‘Ten years of stolen life can’t simply be brushed off’: After overturned Oakland murder convictions and charges against detective, two men sue OPD
OAKLAND — Two Bay Area men who spent years behind bars for faulty murder convictions are suing the Oakland Police Department and a detective who admitted he paid a key witness after previously denying she’d received financial assistance, court records show.
The lawsuit, filed Thursday by Giovante Douglas and Cartier Hunter, accuses Oakland police Detective Phong Tran of obtaining convictions against both men by paying off a witness and committing “clear perjury” to cover it up. The suit says both men spent close to a decade in jail and prison, until their convictions were quietly overturned by the Alameda County District Attorney’s Office in 2022.
Tran was charged in April with multiple felony charges, including perjury and bribery. The complaint alleges Tran lied under oath when he denied making payments to Aisha Weber, the woman who would testify she witnessed the 2011 fatal shooting of 23-year-old Charles Butler Jr., and implicated both men by their nicknames. The Alameda County District Attorney is also conducting a massive review of cases Tran investigated.
“Ten years of stolen life can’t simply be brushed off. Giovante and Cartier are now free, yet will always carry deep wounds inflicted by a broken system,” Lateef Gray, one of the civil rights attorneys behind the suit, said in a written news release. “This lawsuit is about helping to heal those wounds, reclaiming their dignity, and holding accountable those who planted the seeds of this profound injustice.”
The suit accuses Oakland police of failing to turn over key details of Butler’s killing to defense attorneys, in violation of state and federal law, and of systematically paying Weber starting in 2013. It says she would meet at an East Bay Starbucks and other locations to receive payoffs in the form of $100 and checks made out to her.
The suit also alleges that Weber was a confidential informant for Tran before Butler’s homicide, but that he attempted to conceal that and play her off as someone who’d randomly come forward with information. It describes both plaintiffs as family men whose lives were seriously disrupted by wrongful incarceration.
“Mr. Douglas was snatched away from his family and left to come home to a completely fractured relationship with his children,” the suit says. “Equally as important, Mr. Douglas is still trying to get reacclimated to life outside the penitentiary.”
In May 2021, Aisha Weber submitted a sworn declaration to the court saying that contrary to her testimony in the 2016 trial and earlier preliminary hearing, she doesn’t know who killed Butler Jr. and was several blocks away from the shooting. She agreed to testify only after Tran paid her “more than $30,000 in cash and checks” and brought her to a meeting with Butler’s family, she wrote, adding that she remains haunted by the guilt of implicating the men.
In February 2022, Tran responded with his own sworn declaration, admitting that in 2017 he worked with then-Capt. Ersie Joyner to authorize a $1,000 payment through the Crime Stoppers of Oakland program, which rewards tipsters after a conviction. Tran also admitted, though, that he paid her undisclosed amounts of money before the trial was over.
“This was not done in exchange for her providing information…I would estimate the total amount I provided to her was between $1,500 and $2,000, with the majority being provided after the trial,” Tran wrote, adding that he also loaned her several hundred dollars to recover an impounded car.
Prosecutors dismissed the charges against Douglas, 31, and Hunter, 34, and they were released in September 2022 and last February, respectively.