Darrell Siggers and Desmond Ricks: Witness Intimidation and Faulty Forensic Evidence

The available data on wrongful convictions in Wayne County between 1974 and 1993 shows strong evidence of two systemic issues: intimidation and coercion of witnesses by police, and poor handling of forensic evidence. In at least two exoneration cases in this data set — those of Darrell Siggers and Desmond Ricks — misconduct and mishandling of both witnesses and forensic evidence compounded one another and led to wrongful convictions.

Darrell Siggers spent 34 years wrongfully incarcerated after being convicted of first-degree murder in 1984. His conviction was based almost entirely on testimony from two witnesses, both of whom admitted to being intoxicated at the time of the shooting and both of whom had been standing a great distance away from the shooter. One of the two witnesses who identified Siggers as the shooter later told a relative that he had only identified Siggers after police threatened to have him arrested for the crime. Two additional witnesses who later came forward reported that they had told police another man committed the crime, but police had similarly threatened them with arrest unless they agreed to withhold their statements.

Siggers and his attorneys used these statements to challenge his conviction and request a new trial. In 2004, however, a judge denied the motion, arguing that the three statements about police intimidation of witnesses were not sufficiently credible. Siggers would need more evidence if he was to escape his wrongful incarceration.

Four years later, in 2008, an external event pointed Siggers toward the evidence that would ultimately compel a judge to vacate his conviction. A private investigator for a man accused of murder in Detroit found significant errors in the forensic firearms testing used to connect bullets from the crime scene to his client. The then-Chief of Police in Detroit requested an outside investigation by the Michigan State Police into the firearms and quality assurance units of the Detroit Police Department Forensic Services Laboratory. The report, released in September 2008, found serious, widespread errors in firearms testing and laboratory procedure.

Investigators from the Michigan State Police re-examined over 200 instances of firearms analysis conducted by the DPD and found serious inconsistencies in 10% of these cases, indicating that forensic evidence in as many as one in ten firearms cases may have been compromised. Noting that “essential criteria must show 100% compliance for accreditation to be achieved,” the investigation found that “the DPD firearms unit scored only 42% compliance with the essential criteria.”

The procedural violations documented included a lack of proper labels on 90% of evidence jackets, without which “the chain of custody is broken and the integrity of the evidence is compromised.” Investigators also found that “access to the firearms unit is not restricted” and that there was no consistent documentation of when evidence was removed from the firearms property room vault. Among the other violations were a lack of proper training and assessment of technicians, widespread failures to calibrate and maintain testing equipment, and no internal audits of work quality. These failures were “so severe as to demonstrate a systemic problem in all disciplines in the crime lab,” according to Wayne County Prosecutor Kym Worthy. The entire laboratory was shut down in late 2008.

After the exposure of these problems, Darrell Siggers made contact with Claudia Whitman, an experienced activist working to exonerate victims of wrongful convictions. Whitman put Siggers in contact with a firearms expert who could review the statements of the Detroit forensic analyst who had testified against him in 1984. The analyst had testified that bullets recovered from the crime scene matched bullets and shell casings found in the wood of the apartment across the hall from Siggers’ residence.

The expert’s review found it was highly unlikely that an analyst could have made a positive identification of the bullets at the two sites. Moreover, neither the bullets supposedly linking Siggers’ apartment to the crime scene nor the bullets taken from the crime scene itself had appeared in initial evidence reports. It was this evidence of false forensic testimony that finally led to Siggers’ legal exoneration in 2018.