Buffalo, New York – A federal jury on Wednesday awarded $80 million to the estate of a Buffalo man whose 1976 murder conviction was overturned after he spent nearly a quarter-century in prison.
Darrell Boyd, one of a group of black teenagers arrested for the murder of William Crawford (sometimes called the Buffalo Five), filed the lawsuit in 2022 seeking damages and alleging that Buffalo police investigators and Erie County prosecutors failed to uncover more than a dozen pieces of evidence that pointed to other suspects. The suit also alleged that investigators forced witnesses to make false statements referring to Boyd, and that prosecutors committed collective misconduct — making inappropriate or false comments in their closing arguments.
“Had it not been for Defendants’ misdeeds, Mr. Boyd would not have been tried, convicted, and imprisoned in violation of his constitutional rights, nor would he have spent 45 years asserting his innocence and fighting for his freedom in connection with a crime he did not commit,” Boyd’s attorneys wrote in the lawsuit.
Mark Poloncarz, a spokesman for the Erie County Executive, said the county extends its sympathies to Boyd’s family, but he believes the $80 million award is excessive and the county plans to appeal.
After a two-and-a-half-week trial, a federal jury in the Western District of New York took about an hour to return the sweeping verdict — which lawyers described as one of the largest monetary awards for a wrongful conviction case in the United States.
After Boyd was released from prison, he spent another two decades on supervised release before a judge overturned his conviction in 2021. The county chose not to retry Boyd or John Walker Jr., whose convictions in the case were also overturned.
A third man convicted of murder, Darren Gibson, was released from prison in 2008 and died a year later. One of the other teens was acquitted at trial, and a fifth teen testified against the others, which Boyd’s lawyers said newly released case files show was coerced.
Boyd and Walker settled their case against the city of Buffalo for about $4.7 million each. Walker won a $28 million judgment against the county earlier this year, which the county appealed.
“He lost his entire life because of this wrongful conviction,” said Ross Fersenbaum, an attorney with Wilmer Hill, one of three firms representing Boyd’s estate. “The jury heard how many years he spent in a maximum security prison. All the terrible things you assume happen in prison, happened in prison.”
Fersenbaum said being released on parole was equally difficult for Boyd, who suffers from post-traumatic stress disorder, anxiety and other ailments. He struggled to keep or get jobs due to the conviction and eventually began self-medicating and developed a substance abuse addiction.
Boyd was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer and died in 2023 before the trial could take place. Fersenbaum said his mother and son attended the trial every day.
“(The county) said his drug use was the cause of his problems, not the 27 or so years he spent illegally in prison,” Fersenbaum said. “This is offensive. The jury recognized that and returned this verdict.”
He added that the lawyers proved that there was a pattern and practice of misconduct at the time of the conviction, and not just a mistake committed by one employee.