MILWAUKEE (AP) - A 28-year-old Milwaukee man accused of providing the gun used to shoot a liquor store customer has asked a court to overturn his murder conviction, saying a police officer who was fired amid allegations of misconduct planted a bullet.
Steven Hopgood is serving a 17-year prison sentence for felony murder in the June 2010 attempted robbery of Vincent Cort outside a liquor store. Another man, Laquan Riley, was convicted of firing the fatal shot.
Lawyers for the Wisconsin Innocence Project filed a motion for a new trial Monday in Milwaukee, saying a bullet found in Cort’s car helped convict Hopgood by lending credence to the testimony of a man who turned in Hopgood, Riley and a third man to police. The bullet was discovered by Milwaukee police detective Rodolfo Gomez, who was fired last year after a video recording showed him beating a handcuffed suspect. Gomez has been charged with misconduct in office and acting with excessive authority in that case.
Gomez was previously convicted of lying on a search warrant application and had threatened a witness in the Cort case, Hopgood’s attorneys said in their motion. They accused the officer of placing a bullet in Cort’s car to advance his investigation.
“… as a new expert analysis shows, the bullet is in a pristine condition entirely inconsistent with having been fired through a person’s body and ricocheting in a car,” they wrote. “As described further below, the new expert analysis strongly supports the view that Gomez planted the bullet. While typically such claims of police misconduct would be difficult to sustain, in this case they are not, because of Gomez’s recent conduct in this and other cases.”
Gomez’s attorney and the Milwaukee County district attorney did not immediately respond to messages left for comment. A Milwaukee Police Department spokesman said he was looking into the case.
According to court documents, Cort had stopped to buy liquor and was getting into the driver’s seat of his orange Oldsmobile, when Riley walked up to him in the parking lot, yelled “Give it up!,” fired a shot and fled. Cort drove several blocks before realizing he had been hit. He died later that night at a hospital.
No one was arrested for two years. Then a drug suspect, hoping for leniency and a $10,000 reward offered by Cort’s family, identified Riley as the shooter and implicated Hopgood and a third man.
Gomez found the .380-caliber bullet under a mat during a search of Cort’s car, supporting the drug suspect’s statement that he saw Hopgood gave Riley a .380 caliber handgun. According to the Innocence Project’s motion, a forensic expert determined the bullet was in “pristine” condition and didn’t look like it had been fired.
Charges against the drug suspect were dropped after he testified in court.
The motion claims there was little other evidence to convict Hopgood. Two other witnesses couldn’t identify Riley in court, and police received tips from other people identifying at least three other possible shooters.
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