Jan 28, 2022: According to a report by AP, a Philadelphia man who served 37 years in prison in a case tainted by perjured testimony was cleared of the murder on Thursday and then sued the US city over his 1984 conviction.

Earlier this month, Willie Stokes left prison after a US federal judge found prosecutors never disclosed that they had charged his chief accuser and prosecution witness with perjury after the trial.

The witness has said he was offered sex and drugs at police headquarters to frame Stokes in an unsolved 1980 dice-game slaying.

Late last year, one of two men wrongly convicted for the 1965 murder of Black civil rights advocate Malcolm X, sued New York state for at least $20m in damages after being exonerated.

In the case of Willie Stokes in Philadelphia, the trial witness who had identified Stokes as the killer at a preliminary hearing retracted his testimony at the murder trial, in what he later called a fit of conscience. Stokes was nonetheless convicted. The witness, Franklin Lee, was subsequently charged with perjury over his pretrial testimony, and Lee went to prison for it. Stokes never knew that until 2015.

Willie Stokes’ lawyer Michael Diamondstein, who handled Stokes’s successful federal court appeal, called the actions of police and prosecutors in the case outrageous. “They used perjured evidence to convict him and then charged the perjurer, and never told him. And then Willie was warehoused for 38 years,” Diamondstein said.

Meanwhile, the Philadelphia police department declined to comment on the case. The city did not immediately return a message seeking comment on Thursday.

After being exonerated, Stokes filed a lawsuit on Thursday accusing the city of “outrageous police misconduct”. The lawsuit names the estates of the now-deceased detectives as defendants.