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By Roni Ayalon
SEATTLE, WA – An innocent man imprisoned for nine years for a murder that he didn’t commit is now suing the police captain and prosecuting attorney that he claims racially targeted him and denied him his rights, notes the Seattle Times Editorial Board this week.
“It’s a miserable case from every angle,” the Seattle Times writes, recounting how Emanuel Fair, a Black man, was accused of murdering a woman in 2008 and wasn’t acquitted until 2019.
The woman, a 24-year-old in Redmond, “was sexually assaulted and strangled to death in her apartment,” said the board, adding investigators discovered that she had been at a Halloween party, where there were “numerous other men.”
“Detectives found crime-related evidence showing trace amounts of DNA that could have been Fair’s. But it was not a conclusive match. Other evidence pointed strongly toward several other suspects — all of them white,” the Seattle Times said.
Fair, the Times adds, is suing on the basis that the Redmond Police Department and the King County Prosecutor’s office singled him out “to the exclusion of everyone else because of his race and the fact that he had a prior criminal history,” as the detective at the times said, “If you do it once, you’ll do it again,” referring to Fair’s criminal record and pointing out that Fair was “the only African American at the party.”
Throughout the two-year investigation, the editorial board explains, “it became clear to Fair that he was being treated differently from other suspects. For instance, he was interrogated in an unmarked police car, without a lawyer, while another man under question, who is white, was permitted to have his father and an attorney present during a police interview. At one point, the other man was even granted immunity, according to Fair’s legal team.”
The original case detective, now a Captain at the Redmond Police Department, is “the main target” of the civil rights lawsuit, which argues that “King County Deputy Prosecuting Attorney Jeff Baird assisted the bungled investigation and engaged in malicious prosecution driven by ‘racial animus.’”
As a result, Fair spent nine years in King County Jail without being convicted of a crime, and, according to the Seattle Times, his family couldn’t afford his “seven-figure bail.”
The Seattle Times Editorial Board cited Fair’s “nine-year ordeal in the King County Jail, most of it spent in de facto solitary confinement, may well be a civil rights violation. At least as troubling is the fact that 15 years after the horrific murder of Arpana Jinaga, no one has had to account for her death.”
“Whether or not a jury ultimately finds that racism was the motivation behind this shoddy investigation, holding a person for nearly a decade pretrial — while legally presumed innocent — is an assault on basic human decency,” the Seattle Times opines.
