Man who served 7 years sues Oakland over wrongful conviction

A man who was wrongly convicted of a 2006 shooting in Oakland has filed a $32 million federal civil rights lawsuit against the city, alleging that he was maliciously prosecuted.

The lawsuit by Ronald Ross, filed in U.S. District Court in San Francisco, accuses Oakland police of conducting a faulty photo lineup that ended with his being improperly identified by the shooting victim, Renardo Williams, as the shooter. Ross spent nearly seven years behind bars before being released last February.

"The defendant engaged in malice or a wrongful act when he coerced Williams to pick the photo of the plaintiff, even though Williams had said that the plaintiff was not the person who shot him," said the suit filed Friday by attorney Stanley Goff, which seeks at least $32 million in damages.

The city has not responded to the suit in court.

Ross had been found guilty of shooting Williams in the chest April 15, 2006, on Williams' doorstep at the Campbell Village apartments in West Oakland.

Williams told police that he believed he had been shot as a result of a previous dispute with a 14-year-old boy and his mother, Nikki Stuart. He said the boy had been with the gunman, whom he believed was the boy's father.

That man is Steven Embrey Sr., who has a violent criminal history.

But the investigating officer, Sgt. Steven Lovell, testified that he had put a picture of Ross - not Embrey - in a photo lineup that he showed to Williams as he lay wounded at Highland Hospital in Oakland.

Lovell said Ross' only connection to those involved in the case was that he was once a neighbor of Stuart's. He said he had presented the lineup to Williams to "show that the Police Department was at least doing something."

Williams told Lovell his assailant was bald. Lovell left his interview recorder off when Williams told the officer that none of the people in the photos fit the description of the shooter, Ross' lawsuit said.

"The defendant then indicated to Williams to pick photo number 4, which was a photo of the plaintiff," the suit said. "Williams felt that he owed the defendant a favor, decided to pick the photo of the plaintiff, indicating that he was the person who shot him. At that time, defendant turned on his recorder to take Williams' statement."

Williams picked Ross, who had a full head of hair, out of the six-photo lineup.

Lovell's police report says that when Williams identified Ross, he said he thought he was picking out the 14-year-old boy's father.

After that, Ross became the focus of the investigation. At his trial, three people identified him as the shooter: Williams, Stuart's son and another 14-year-old boy who claimed to have witnessed the shooting.

Lovell testified that he had never tried to find Embrey during the investigation. The officer, who retired from the Oakland force soon after the shooting, has not responded to messages from The Chronicle.

Ross lost an appeal of his conviction, but his case was taken on by attorneys from the San Francisco law firm Keker and Van Nest and the Northern California Innocence Project at Santa Clara University. Key witnesses in the case later recanted their identifications of Ross.