Cop framed 19-year-old who spent nearly 3 years in prison, suit says. He’s exonerated
Jorge Valle-Ramos was 19 years old and studying to become an X-ray technician before he was sentenced to a Florida prison in 2014 for a crime he didn’t commit, a new federal lawsuit says.
Ahead of sentencing, he was confident the charges against him would be dropped, according to the lawsuit.
“As it turned out, however, Valle-Ramos went to his trial and never came back,” a complaint filed July 12 in U.S. District Court for the Middle District of Florida says.
According to the complaint, his wrongful conviction and sentencing was the result of an Orlando Police Department detective manipulating witnesses into misidentifying him and framing him as a suspect.
Valle-Ramos was sentenced to nearly three years in prison on charges of burglary and grand theft at a jury trial in May 2014, Ninth Judicial Circuit Court records show. Most of his sentence was served at Taylor Correctional Institution in Taylor County, his attorney in the civil case, Jonathan Loevy, told McClatchy News.
He “spent his early 20s locked away from his friends and family, watching the life he had been proudly building for himself disintegrate,” Loevy said.
Valle-Ramos, now 31, of Orlando, fought for his innocence and was granted a new hearing in 2022 after one of the witnesses in his case, Bethany Szewczyk, a licensed attorney in Florida, said she misidentified him years ago, according to the complaint.
He was exonerated in March and the charges against him were dropped, court records show.
“I feel confident and continue to feel confident in my recantation of his misidentification,” Szewczyk told McClatchy News on July 15.
“I hope he’s able to lead a full and happy life,” she said.
Valle-Ramos is suing the city of Orlando, the detective he accuses of framing him and several unnamed officers.
The lawsuit is about bringing awareness and “to try and prevent what happened to me from happening to anybody else,” Valle-Ramos told McClatchy News.
Orlando spokesperson Ashley Papagni told McClatchy News that the city hasn’t been served with the lawsuit as of July 16 and that it doesn’t “comment on pending litigation” as part of its policy.
The police department didn’t immediately respond to McClatchy News’ request for comment on July 15.
“If it were not for an eyewitness bravely coming forward, Jorge would have to live the rest of his life with the badge of felony conviction,” Laura Cepero, Valle-Ramos’ lead defense attorney in the criminal case, told McClatchy News.
The crime he was accused of
The morning of April 9, 2013, three men were accused of breaking into another man’s home and stealing jewelry, the complaint says.
The homeowner told Orlando police the first burglar was between the ages of 17 and 20 and was “‘Hispanic, light brown color’ with an afro,” the complaint says.
A second witness and neighbor, Szewczyk, told police she saw “three young Hispanic men run and jump into a vehicle” afterward, according to the complaint.
She mentioned the driver had “‘poofy’ hair like an afro,” the complaint says.
Another neighbor police interviewed said she also saw three men run into a vehicle that morning — but “none of the men had an afro,” according to the complaint.
‘Rigging photo identification procedures’
The officer named in the lawsuit was a new detective when he was assigned to investigate the robbery, according to the complaint.
“Based on nothing other than a hunch,” he suspected Valle-Ramos was involved after he encountered police a week earlier, when he was a passenger in a vehicle that had been pulled over, the complaint says.
To link Valle-Ramos to the burglary, the officer prepared a photo identification procedure, pulling six photos from Florida’s driver’s license database, including an older image of Valle-Ramos in which he had an afro, the complaint says.
The day of the robbery, Valle-Ramos no longer had an afro and instead had long hair, the complaint says.
The detective showed the homeowner photos of six people, including the one of Valle-Ramos with an afro, according to the complaint, which says the other individuals shown didn’t have that hairstyle.
He’s accused of showing a second older photo of Valle-Ramos with “an even bigger afro,” the complaint says.
Five months after the burglary, he showed the six photos to Szewczyk, according to the complaint.
Both the homeowner and Szewczyk identified Valle-Ramos as a suspect, the complaint says.
“The Complaint alleges that the Orlando police officers acted indefensibly in pursuing Mr. Valle-Ramos’s conviction, rigging photo identification procedures against him and closing the case as soon as they manipulated two eyewitnesses into wrongly identifying Mr. Valle-Ramos as the perpetrator,” Loevy said.
Szewczyk would later testify, saying, “I had had doubts over the years and that I always wondered did I help send somebody innocent to prison,” court transcripts filed Feb. 26 show.
Other evidence withheld
At the scene of the robbery, there was a candy wrapper with fingerprints that didn’t match Valle-Ramos’, along with a cigarette butt, knife and backpack, according to the complaint.
The candy wrapper was tested for DNA while the other items weren’t, the complaint says.
“No physical evidence connected Valle-Ramos to the crime scene,” the complaint says.
“Without the unduly suggestive photo lineup resulting in (the homeowner) and Szewczyk’s manipulated confessions, Valle-Ramos never would have been convicted,” the complaint says.
The lawsuit says Valle-Ramos is seeking an unspecified amount in damages, including for physical injury, emotional pain and suffering, mental anguish, humiliation, degradation and more.
He “is still struggling to build an existence outside of prison” and is “still rebuilding the relationships that atrophied during years of neglect,” the complaint says.
“Valle-Ramos can never get back the years he spent incarcerated, but with this lawsuit he will hopefully hold to account those who are responsible for his wrongful conviction and get the compensation he deserves,” Loevy said.
This story was originally published July 16, 2024 at 8:19 AM with the headline "Cop framed 19-year-old who spent nearly 3 years in prison, suit says. He’s exonerated."
.jpg)