Federal jury awards $80 million to estate of NY man wrongfully convicted of murder

BUFFALO, New York — A federal jury awarded $80 million Wednesday to the estate of a Buffalo man whose 1976 murder conviction was overturned after he spent nearly a quarter-century in prison.

Darryl Boyd, one of the group of black teenagers arrested in the killing of William Crawford, sometimes called the Buffalo Five, filed a lawsuit in 2022 seeking damages and alleging that Buffalo police investigators and Erie County prosecutors failed to disclose more than a dozen pieces of evidence pointing to other suspects. The lawsuit also alleged that investigators coerced witnesses into making false statements naming Boyd and that prosecutors engaged in misconduct by making inappropriate or false comments in their closing arguments.

“But for Defendants’ wrongdoing, Mr. Boyd would not have been prosecuted, convicted, and imprisoned in violation of his constitutional rights, and would not have spent 45 years maintaining his innocence and fighting for his freedom in connection with a crime he did not commit,” Boyd’s attorneys wrote in the lawsuit.

A spokesman for Erie County Executive Mark Poloncarz said the county extends its sympathies to Boyd’s family, but he believes the $80 million settlement is enormous and the county plans to appeal.

After a two-and-a-half-week trial, the federal jury in the Western District of New York took about an hour to return a massive verdict – touted by lawyers as one of the largest monetary awards for a wrongful conviction case in the United States.

After Boyd was released from prison, he spent two more decades on parole before his conviction was overturned by a judge in 2021. The county chose not to retry Boyd or John Walker Jr., whose conviction in that case was also overturned.

A third man convicted of the murder, Darren Gibson, was released from prison in 2008 and died a year later. One of the other teens was acquitted at trial and the fifth testified against the others, which Boyd’s lawyers say newly released records show was coerced.

Boyd and Walker had settled their case against the city of Buffalo for approximately $4.7 million each. Walker won a $28 million verdict against the county earlier this year, which the county appealed.

“He lost his entire adult life because of this wrongful conviction. The jury heard how many years he suffered in a maximum security prison. All the terrible things you assume happen in prison, happened in prison,” said Ross Firsenbaum, an attorney with WilmerHale, one of three firms representing Boyd’s estate.

Firsenbaum said being paroled was just as difficult for Boyd who suffered from PTSD, anxiety and other illnesses. He struggled to maintain or obtain employment due to his conviction and eventually began self-medicating and developed a drug addiction.

Boyd was diagnosed with terminal pancreatic cancer and died in 2023 before the trial could take place. His mother and son attended the trial daily, Firsenbaum said.

“The (county) argued that his substance use was the cause of his problems, not the approximately 27 years he had spent illegally in prison,” Firsenbaum said. “And it’s offensive. And the jury recognized that and responded with this verdict.”

He said the lawyers proved there was a pattern and pattern of misconduct at the time of the convictions, not just wrongdoing by an employee.