Jordan Brown’s lawsuit against the Pennsylvania State Police approaches

More than six years after he was exonerated due to insufficient evidence, a man accused of shooting his father’s pregnant fiancée as an 11-year-old is asking a federal jury to pay the Pennsylvania State Police for the years he spent there , youth penal system comes into being.

Jordan Brown’s federal civil rights case is expected to begin in Pittsburgh early next month, nearly 16 years after he was first charged in the February 2009 death of Kenzie Marie Houk in her rented farmhouse in Wampum, Pennsylvania.

Pennsylvania is among about a dozen states that do not have wrongful conviction compensation laws, leaving a lawsuit for Brown’s legal option to seek damages for allegations that four former police officers fabricated reports and falsified evidence.

Brown, now 27, was convicted in juvenile court of first-degree murder and the killing of an unborn child. He was released from prison at age 18 before the state Supreme Court overturned his conviction in July 2018.

The four former police officers – one of whom is now deceased – named in the lawsuit played a leading role in the murder investigation, conducting interviews and writing the probable cause affidavit that charged Brown. They are being sued over allegations that they violated his federal civil rights by filing charges for which there was no probable cause and by fabricating evidence. State Police spokesman Myles Snyder said the agency would not comment on the lawsuit, in keeping with its policy regarding pending litigation.

The officers argued they had not fabricated or concealed evidence or violated Brown’s constitutional rights. They said they had probable cause to arrest him, considering his ability and opportunity to commit the crime and his possession of a 20-gauge shotgun.

Brown is seeking damages for emotional and psychological harm, lost wages, legal fees and time spent in custody. His lawyer, Alec Wright, said Brown was in juvenile facilities for three or four years before he was old enough to understand his predicament.

“At this point, Jordan has two options,” Wright said. “Succumb to the pain of not seeing your family, not celebrating birthdays, not being free, or do your best to get through this situation that your family says has a finite end. He chose the latter.”

According to the National Registry of Exonerations, about 800 civil awards to exonerees since 1989 totaled about $3.3 billion, or about $325,000 for each year of wrongful imprisonment. For Pennsylvania, the registry lists 32 civil awards with a total value of $110 million.

Jordan Brown is not listed on the National Exoneration Registry because the registry requires that the defendant have evidence that was not presented at trial. In his case, the juvenile criminal case was overturned due to insufficient evidence.

“It’s hard to imagine a more horrific experience than being convicted of a crime you didn’t commit,” said Jeffrey Gutman, a law professor at George Washington University who manages the exoneration database. “You have lost your freedom, your livelihood, your family relationships and possibly your health, often for decades, for something you did not do. Therefore, society owes people who have had terrible dice rolls a cure for it.”

Jordan and his father, Chris Brown, were living with 26-year-old Houk and their two girls, ages 4 and 7, when Houk was shot in her bed. Chris Brown had gone to work and was eliminated as a suspect.

Police and prosecutors were pursuing the theory that Jordan Brown, then a fifth-grader, used a 20-caliber youth-model shotgun to kill Houk just before he and Houk’s 7-year-old daughter walked down their snow-covered driveway to meet the morning school bus.

The shooting came to light when a crew collecting firewood noticed Houk’s four-year-old daughter standing at the front door crying around 9 a.m. on Feb. 20, 2009. At 3 a.m. the next day, Brown was charged as an adult. although his case was later transferred to juvenile court. In 2012, Brown was declared delinquent, which is the juvenile equivalent of a guilty verdict in Pennsylvania.

Houk’s sister, Jennifer Kraner, said she was in the juvenile courtroom for Brown’s trial and believes he did it.

“Obviously there will never be justice in bringing her back,” Kraner said. “But it doesn’t make us feel good that this will make him a millionaire. It seems absolutely ridiculous.”

An important piece of evidence for the prosecution came from interviews that investigators conducted with the seven-year-old. The girl said, according to the lawsuit, that she saw Jordan Brown with two guns and that “she heard a ‘big bang’ before Jordan came out and they walked to the bus.”

Brown argued in the lawsuit that the interviews “contained numerous inconsistencies and contradictions” and were not reliable.

The state Supreme Court freed Brown, unanimously saying that investigators presented no eyewitnesses, no DNA or fingerprint evidence and no blood or biological material on the boy’s clothing.

Police investigated Houk’s ex-boyfriend, who was just 10 miles from her home, but eliminated him as a suspect. Houk had told him that a paternity test had shown that Houk’s 4-year-old daughter was not his child, and the night before Houk’s murder he confronted Houk’s parents at a bar, the lawsuit says.

The lawsuit alleges that the ex-boyfriend made death threats against Houk and several of her relatives, although he denied this in his testimony at Brown’s juvenile court hearing.

A 2014 summary of the state Supreme Court case said the ex-boyfriend told police in a voluntary interview that he was in the basement of his parents’ home after 10 p.m. the night before Houk’s murder . At Brown’s hearing, he said he left around 9 a.m. the next morning to return a car part to a store.

An examination of his hands revealed no gunshot residue, and there was still snow on his truck, which investigators said would not have survived the drive to the home where Houk was killed, the court summary said.

Brown told police he saw a black pickup truck on the property the morning of the murder, a description that matched his ex-boyfriend’s Ford F-150. Wright believes there has been no investigation into the murder since his client was released by the state Supreme Court. Lawrence County District Attorney Joshua Lamancusa did not return calls seeking comment.

When the lawsuit was filed four years ago, Brown told the Associated Press he hoped a favorable verdict could dispel any remaining doubts about his innocence.

“You don’t just win an injustice lawsuit without cause,” he said.

Brown currently runs a beer distribution business in western Pennsylvania with his father and plans to finish his college degree, Wright said.