Man Exonerated for Murder Settles With City of Louisville for $7.5M

A man exonerated of murder has reached a $7.5 million settlement with a Kentucky city he had sued for wrongful arrest and imprisonment.

Attorneys for Kerry Porter, who spent 11 years in prison after being wrongfully convicted in the 1996 slaying of Tyrone Camp, said in a statement March 12 that the settlement against the city of Louisville was recently finalized. Porter was exonerated in 2011.

The lawsuit said officers wrongfully conspired to convict Porter by fabricating evidence, using improper identification procedures and hiding evidence that would have cleared him.

Porter, now 56, maintained “the sum total of the evidence presented against him at trial was a tainted and coerced identification.” He also complained of “the false testimony of two jailhouse snitches.”

Josh Abner, a spokesman for the county attorney’s office in Jefferson County, which encompasses the Metro Louisville area, told the Courier Journal that the settlement was completed last week.

“Given the potential for continued expensive litigation, all parties agreed it was in their best interest to resolve the disputed claims at this time with no admission of liability,” Abner said.

When a judge dismissed the case against Porter, he cited a statement from a man who said someone else had killed Camp and DNA at the scene that didn’t belong to Porter.

The slaying remains unsolved.