responsible for wrongful convictions or miscarriages of justice in the past.” 

Mayor Justin Elicker wrote in a statement that he wasn’t mayor at the time of Carmon’s arrest and trial and “can’t personally speak with authority about events that happened in 1994.” Today, in 2025, he wrote that “overwhelmingly, our police officers do an outstanding job” and are held to a “strong code of conduct” with body and dashboard camera policies in place. “The NHPD has clear policies and protocols, conducts regular trainings, utilizes bodycams and dashcams, and has a strong code of conduct that all officers must follow.”

“As Chief Jacobson and I have made clear from day one,” Elicker wrote, “we’re committed to supporting our officers and giving them the tools, training and resources they need to succeed – and, at the same time, we also hold our officers accountable and we are transparent with the public. That’s how we will continue to operate and that’s how we build trust with residents and keep our communities safe.”

Carmon’s lawyer, Doug Lieb, wrote meanwhile that “Judge Hall’s decision is an important step in achieving justice for Adam Carmon. Our case alleges that the New Haven Police Department’s deep-rooted culture of misconduct helped cause Mr. Carmon’s wrongful conviction. We look forward to proving to a jury that the City should be held accountable for it.”

Part of a Pattern?

Underlying the legal back-and-forth between the city and Carmon was the question of whether the errors in Carmon’s conviction stemmed from the individual actions of a few detectives — or systematic corruption in the New Haven Police Department during the time of his prosecution.

Carmon is claiming that the police department maintained a “widespread practice” of fabricating evidence, coercing and manipulating witnesses, and deliberately encouraging false confessions — and that city policymakers demonstrated “deliberate indifference” to those actions.

Carmon’s attorneys referenced other overturned or questioned convictions involving allegations of misconduct from New Haven detectives, including some of the same detectives involved in putting Carmon behind bars.

The city argued that some of those convictions have not been legally overturned, and that other allegations of misconduct should not be generalized. “The conduct of one detective in one instance does not constitute the custom and practice of the NHPD,” the city wrote. “The few incidents cited above do not, as a matter of law, constitute a pervasive practice to violate constitutional rights, so widespread as to have the effect of department policy.”

The city’s lawyers also wrote that the police department has maintained a policy since the 1970s that “mandated all police officers to be truthful, and prohibits fabrication of evidence, or withholding of evidence of any kind.”

In her ruling, Hall sided with Carmon, writing that allegations of police misconduct from Daryl Valentine, Eric Ham, and Stefon Morant, among others, amounted to a track record that “suggests a ‘widespread pattern’ of fabricating evidence.”

“While the evidence reviewed by the court does not directly establish that officials at the highest level of the NHPD supported fabricating evidence,” she wrote, the pattern “would allow a jury to reasonably conclude policymakers constructively condoned such a practice…. The court concludes, therefore, that Mr. Carmon has adduced evidence upon which a reasonable jury could find the City liable for violating Mr. Carmon’s constitutional rights on a theory that the City engaged in a custom, pattern, or practice of falsifying evidence.”