John Huffington served 32 years in prison for a double homicide in Harford County, Maryland, which he did not commit. He was later pardoned. Photo / Tom Jackman, the Washington Post
A Maryland man was twice sentenced to death for a pair of murders he didn’t commit and then served 32 years in a United States prison before being released.
He is now suing the prosecutors and police detectives who mishandled his case, though he has now outlived four of the five people he says caused his decades of wrongful imprisonment.
John Huffington, 62, battled the chief prosecutor of Harford County, Maryland, Joseph Cassilly, from his arrest in 1981 at age 18, through two trials and then his release in 2013.
And he played a role in Cassilly’s disbarment as a lawyer in 2021, an extremely rare sanction for a prosecutor, officials with the Innocence Project said.
The release was triggered after a reporter for the Washington Post discovered a letter the FBI had sent to Cassilly in 1999 saying the evidence used to convict Huffington was flawed and an agent had testified falsely – and Cassilly never told anyone.
The courts ordered a new trial, and more than 40 years later, Cassilly was still in office and still adamant that Huffington killed Diane Becker and Joseph Hudson in Abingdon, Maryland, in May 1981.
Rather than face a third trial, Huffington said he reluctantly entered an Alford plea in 2017, in which a defendant doesn’t admit guilt but acknowledges the evidence is sufficient to find guilt. He was sentenced to his 32 years of time served, including 10 years on death row.
In 2023, Governor Larry Hogan (Republican) pardoned Huffington, and later that year he was awarded US$2.9 million ($4.8m) under a state programme to compensate those wrongly convicted.
Even while awaiting his third trial, Huffington had begun working as a logistics manager for a company that salvages buildings and provides job training in Baltimore, then oversaw a staff of 25 as director of workforce development for the Living Classrooms Foundation.
Now he is suing Cassilly, as well as the assistant state’s attorney on his case, Gerard Comen, the Harford County government – now headed by Cassilly’s brother Bob Cassilly – and the Harford County Sheriff’s Office detectives David Saneman, William Van Horn and Wesley J. Picha.
All but Saneman are now dead, according to the lawsuit filed on July 15 in federal court in Baltimore. Saneman said yesterday that he had not seen or heard of the suit and declined to comment.
Joseph Cassilly died in January. His widow, Diana Cassilly, issued a statement today that did not respond directly to the lawsuit but said her husband “was an honourable man who dedicated his life in selfless service to our nation, the community and his family”.
She noted that Joseph Cassilly, the state’s attorney for 36 years, was “a dedicated servant to victims of crime” and that he was “a statewide leader in advancing modern prosecutorial techniques”.
The survivors of the other three defendants could not be reached.
“Harford County government has been improperly named in this case,” said Matt Button, a spokesman for the county.
“The Harford County State’s Attorney’s Office and the Harford County Sheriff’s Office are state offices, and their employees are state employees, not employees of Harford County government.”
The lawsuit alleges that Cassilly, as “the chief policymaker” for the prosecutor’s office “was a Harford County employee”.
“It took many, many painful years,” Huffington said in a news release, “but the truth eventually came out about my case. But here’s another painful truth: All of those years I spent behind bars damaged and strained my relationships,” which included prison officials refusing to allow him to attend his mother’s funeral.
And by the time he was released, his father was in his 90s and diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease.
“Neither of my parents ever got to see and understand my name was cleared and I was free,” Huffington said.
A co-defendant, who was a prime suspect from the start and testified against Huffington in 1981, was convicted in a separate trial and served 27 years after prosecutors did not seek the death penalty.
Huffington appealed his conviction, won a new trial, was convicted again in 1983, and again sentenced to death. In 1992, he was resentenced to life imprisonment and continued to challenge his convictions.
Then in 1997, the FBI sent a letter to Cassilly telling him they were investigating the FBI special agent who had analysed evidence in the case, Michael Malone.
Cassilly didn’t share that letter, Huffington’s suit says. In 1999, the Justice Department sent a letter to Cassilly “informing him that Malone had testified falsely” in Huffington’s case, after claiming hair evidence at the scene matched Huffington.
In 2011, while working on a story about the Justice Department’s refusal to inform defendants of the FBI’s use of flawed evidence such as hair comparisons, the Washington Post uncovered the letter to Cassilly and provided it to Huffington’s lawyers at Ropes and Gray, who represented Huffington for more than 30 years.
Tests done in 2013 showed Huffington was not the source of hair found at one of the two murder scenes. A new trial was ordered, and Huffington was out.
Huffington told the Washington Post in 2019 that his Alford plea “was easily the hardest decision of my life. I didn’t want to do that.”
But he felt he had worked into a position where he was advocating effectively for those who needed it, having an impact on a variety of lives, and didn’t want to risk it with another trial.
Further investigation revealed more evidence Cassilly had withheld over the years and misstatements he made in court about them.
The lawsuit cites five other cases in which Cassilly and Van Horn coerced witnesses into false testimony.
Cassilly said even after his disbarment that he had done nothing wrong and still believed Huffington was guilty.
Huffington filed the bar complaint that led to Cassilly losing his licence.
“These convictions,” said Antonio Romanucci, one of Huffington’s lawyers, “were fundamentally wrongheaded and never should have happened.
“John Huffington paid dearly for the insufficient investigation and prosecution with decades of his life, deep trauma to his personal relationships, and a derailment of his reputation, career aspirations and earning potential.”
The case will be heard by US District Judge Brendan Hurson in Baltimore.