Former Philly homicide detective James Pitts was found guilty of all charges at his perjury trial

A once-prolific Philadelphia homicide detective was found guilty Tuesday of physically abusing a murder suspect to obtain a false confession, then lying about it in court to help secure a life sentence — even though prosecutors now say the man who was convicted had nothing to do with the crime.

The verdict against James Pitts, 53, was delivered by a jury after about eight hours of deliberation over two days. And his conviction on charges of perjury and obstruction immediately became a notable moment in the history of the city’s criminal justice system: Despite decades of complaints from citizens that some detectives, particularly in homicide, have employed coercive tactics to shore up weak or otherwise evidence-free cases, Pitts is now one of the first to be found guilty of a crime for such conduct.

Pitts dipped his head but otherwise did not visibly react as the jury returned its verdict, and he declined to comment afterward. Still, the decision thrilled a small group of onlookers in the gallery, several of whom sat through nearly a week of testimony because their loved ones are incarcerated in cases Pitts helped build. The spectators said those cases have been marred by the same type of misconduct that formed the backbone of this case: Physical abuse, coercion, and lies.

Assistant District Attorney Michael Garmisa said during closing arguments Monday that Pitts “wasn’t trying to solve a murder” during the 2010 investigation around which the case centered. “He was trying to get a confession to close a case.”

Pitts denied that accusation while testifying last week, saying he’d never touched the onetime suspect, Obina Onyiah, and did not lie to cover anything up.

Pitts’ attorney, Bill McLaughlin, meanwhile, sought to convince jurors during his closing argument that Onyiah — who’d been convicted of bank robberies before being interrogated by Pitts for murder in 2010 — was the person with the strongest motive to lie.

“Obina Onyiah told a story you’d expect of a career criminal,” McLaughlin said, adding that Onyiah’s conduct when accused of crimes was to “minimize and deflect.”

Prosecutors said they would be seeking a prison term at his sentencing hearing, which is scheduled for October. But Common Pleas Court Judge Anthony Kyriakakis denied a motion to jail Pitts until then.

Pitts is now one of the few Philadelphia detectives convicted of criminal misconduct in the course of his official duties. Another was Philip Nordo, who worked in homicide at the same time as Pitts. He was found guilty in 2022 of sexually assaulting witnesses and informants.

Three older investigators, meanwhile — Martin Devlin, Manuel Santiago, and Frank Jastrzembski, all of whom worked in homicide in the 1990s — are awaiting trial on perjury charges, accused of lying on the witness stand at a 2016 retrial. Each has denied wrongdoing.

Some previous cases against Philadelphia police officers accused of criminal misconduct collapsed in court — including a corruption case a decade ago in which federal prosecutors accused six members of an elite narcotics squad of robbing and beating drug suspects and lying in court. All were acquitted and eventually got their jobs back.

District Attorney Larry Krasner, whose office charged Pitts in 2022, has long said that city officers benefited from a culture within law enforcement that tolerated — or protected — wrongdoing. And Pitts, for years before his arrest, had been the subject of lawsuits, complaints, and allegations of abuse, few of which seemed to derail his two-decade career as a detective.

Krasner said Tuesday that the prosecution of Pitts was important not only as a measure of individual accountability, but also as a way to reinforce trust in the system by weeding out officers who violate their oaths.

“In order to elevate [ethical detectives], in order to elevate their status, we have to knock down the detectives who do it the wrong way,” he said at a news conference after the verdict.

» READ MORE: Dozens accused a detective of fabrication and abuse. Many cases he built remain intact.

The incident at issue in Pitts’ trial was the investigation of the murder of Northeast Philadelphia jeweler William Glatz in October 2010. Glatz was killed during a robbery at his store, and one of the two perpetrators, Kevin Turner, was fatally wounded during a shootout.

But another suspect escaped, and police began investigating Onyiah after a coconspirator in his prior robberies called police and said Onyiah may have been involved.

Pitts interrogated Onyiah inside a sergeant’s office at the homicide unit. When it was over, the detective said Onyiah had confessed — admitting to participating in the robbery with Turner, but saying he hadn’t fired a shot as it devolved into violence. A person could be seen taking similar actions in surveillance footage that detectives had obtained and reviewed before Pitts interrogated Onyiah.

Onyiah was charged with murder but quickly disavowed his statement, and said in recorded jail calls with his mother and girlfriend that he’d been coerced.

Onyiah and his trial lawyers sought to have the statement thrown out before the case reached a jury, telling a judge it was not true and describing the alleged abuse by Pitts.

But the suppression request was denied, in part because Pitts testified and said he had never abused Onyiah — both at a pretrial hearing, and again at the 2013 trial.

“I never touched your client,” Pitts told Onyiah’s lawyer at the time.

Onyiah was convicted and sentenced to life behind bars.

A decade later, the District Attorney’s Office, under Krasner, began reinvestigating Onyiah’s conviction. Prosecutors commissioned experts to review surveillance footage of the crime, and the experts said the perpetrator identified as Onyiah — who stands 6-foot-3 — was clearly several inches shorter.

A judge ultimately agreed that Onyiah’s conviction should be overturned, and he was freed from prison after prosecutors agreed to drop all charges (they also helped reduce his sentence on another, unrelated robbery case).

Prosecutors concluded as a result that Onyiah’s statement to Pitts was clearly false, and they convened a grand jury to investigate. In 2022, they announced charges against Pitts, saying they’d come to believe Onyiah’s allegations of abuse. By extension, they concluded Pitts had lied on the stand when he was asked whether he’d ever roughed up Onyiah during the interrogation.

Onyiah and Pitts each testified last week, offering dramatically different accounts of their interaction 14 years ago.

Onyiah, during several tense hours on the stand, said Pitts had struck him in the chest, and later shoved his head between his legs while forcing him to confess. He glared at the detective while testifying, and said Pitts had stolen more than a decade of his life.

Pitts, meanwhile, reiterated that he’d never touched Onyiah, and said his testimony, as the case wound through the courts, was truthful.

Through their verdict, jurors signaled that they believed Onyiah.

That was welcome news to some observers, including Hassan Bennett. He was charged with murder in 2006 in a case Pitts helped build, but was acquitted in 2019 after representing himself at a re-trial.

Bennett said Pitts’ conviction was a step in the right direction, but “not enough” because of the number of people still imprisoned in connection with cases Pitts built.

“We’re still hurting,” Bennett said, adding that prosecutors should seek to overturn more Pitts convictions, and that the city’s civil attorneys should “stop protecting and defending” Pitts in lawsuits.

Christopher Goodwin, 33, was exonerated in 2023 after serving more than a decade in prison for murder in another Pitts case. He said he believed justice was finally served, but that he was still haunted by the idea that Pitts had gotten away with misconduct for years.

“I knew all along. But knowing the law, they want corroboration of everything. ...They’re going to take a cop’s word over anybody,” Goodwin said.

Krasner said he believed prosecutors should now review nearly all Pitts-related cases to determine which ones, if any, should be viewed in a different light. Still, neither he nor Garmisa, the trial prosecutor, was able to offer specifics on how many cases may be ripe for another look.

Krasner said not all of Pitts’ cases are likely to be overturned, either because he played a small role, or because other evidence might corroborate aspects of the conviction.

Still, Krasner said: “Let’s be honest, the word of a perjurer is worth next to nothing. So we have to look back at his cases, knowing that whatever his word was on those cases is worth next to nothing.”

Staff writer Samantha Melamed contributed to this article.