Ayers v. City of Cleveland, No. 13-3413 (6th Cir. 2014)
Annotate this CaseIn 1999, 76-year-old Dorothy Brown was found murdered in her Cleveland apartment, having suffered blunt-trauma injuries to the head. She was partially clothed, and foreign human pubic hairs were collected from her mouth. Ayers spent 12 years in prison based on a state-court murder conviction for Brown’s murder that was later overturned. He was freed in 2011 after the Sixth Circuit granted his habeas corpus petition, finding that the detectives leading the investigation (Cipo and Kovach) had violated Ayers’s Sixth Amendment right to counsel by using a fellow inmate to induce Ayers to make allegedly incriminating statements without the assistance of counsel. Ayers filed a 42 U.S.C. 1983 suit against Cipo, Kovach, and others, alleging a Brady violation and malicious prosecution. The district court denied Cipo and Kovach’s motion for summary judgment on qualified-immunity grounds, and a jury found in favor of Ayers and awarded $13 million in damages. The Sixth Circuit affirmed, declining to address the denial of summary judgment, denial of a preverdict motion for judgment as a matter of law, the sufficiency of the evidence, and denial of a motion in limine to exclude certain expert testimony because those arguments were procedurally forfeited.
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