In 1975, when 12-year-old Edward Vernon told police he couldn’t identify suspects in a daylight murder that he claimed to have witnessed, angry detectives threatened to arrest his parents unless he identified the killers.

That threat set in motion a years-long chain of misconduct, incompetence, fear-based silence, and official malfeasance that resulted in the wrongful incarceration of three men for a total of 106 years.

More than 35 years later, prompted by a 2011 newspaper account of the trial that pointed out obvious discrepancies in Vernon’s testimony and described the shoddy police investigation, Vernon recanted his story, leading to the release of two men who had been imprisoned for more than 35 years for a crime they didn’t commit. At the time it was believed to be the longest wrongful incarceration in U.S. history.

The author of that 2011 newspaper article was 25-year-old Kyle Swenson, a reporter for the weekly Scene Magazine in Cleveland. Today, Swenson is a reporter for the Washington Post, and yesterday he spoke at the Cleveland City Club about the case, which he has written about in a new book, Good Kids, Bad City.

No physical evidence linked 17-year-old Ronnie Bridgeman, 18-year-old Rickie Jackson, and Ronnie’s 20-year-old brother, Wiley Bridgeman, to the robbery and murder of money order salesman, Harry J. Frank, on the sidewalk in front of a white-brick inner city convenience store in Cleveland’s predominantly black east side on May 19, 1975. The prosecution’s case depended entirely upon the testimony of a 12-year-old neighborhood child who told police he saw the crime. The three young men had alibi witnesses who told police that the arrested men were not at the store during the crime. Two witnesses to the crime failed to identify the suspects. Other neighborhood residents told detectives that the young men were innocent, and several residents provided police with the names and descriptions of other men who were said to have committed the murder. Even the FBI provided police with the names of other possible suspects.

But while some leads were investigated by Cleveland detectives, their follow-up was perfunctory. They were focused on the three young men in custody and seemed uninterested in information that might clear them. There was still no physical evidence to link them to the crime.

Despite the weakness of the prosecution’s case, all three men were convicted and sentenced to death. They escaped execution only because the United States Supreme Court struck down Ohio’s death penalty law in 1977.

Because the three young men had requested separate trials, their sentences were not identical. Thus, in 2003, twenty-eight years after being arrested for a crime he did not commit, Ronnie Bridgeman was released on parole. But his brother, Wiley, and their friend, Rickie, remained in prison.

By the time he was freed, Ronnie Bridgeman had changed his name to Kwame Ajamu in an effort to distance himself from his past. But he couldn’t escape from the reality that his brother and friend remained wrongly incarcerated. Ajamu began contacting people who might help him in his efforts to free Wiley and Ricky. In 2011 he contacted the young reporter, Swenson.

As Swenson recalls, he was not immediately convinced that Ajamu’s story was true. Even an inexperienced journalist knew that many people lie to reporters. At the time, Swenson told the City Club audience, “I was less jaded than I might be today.”

But after meeting Ajamu; listening to his story over a series of interviews; studying trial transcripts, police case files, and other documents; and talking to dozens of people about the case; Swenson became convinced of Ajamu’s innocence.

One person who would not talk to Swenson was Edward Vernon, whose testimony convicted the three men. Vernon had overcome drug addiction, which Swenson said was connected to the fear and guilt he felt about his role in the convictions. Vernon was afraid that if he became involved in the case again, he would relapse.

But even without Vernon’s help, in 2011 Swenson published a detailed account of the crime, the trial, and its aftermath in the weekly Scene Magazine. And nothing happened. Vernon would not come forward and recant his testimony and the legal system was unmoved.

“I thought there would be some redress,” said Swenson. “That something would happen. I felt that I had let Kwame down, that the story hadn’t done what we wanted it to.”

But the story had caught the attention of attorneys at the Ohio Innocence Project. They believed Ajamu, Jackson, and Bridgeman were innocent, and that Vernon was the key. They pressed him to come forward, and in 2014, he did. In November, 2014, Vernon spent a harrowing day testifying at a court hearing. He recanted his earlier testimony and withstood hours of aggressive questioning by a district attorney. As a result, Jackson and Bridgeman were freed.

Vernon testified that his participation in the original trials had ruined his life. He had told detectives that he couldn’t identify the three men. But detectives had threatened to jail his parents if he did not identify them. “You don’t know how much pain and suffering I have been going through throughout these years,” he said in court. “You and nobody else knows. You can ask a thousand questions and it is still not going to free me from the pain and the hurt and the lies I had to live.”

Today, Ajamu, Bridgeman, and Jackson are free men. They have received compensation from the State of Ohio for the time they spent in prison, and a lawsuit they have filed against the City of Cleveland is pending. They have forgiven Vernon. “You can’t live with that hate for decades,” Ajamu told Swenson.

This story is not just about a kid who lied, said Swenson. “This case was a system failure.”

When he first began talking to Ajamu, Swenson was unconvinced. He had thought that the criminal justice system had guardrails to prevent people from being wrongfully imprisoned. But nothing as solid as a guardrail exists. The safety features that do exist were simply inadequate.

Like any system failure, the sequence of events that led to the wrongful conviction was lengthy. Had things been done differently at any point in the failure chain, the outcome could have been different. Had the police been better trained, or had detectives been more diligent, had the detective’s supervisors noted the discrepancies in the case, had the prosecutor been willing to question the police investigation, had neighborhood residents not been afraid to tell the police what they knew, had defense attorneys presented a better defense, had the jury demanded more proof than the testimony of a frightened 12-year-old, had any of these things happened, three innocent men might have been spared decades in prison.

It is chilling to think that had the death sentences remained in effect, all three men would have been executed.

“One of my fears,” said Swenson, “is that people would see this case as old history, that things like this don’t happen anymore. But that’s not the case at all. These cases are not old. They are still happening.”

For a comprehensive account of the trial, investigation and aftermath, see Good Kids, Bad City, by Kyle Swenson: https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250120236

February 20, 2019