Jury quickly acquits former veteran Philly narcotics officer of pocketing cash in drug raid and lying about it

A federal jury on Friday swiftly acquitted a former Philadelphia police sergeant accused of lying to the FBI about money seized in a drug raid after he testified that he had given a flawed account out of a memory lapse, not in a deliberate attempt to deceive the agents.

After only a hour of deliberation, the jury rejected all eight counts in the case against Michael Kennedy, a 27-year police veteran who was indicted last year largely on the basis of surveillance footage of the raid captured by nanny cams set up by the reputed drug dealers targeted in the raid.

In an unusual twist, the footage was obtained and posted publicly by a website called Serpico News, devoted to exposing alleged wrongdoing by police and run by a former Philadelphia cop. The name of the site is from the 1973 movie about police corruption in New York.

The footage showed Kennedy putting an undetermined amount of loose money in his pocket during a search of a Kensington loft in 2016. Prosecutors said he was caught in an act of theft, but Kennedy told the jury he had later turned in the cash as evidence — and that he had taken custody of the money in the first place in part so it wouldn’t be stolen by other officers.

“It’s been a long timecoming. My life has been hold for six years because of the incident,” Kennedy, 50, said after the verdict.

Prosecutors, he said, had wrongly assumed the video made the case a “slam dunk.” He added: “They never gave me an opportunity to clear things up. They were overzealous.”

In his closing statement to the jury, Assistant U.S. Attorney Joseph A. LaBar said Kennedy’s guilt was evident because he had conspired with another officer to create a cover story that the nanny cam videos proved to be false.

When interviewed by the FBI in 2017, Kennedy and the other officer — who has also left the force — both said they were in the same room in the drug dealers’ loft when the money was found. LaBar, however, pointed out that the video showed thatw Kennedy took the money while alone. “He made sure no one was looking because he was stuffing money in his pocket,” LaBar said.

The prosecutor asked the jurors to consider how the two police officers “miraculously” both endorsed a problematic narrative. “Ask yourself if they somehow coincidentally came up with the same story,” he said.

In an eight-count federal indictment, prosecutors accused Kennedy of coaching that former officer, Thomas Clarke Jr., to lie on his behalf. Kennedy denied that accusation Friday as well.

In his closing, defense lawyer Michael Drossner said the other officer had acted on his own initiative. “It was Clarke’s opinion that Kennedy was being railroaded,” Drossner told jurors. “He took it upon himself to lie.”

Kennedy, a member of the elite Narcotics Field Unit who joined the force after a decade as a Marine, said he had done his best to provide an accurate account of the raid to the FBI in 2017 but had inadvertently gotten some aspects wrong.

“It was nine months after the fact,” he said on the stand. “Certain facts weren’t clear.”

Kennedy — who quit the police force after the department said it planned to fire him as a result of the federal charges — said he took part in up to 200 drug raids a year and had not consulted paperwork about the Oct. 13, 2016 raid in Kensington before speaking with the FBI in a hurriedly scheduled interview in a diner parking lot.

Kennedy faced charges of conspiracy, obstruction of justice, and making false statements to the FBI — the most serious of which carries a maximum prison term of 20 years. He was not charged with the underlying theft, an offense apparently ruled out by the statute of limitations,

The two reputed drug dealers in the loft that was raided that day were charged with weapons and drug charges and held in prison for months. Police found four guns, marijuana, cocaine, and 900 oxycontin pills.

But the criminal cases against them were dismissed in 2017 after a Common Pleas Court judge suppressed much of the evidence against them, finding that police did not have probable cause to search the apartment.

Staff writers Jeremy Roebuck and Dylan Purcell contributed to this story.