{"id":12920,"date":"2023-06-04T03:49:08","date_gmt":"2023-06-04T08:49:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/ustower.net\/?p=12920"},"modified":"2023-06-04T03:49:12","modified_gmt":"2023-06-04T08:49:12","slug":"21-years-after-filing-a-lawsuit-in-prison-the-man-was-released-in-the-michigan-hunter-murder","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/ustower.net\/?p=12920","title":{"rendered":"21 years after filing a lawsuit in prison, the man was released in the Michigan Hunter Murder"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

DETROIT \u2014 A man who spent nearly 21 years in prison<\/a> for the deaths of two Michigan hunters filed a lawsuit Friday seeking $1.02 million for wrongful convictions, just a day after a prosecutor dropped murder charges<\/a> and ruled out a second trial.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cJeff Titus is 71 years old. He was robbed of 21 years of his prime,\u201d attorney Wolf Mueller said. \u201cWho knows how long he will live? He doesn\u2019t have a day to waste.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Titus\u2019 convictions were thrown out in February<\/a> based on newly discovered evidence, Mueller said, a key threshold to get compensation from the state.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Titus has long declared his innocence in the fatal shootings of Doug Estes and Jim Bennett near his Kalamazoo County land in 1990.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

He was released from prison \u2014 and a life sentence \u2014 earlier this year when authorities acknowledged that Titus\u2019 trial lawyer in 2002 was never given a police file with details about another suspect. Thomas Dillon was an Ohio serial killer whose five victims<\/a> between 1989 and 1992 were hunting, fishing or jogging.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

There is no dispute that the failure to produce the file violated Titus\u2019 constitutional rights.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

 \u201cThe \u2018new evidence\u2019 demonstrates that (Titus) is factually innocent of the crime,\u201d his lawsuit states.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Under Michigan law, someone who is wrongly convicted can be eligible to receive $50,000 for each year in prison.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cWe have not yet received the complaint and will evaluate it when we do,\u201d said Kimberly Bush, spokeswoman at the attorney general\u2019s office.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Dillon died in an Ohio prison in 2011. The file found at the county sheriff\u2019s office revealed that a woman and her son had identified him as the man in a car in a ditch near the Michigan murder scene. The woman also described a car that resembled one owned by Dillon\u2019s wife<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Nbcnews<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

DETROIT \u2014 A man who spent nearly 21 years in prison for the deaths of two Michigan hunters filed a lawsuit Friday seeking $1.02 million for wrongful convictions, just a day after a prosecutor dropped murder charges and ruled out a second trial. \u201cJeff Titus is 71 years old. He was robbed of 21 years of his prime,\u201d attorney […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":6,"featured_media":12921,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1154],"tags":[4435,1584,3064,7843],"class_list":["post-12920","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-trending","tag-litigation","tag-murder","tag-prisons","tag-release"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/ustower.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12920","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/ustower.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/ustower.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ustower.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/6"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ustower.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=12920"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/ustower.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12920\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":12922,"href":"https:\/\/ustower.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12920\/revisions\/12922"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ustower.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/12921"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/ustower.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=12920"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ustower.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=12920"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ustower.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=12920"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}