Perjury trial of three ex-Philly detectives zeroes in on testimony and DNA from overturned murder case
Prosecutors say Manuel Santiago, Martin Devlin, and Frank Jastrzembski committed perjury when they testified that Anthony Wright willingly confessed to murder.
Prosecutors in the trial of three former Philadelphia homicide detectives charged with perjury for their testimony in a murder case spent hours Thursday morning reading aloud from court transcripts and highlighting DNA evidence to try convince a jury that the men lied under oath to keep an innocent man in prison.
The case centers on two murder trials that took place decades apart.
In 1993, a jury convicted Anthony Wright of murder in the stabbing death of Louise Talley, a 77-year-old widow who was raped and killed in her Nicetown home. The verdict was later overturned after DNA evidence raised doubt about Wright’s guilt. And in 2016, another jury acquitted Wright of all charges, despite testimony from the detectives, who said he confessed to the crime.
It was at that 2016 retrial that prosecutors say Dets. Frank Jastrzembski, Manuel Santiago, and Martin Devlin lied about key evidence in the case to keep Wright in prison and cover up a flawed murder investigation.
They say Devlin and Santiago committed perjury when they testified that Wright willingly confessed to police — which Wright has long disputed — and that Jastrzembski lied about a search warrant he executed at Wright’s home.
Santiago and Jastrzembski are also charged with lying on the stand at the retrial when they said they had no knowledge of DNA results that implicated other suspect, only to later acknowledge that a prosecutor had briefed them on the tests before the trial.
Prosecutors spent more than three hours Thursday reading aloud transcripts from Santiago’s testimony at the trial as he insisted that Wright’s confession was voluntary.
Wright, who testified earlier this week, maintains the confession was fabricated. He said two detectives, whose names he does not remember and who are not charged in this case, threatened him with violence in the interrogation room after his arrest. And Santiago and Devlin, he said, made him sign the confession document without allowing him to read it.
According to transcripts read in court Thursday, Santiago testified in 2016 that he still believed Wright alone raped and killed Talley.
DNA evidence in the case had implicated another man, and Santiago knew that at the time, prosecutors said. To support that assertion, they pointed a deposition Santiago gave the following year in a civil suit Wright filed against the city after his acquittal. In that sworn testimony, Santiago acknowledged that he knew of the DNA test results.
Attorneys for the detectives say the three men fabricated nothing. In court this week, they raised questions about the not guilty verdict and argued that the evidence still points to Wright as the culprit.
They echoed the assertions of the prosecutors who sought to convict Wright who said that the DNA evidence did not prove that he was innocent, but rather suggested that he may not have acted alone.
Testimony in the perjury trial will continue Friday and is expected to carry into next week.