As police perjury trial comes to close, jury to begin deliberating whether officers lied in murder case

The jury in the trial of three former Philadelphia homicide detectives accused of perjury in a murder case that spanned three decades will begin deliberations Wednesday after more than a week of testimony.

Detectives Martin Devlin, Frank Jastrzembski, and Manuel Santiago are charged with lying under oath about their 1991 investigation of the rape and killing of 77-year-old Louise Talley in Nicetown. They have denied any wrongdoing and said they followed the evidence in the case and it led to Wright, who they said confessed to the crime.

At the heart of the trial is the question of whether or not they framed Anthony Wright and helped send him to prison for a quarter-century before his conviction was overturned — then lied again on the witness stand at his 2016 retrial before a jury declared him innocent.

Prosecutors called DNA experts and others to build their case that Devlin and Santiago fabricated an eight-page confession that the detectives allegedly forced Wright to sign. And Jastrzembski, prosecutors say, lied about the clothing that he said he found in Wright’s bedroom.

Wright’s sentence was vacated after forensic testing, unavailable during his initial trial, implicated another man in Talley’s death and exposed what prosecutors describe as flaws in the initial murder investigation.

» READ MORE: Trial of former homicide detectives charged with lying in a murder case raises questions about evidence

Then-District Attorney Seth Williams brought Wright to trial again on the theory that DNA evidence did not exclude him as an accomplice. But that narrative fell short, and a jury acquitted Wright and criticized prosecutors for a case that one juror said featured evidence “so compelling for Tony that there really could have been no other verdict.”

Another jury must now decide whether the detectives’ testimony was built on lies.

In closing arguments Tuesday, Assistant District Attorney Brian Collins said Wright’s supposed confession was “a work of fiction” that caught up to the detectives as the science evolved.

It made no sense that Wright voluntarily went to the police station and signed a detail-rich confession that would lead detectives to every piece of evidence they needed to close the case, Collins said, only to later deny the confession for decades.

In addition to the lack of Wright’s DNA on Talley’s body and on the clothes police said they found at his home, a DNA expert testified this week that Wright’s DNA was not found on the knife that police said he used to stab Talley.

“When we talk about the statement — this work of fiction that is Anthony Wright’s confession — this is a key piece of evidence,” Collins told the jury. “He’s excluded from the murder weapon.”

Throughout the week, defense attorneys said the detectives told the truth, followed the evidence, and had the right man all along.

Much of the weeklong trial resembled a retrial of Wright, and in their closing statements, attorneys for the detectives went further: They accused him of perjury on the witness stand last week, pointing to inconsistencies between the evidence and Wright’s testimony about details like his shoe size and his assertions that he had never gotten in trouble in prison.

As they defended the three men on charges of perjury and false swearing, the lawyers repeatedly called into question Wright’s innocence, casting him as a liar with a history of violence and drug use who had duped the jury that set him free.

“He gets crazy when he smokes crack,” Fortunato Perri, a defense attorney for Santiago, said half a dozen times during his closing statement, a reference to one witness’ description of Wright in 1991.

» READ MORE: Perjury trial of former Philly cops accused of lying in a murder case begins week two with a delay

They said the retrial was flawed due in part to uncooperative witnesses and suggested that Wright got away with murder. Jastrzembski’s attorney, Steven Patton, accused District Attorney Larry Krasner of trying to manufacture a corruption story where his predecessors saw guilt.

“It’s the same evidence they used in 2016″ to try Wright for murder, Patton said. “But now it’s 2025 and now [we] don’t want them to be Anthony Wright’s clothes.”

The three detectives, now long retired, sat silently behind their defense attorneys for much of the weeklong trial, occasionally shaking their heads as prosecutors laid out the perjury case against them.

The perjury trial marks a rare instance in which police officers have been criminally charged for their roles in securing a wrongful conviction. While both Wright trials predated his time in office, Krasner has made overturning wrongful convictions and exposing underlying prosecutorial misconduct a cornerstone of his administration, a campaign that has at times met with resistance from others in law enforcement.

Krasner’s office says it has secured more than 50 exonerations since 2018.

Even as the city pays out tens of millions of dollars to settle lawsuits over wrongful convictions, the statute of limitations on criminal charges is often long expired by the time exonerating evidence comes to light, as the police investigations of the crimes often date back decades. In this case, Krasner’s office filed perjury charges against the detectives just days before the statute of limitations on their alleged crimes was set to expire.

Common Pleas Court Judge Lucretia Clemons is to instruct jurors about their deliberations Wednesday morning.