The Byron Halsey Case

In a strongly worded opinion (pdf), a federal appeals court has ruled a man has every right to sue cops who allegedly coerced him into confessing to gruesome child murders he didn’t commit, resulting in him spending 22 years in prison.

The Third Circuit’s opinion revives Byron Halsey‘s lawsuit accusing two cops of violating his Constitutional rights by bullying him into saying he’d tortured and killed two small children. That decision overturns a lower court’s decision, which found the police officers had qualified immunity from his lawsuit.

In his decision Thursday, Philadelphia-based Third Circuit Judge Morton Ira Greenberg almost expresses disbelief (pdf) about the way investigating officers treated Halsey, who was 24 at the time of the murders and had just a 6th-grade education.

“Except when an innocent defendant is executed, we hardly can conceive of a worse miscarriage of justice,” Greenberg wrote for the Third Circuit.