A man from Maryland, John Huffington, has launched a lawsuit against five previous law enforcement officials after a staggering 32 years of wrongful imprisonment. This included a grueling decade on death row.
In January 2023, the former governor Larry Hogan granted him a full pardon, citing serious prosecutorial misconduct related to a double homicide case from 1981 in Harford County. Later that year, under Governor Wes Moore, a Maryland board approved $2.9 million as compensation for his ordeal.
In a heartfelt statement from Thursday, Huffington expressed, “It took many, many painful years, but the truth eventually came out.”
At just 18 years old when he was arrested, he lamented that neither of his parents lived to see him exonerated and freed from prison.
“Those years I spent in prison ruined my relationships, robbed me of the chance to start a family, and kept me away from my mother before she passed. I lost invaluable time with my father, who was struggling with Alzheimer’s by the time I got out,” he recalled.
Now 62, he has always maintained his innocence. After spending 32 years locked up under two life sentences, he was finally released from Patuxent Institution in 2013.
He was wrongfully convicted for the brutal murders often referred to as the “Memorial Day Murders”. Victim Diane Becker was tragically stabbed inside her RV, though her young son miraculously survived. The body of Joseph Hudson, Becker’s boyfriend, was discovered shot dead a few miles away.
A second accomplice in the crime testified against Huffington, received a conviction of first-degree murder, and served a 27-year sentence.
The prosecution relied on questionable testimony regarding hair found at the crime scene that they claimed matched Huffington’s, but this evidence would later be thrown into doubt.
The troubling nature of the evidence came to light in 2011. A revealing Washington Post investigation uncovered an FBI report indicating that the agent who examined the hair evidence may have used faulty methodology or even failed to conduct proper tests altogether. This vital document from 1999 had never been shared with Huffington’s legal team by Harford County State’s Attorney Joseph Cassilly.
In 2013, when new DNA testing techniques that weren’t around during his initial trials were employed, a Frederick County judge overturned Huffington’s convictions and ordered a new trial, revealing that the hair did not belong to him.
In 2021, Maryland’s highest court went as far as to unanimously disbar Cassilly, proving he had withheld crucial evidence related to the double murder case and had falsified information in subsequent years.
Cassilly, who insisted he’d acted appropriately, retired in 2019 and passed away in January. His brother, Bob Cassilly, who is currently the Harford County executive, issued a statement highlighting that his brother was a war hero who fought and was injured for his country while dedicatedly serving as the county’s state’s attorney for 36 years in a wheelchair.
Bob stated, “Joe cannot defend himself in this decades-old matter because he is now deceased, and only one of the defendants is still alive, almost 80 anyway. The Harford County government I represent has no involvement in this issue — the county was never the employer of the defendants in question.”
In addition to claiming damages from the former officials, Huffington is also suing the assistant state’s attorney, Gerard Comen, and detectives from the county sheriff’s office: David Saneman, William Van Horn, and Wesley J. Picha. Interestingly, all but Saneman are deceased, based on the lawsuit that was initiated on July 15 in federal court in Baltimore.
Saneman, when approached for his comments by the Washington Post on Wednesday, mentioned he hadn’t seen or heard anything about the lawsuit and decided not to comment further.
