After spending 20 years maintaining her innocence in a homicide case, a Black woman has finally been vindicated with a $2.9 million settlement from the city of Louisville, Kentucky, for her wrongful conviction.
Louisville Metro Government settled a lawsuit with Johnetta Carr last month for her claims of being wrongfully convicted of her ex-boyfriend’s murder, for which she spent years in prison and on parole, Courier Journal reported. As part of the settlement, the city requires Carr to drop all claims related to the lawsuit, while Louisville Metro denies any liability or fault in the case.
Carr was only 16 when she was convicted of the killing of Planes Adolphe, a Haitian-born cab driver she was dating at the time. Adolphe was found strangled outside his Louisville apartment building in October 2005.
Her lawsuit claimed that when she was arrested the following January, police disregarded DNA evidence from the murder weapon that didn’t match her and relied instead on coerced statements from witnesses and jailhouse informants. As a result, in 2008, Carr entered an Alford plea to charges including manslaughter, conspiracy to commit burglary and robbery, and evidence tampering, that allowed her to maintain her innocence while also acknowledging that prosecutors had enough evidence to convict her.
Carr was sentenced to 20 years in prison but was released on parole in 2009. A decade later, in 2019, former Governor Matt Bevin granted her a pardon, one of hundreds issued before leaving office.
The following year, Carr filed a federal lawsuit in U.S. District Court against the city and seven Louisville Metro Police officers, accusing them of violating her civil rights by failing to investigate a key alternate suspect. The lawsuit alleged that lead detective Tony Finch coerced a co-defendant, Carla Sowers, into falsely implicating Carr in the murder, claims Sowers almost immediately recanted. It also cited a jailhouse informant who initially told police Carr committed the crime but later took back the statement.
Carr’s attorney, civil rights lawyer Elliot Slosar, said she has always had a solid alibi supported by witnesses who said she was spending the night at a friend’s house at the time of Adolphe’s murder. Carr’s case marks the second wrongful conviction lawsuit brought against Finch. In 2012, Kerry Porter sued Finch over alleged misconduct in a separate murder investigation that resulted in a $7.5 million settlement.
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