A Connecticut man who served 30 years in prison for a murder he did not commit should be compensated because one local police officer failed to disclose key evidence and another sat by as the state police fed facts to an informant, his attorneys told a federal jury Monday afternoon.

During opening statements in Ralph "Ricky" Birch's civil rights case against town of New Milford Officers Steven Jordan and David Shortt, David A. Lebowitz of Kaufman Lieb Lebowitz & Frick LLP, said the two officers bent the rules and helped ensure Birch's conviction for the 1985 murder of Everett Carr.

According to Lebowitz, police zeroed in on Birch and associate Shawn Henning because they were identified as local burglars. Lebowitz said the young men were essentially homeless in 1985 and were stealing electronics to pay for drugs.

"Being a teenager with a drug problem does not make you a murderer," Lebowitz told the jury.  

Birch and Henning drove an old Buick with a loud muffler, and a witness said a loud car may have been heard leaving the home where Carr was beaten, stabbed 27 times and had his throat slit.

Police theorized that the killing occurred when Carr startled burglars who broke into his home, Lebowitz said.

But he told jurors that no traces of Birch or Henning were ever found inside Carr's home. Small, bloody shoe prints at the scene matched neither man. The Buick contained no blood evidence. Eventually, unknown DNA turned up at the crime scene.  

Officer Jordan failed to raise red flags when $1,000 in cash turned up during a thorough search several days after the killing, Lebowitz told the jury. That finding should have been fully vetted by the police and disclosed to Birch's defense attorney because it ran against the theory that Carr's home had been burglarized.

"Ricky never heard the real killers left behind a cash-stuffed envelope," Lebowitz said.

Rather than properly process the finding, Jordan wrote a receipt and gave the money to the victim's daughter, Lebowitz indicated.

"He made the choice, and Ricky paid the price," he said.

Later, Shortt, the other officer, failed to speak up when a Connecticut State Police interrogator fed facts to a Virginia jailhouse informant who knew Birch from a juvenile detention stint and claimed Birch had confessed to killing Carr, Lebowitz said.  

The snitch, Todd Cocchia, couldn't keep his facts straight, so the state police gave him details that helped him spin a coherent narrative, according to Lebowitz.

"Shortt just watched and let it happen," the attorney told the jury.

The informant became a key witness at trial.

The two local cops' alleged failures were factors in Birch's more than 10,000 days of incarceration, Lebowitz indicated. Birch was in prison from age 22 until age 52, when the state, in 2019, tossed his first conviction and refused to try him a second time. He is now 58.

Lebowitz said that while society generally trusts the police, juries must remedy any wrongs caused by bad police work. 

He said the violence and the cash left behind suggested a crime of passion, not a burglary.

While Jordan is present for the trial, Shortt died in 2019. His estate is representing his interests in the case.

Arguing for Jordan and Shortt's estate, Elliot B. Spector of Hassett & George PC, pointed to state investigators as the source of the trouble.

Spector said the state police took over the scene just three hours after the initial call and investigated Carr's death for three years.

New Milford officers "played a minimal role in this investigation," he told the jury, defending Jordan and Shortt as officers who "did live up to their obligations." 

While Spector agreed it was plausible a burglar could have found and taken the $1,000, he noted that investigators didn't find the money until the third day of their search.

He suggested that the working theory — that of a burglary gone bad — was solid because it was also plausible that a hypothetical burglar might not have seen the cash.

It was unclear where exactly the money was found, he indicated.

Spector said Cocchia promised to tell the truth when testifying during Birch's probable cause hearing and trial. The police took him at his word, Spector indicated.

Cocchia didn't recant until 27 years later, Spector said.

He urged jurors not to conclude that Shortt was the cause of Cocchia's false statement.

Two witnesses testified Monday after opening statements. 

Norbert Lillis, the deputy chief of the New Milford Police Department, said he was thrown off the case after interrogating Birch and Henning days after the stabbing and concluding that neither was at fault.  

William Bodziak, a retired FBI shoe and tire print expert, said several bloody prints at the scene were in his opinion left by someone wearing a size 9 shoe or smaller.  The pattern didn't match one set of shoes and one set of boots owned by Birch, who wore a size 10.5, or Henning's shoes, size 11.5.

Bodziak also testified in the O.J. Simpson trial and at the Oklahoma City bombing trial, he told the jury.

The state of Connecticut settled with Birch and Henning for $12.6 each in 2024.

The state's settlement scuttled accusations that Dr. Henry C. Lee, a renowned forensics expert who for more than two decades served as the director of the Connecticut State Forensic Laboratory, testified that a towel recovered from an upstairs bathroom at the crime scene had tested positive for the presumptive presence of blood.

When asking lawmakers to okay the settlement in 2024, Deputy Attorney General Eileen Meskill said that the towel was never tested and that subsequent tests proved that a small red stain on the towel was not blood.

Birch is accusing Shortt of failure to intervene in the fabrication of evidence and Jordan of suppressing material favorable evidence, both violations of federal civil rights laws.

Other counts include statutory and common-law negligence and negligent infliction of emotional distress claims under Connecticut state law.

He is seeking compensatory and punitive damages.

Eight men and no women are on the jury. The panel includes a business owner, a company president, a hospital employee, a financial expert and two engineers.

U.S. District Judge Victor A. Bolden and attorneys for both sides on Monday morning whittled individuals with strong opinions about the police and the criminal justice system from the initial venire.

The trial is expected to last one to two weeks.

Birch is represented by David A. Lebowitz, Douglas E. Lieb and Alyssa Isidoridy of Kaufman Lieb Lebowitz & Frick LLP.

The New Milford defendants are represented by Elliot B. Spector, Jeffrey O. McDonald and Forrest Noirot of Hassett & George PC.

The case is Birch v. New Milford et al., case number 3:20-cv-01790, in the U.S. District Court for the District of Connecticut.

--Editing by Rich Mills.