A $45 million wrongful conviction award to an exonerated Ohio prisoner was upheld by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit on May 2, 2025. Miami Township and its Police Department (MTPD) had challenged the verdict, claiming that Det. Matthew Moore acted in bad faith and outside the scope of his employment when he engaged in misconduct that resulted in Roger Dean Gillispie’s wrongful 1988 conviction. But the Court rejected those claims, finding no error in the verdict, nor in a lower court’s ruling that the Township must indemnify Moore and pay the award on his behalf.

In 1988, Gillispie had been fired from his job at General Motors when former supervisor Richard Wolfe suggested to MTPD that Gillispie might be the suspect they were seeking in a series of sexual assaults against a trio of victims. Because Wolfe was a former MTPD officer, Chief Thomas Angel took his suggestion seriously and ordered Gillispie investigated. But Det. Gary Bailey and his supervisor, Sgt. Steve Fritz, “found that Gillispie did not meet the victims’ descriptions and had no criminal history,” as the Court later recalled.

In 1990, after the two detectives had left MTPD, Angel assigned the case to a new detective, Moore. He reinterviewed the victims with a new photo lineup; each one picked out Gillispie as her attacker. He was arrested and jailed in September 1990. Later tried and convicted, he remained incarcerated, pursuing numerous appeals, until he finally managed to obtain evidence of the decision by Bailey and Fritz excluding him as a suspect—evidence that was never shared with Gillispie’s defense counsel. 

He then filed a habeas petition in federal court for the Southern District of Ohio, which granted a conditional writ in December 2011. After more than 21 years of incarceration, Gillispie was released. A state court then vacated his conviction and ordered a new trial before his charges were ultimately dropped in 2017. He was declared wrongfully imprisoned in 2021. 

Meanwhile, Gillispie filed suit in the district court in 2013 against the Township, MTPD and Moore, both for withholding exculpatory evidence and for the photo lineup that the detective made for the victims—in which Gillispie’s photo was “larger and had a different background color” than “filler photos of police officers with darker skin than Gillispie and whom the victims may have seen,” as the Sixth Circuit later recalled. Moore also told two of the victims “that they selected the same individual, which may have increased each of the victims’ confidence in their selection while testifying at trial,” and he further added that he “believed that Gillispie had changed his appearance by dyeing and cutting his hair.”

The case went to trial. A jury found Moore guilty of suppressing evidence and making a suggestive identification, awarding damages to Gillispie. The Township objected to the verdict, arguing that it should not have to indemnify the detective because he acted (1) in bad faith and (2) outside the scope of his employment. But the district court rejected those claims. There was “ample evidence” that Moore’s conduct was reckless, but that is not the same as “bad faith”—and Ohio law requires a showing of the latter, which the Township failed to provide, as the Sixth Circuit later agreed. The Township further failed to provide evidence of the required showing to put Moore’s conduct outside the scope of his employment—that his actions “were either self-serving or wholly detached from the business of MTPD,” as the Sixth Circuit later put it. Finding no error in either decision, the appellate court rejected that part of the Township’s appeal.

It also rejected objections to the size of the award. The Township complained that Gillispie presented insufficient evidence of his pain and suffering. But jurors “reviewed the reams of evidence describing the long-term pain Gillispie endured throughout his wrongful term of imprisonment,” the Court noted, as well as “the long-term psychological and familial effects caused by a quarter-century spent behind bars.” In light of that, the Court refused to say that the award so “shocks the conscience” that it must be amended.

Accordingly, the district court’s order upholding the verdict was affirmed. Gillispie was represented before the Court by attorneys David B. Owens and Michael I. Kanovitz with the Exoneration Project in Chicago. See: Gillispie v. Mia. Twp., 2025 U.S. App. LEXIS 10733 (6th Cir.).  

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