Federal Lawsuit Claims Evidence Was Fabricated In The Wrongful Conviction Of Jordan Brown
PITTSBURGH (KDKA) - A federal lawsuit has been filed against four former state troopers and a former state police commissioner for the wrongful conviction of a boy arrested at 11 years old.
Then-11-year-old Jordan Brown was charged in 2009 in the shooting death of his father's pregnant fiancée, Kenzie Houk in New Beaver, Lawrence County.
Brown was exonerated by the Supreme Court in July of 2018. He was 20 years old. His attorney says he was robbed of his youth.
"You're a kid. They took that from Jordan. And they took it from him at 3 a.m., in the middle of the night, with flashlights pointed in his face, for a crime he didn't commit. The first place they put him was in a solitary confinement suicide watch cell, in an adult facility," says Brown's attorney, Alec Wright.
Wright says police fabricated evidence and hid evidence that would have exonerated Brown.
"Absolutely no evidence, direct or circumstantial, indicating that Jordan Brown committed this crime. There's not a single piece of physical evidence. No DNA. There were no fingerprints. There was nothing," says Wright.
Instead, they relied on the statement of a 7-year-old girl who changed her story.
"She was interviewed four times against protocol, on the day her mother was found dead. And most specifically, none of them were recorded except for the fourth of those interviews, which occurred after midnight," says Wright.
Brown is now 20 and hopes to become a civil rights attorney.
The lawsuit seeks compensation. State police have declined comment.