Joe Malinconico

Paterson Press

PATERSON — Two men who spent more than 24 years in prison until DNA evidence lead to their murder convictions being overturned have filed lawsuits accusing Paterson police officers of “egregious misconduct” during the investigation.

Eric Kelley and Ralph Lee Jr., who were cleared through the efforts a nonprofit group that works to free wrongly convicted prisoners, are seeking as much as $48 million, according to legal records.

In separate 47-page lawsuits that use almost the exact same wording, Kelley and Lee accuse Paterson police officers of coercing their confessions, fabricating evidence against them and hiding information that would have shown they were not guilty.

Kelley and Lee were in prison from 1993 until their release in 2017, when they were both in their 50s.

The New York-based Innocence Project spent 10 years working to prove they did not kill Tito Dante Marino, a 22-year-old college student and Peruvian immigrant who was fatally stabbed while working at his family’s video store on Union Avenue in Paterson.

The two men were cleared after DNA from a green plaid baseball cap, found at the crime scene and believed to have been worn by the killer, did not match either Kelley or Lee.

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The lawsuits, filed last month, allege that the high-profile slaying on July 28, 1993, triggered a “wave of outrage” and pressure on police to solve a stalled case.

During interrogations that went on for hours, the lawsuit claims, Paterson police officers threatened, struck and made false promises to Kelley and Lee.

“Mr. Kelley was particularly vulnerable to Defendants’ coercive interrogation tactics, in part because of a traumatic brain injury he incurred in a car accident several years earlier that resulted in a significant decline in his cognitive abilities — which would have been evident to Defendants,” reads his lawsuit.

Eventually, Kelley “falsely admitted” committing the murder, even though he didn’t know any of the facts of the crime, the lawsuits said.

Police used Kelley’s confession to get Lee — who has an IQ that’s in the lowest 2 percent of the population — to admit to the crime as well, the lawsuits say.

Detectives allegedly then “fed” the two men details about the killing and made it look as if the information originated from them, the lawsuits say.

During the investigation, a key witness who knew both Kelley and Lee told police he did not recognize the perpetrator when he saw him inside the video store, “meaning the perpetrator could not be either Mr. Lee or Mr. Kelley,” the lawsuits say. The detectives concealed that evidence, which could have cleared Kelley and Lee, according to the lawsuits.

The 11 former Paterson police officers named in the lawsuits are Vincent Amoresano, Albert Clark, the late Michael Finer, Peter Iurato, Timothy Jordan, Richard Munsey, Alex Nieves, Raymond Reid, Richard Reyes, Robert Smith and Louis Stell.

The lawyers for Lee and Kelley could not be reached for comment. The lawyer representing the city in the case said in a letter to the federal judge that Paterson would file a response to the allegations by Nov. 4.

The lawsuits contend that the alleged misconduct by the officers in the case reflected common practices used by Paterson police in the 1980s and 1990s. The lawsuits cite the recent FBI probe that produced the corruption convictions of seven rogue Paterson cops as evidence that the custom of misconduct allegedly continues “even up until the present day.”

Email: editor@patersonpress.com