Allegations:
Several months after a woman was found dead in 1994 in a dumpster behind a liquor store, the officers approached and arrested an 18-year-old with a severe learning disability. The detectives interrogated the man for two days and used threats, physical force, and intimidation to coerce him into implicating himself and four other teenagers, including Swift, in the crime. In his false confession, the man said the group of male teenagers took the woman to a basement, gang raped and strangled her, and then threw her body in a dumpster. Based on this false confession, which was later suppressed, the officers brought Swift to a police station to interrogate him. The detectives intentionally misled Swift, who was 17 at the time, about the purpose of his detention and misled his family about which police station he was being taken to in order to isolate him and deny him access to counsel. During the interrogation, Swift repeatedly asked for his mother and a lawyer, but his requests were ignored. The detectives lied and told Swift he would be let go if he confessed and, after hours of interrogation, Swift confessed to raping and murdering the woman. The other three teenagers were also coerced into confessing to the rape and murder. Swift was found guilty at a bench trial, based entirely on the coerced confession. In fact, reports from forensic testing done before the trial revealed that the semen found on the woman did not match Swift or the other teenage defendants. Still, Swift and two of the other teens were found guilty and a fourth pleaded guilty. (The 18-year-old who had initially implicated all of them had the charges against him dropped.) Swift was sentenced to 36 years in prison and served 15 years before finally being released on parole in May 2010 as a convicted sex offender. Seven months after his release, Swift and two of his co-defendants filed a motion for post-conviction DNA testing, which matched the DNA profile of a convicted felon with a long history of violent sexual assault. Even though the defendant officers knew this man and, in fact, had interviewed him at the crime scene, they never arrested him or pursued him as a suspect. Swift and the other wrongfully convicted teens successfully filed a joint petition to vacate their convictions. In 2012, Swift was granted a certificate of innocence.