U-M law clinic: Records prove convicted killer Mark Craighead is innocent after all
Detroit homicide detectives were waiting for Mark Craighead when he got home from work and errands in June 2000.
They wanted to question him about the 3-year-old slaying of his best friend, Chole Pruett.
Craighead said he asked whether he could call a lawyer.
They refused, and he reluctantly went with them.
During the next 17 hours, he said, the cops squeezed him to admit to killing Pruett. He wound up signing a vaguely worded confession that undercut his claim that he was locked inside a Sam's Club in Farmington Hills, working the midnight shift the night Pruett was killed.
A jury convicted him of manslaughter, and he spent seven years in prison.
Today, law students at the University of Michigan's Innocence Clinic are battling in court to exonerate Craighead after finding Sam's Club phone records that, they say, prove his innocence.
Former State Police polygraph examiner John Wojnaroski III, who gave Craighead two tests in 2009-10 to verify his claims, said Craighead is innocent.
"He's not the one," Wojnaroski said. "He didn't do it."
Man fights to clear his name after phone records raise more doubts about confession
Mark Craighead said he was unprepared for the way Detroit homicide detectives handled him when they questioned him about his friend Chole Pruett's slaying.
He said they told him they had a witness who saw him kill Pruett, and that he'd never see his wife and children again unless he confessed to killing Pruett in self-defense.
Craighead, 51, said he was so distraught and sleep deprived that he signed a false confession prosecutors used to convict him of manslaughter and lock him up for seven years.
"I trusted police officers," said Craighead, who had never been in trouble before and coached football for the Police Athletic League. "I never thought they'd mess me around like that."
The detective who obtained the confession, Barbara Simon, denied abusing Pruett or ignoring his request for a lawyer. She testified that he simply confessed three minutes into an interview.
Now, 10 years later, the Innocence Clinic at the University of Michigan Law School says it has found phone records that substantiate Craighead's claim that he was working the night Pruett was killed.
The clinic says the records show Craighead called his brother and a friend from a Sam's Club phone that night.
"You don't need to be Sherlock Holmes to figure out who was making those phone calls," said David Moran, a U-M law professor and clinic co-director.
Both men testified at a hearing last summer that Craighead often called them from work in the wee hours of the morning, and that he was the only person they knew at the Farmington Hills store.
In December, Moran and the clinic co-director, Bridget McCormack, asked the Michigan Court of Appeals to grant Craighead a new trial after Wayne County Circuit Judge Vera Massey Jones refused.
The Wayne County Prosecutor's Office, which opposes the request, didn't comment.
Assistant Prosecutor Janet Napp urged the appeals court to reject the request, saying Craighead should have told his lawyers about the phone calls before the trial.
"Why he chose not to share that knowledge with trial counsel is incomprehensible," Napp said in a court filing. "There is no evidence that (the) defendant made those phone calls."
Moran, whose students have gotten four men exonerated and one sentence commuted since 2009, is hopeful.
Craighead, who has struggled to find a steady job since his parole in late 2009, said he's running out of options to clear his name.
"They're my last hope," he said of the clinic.
What happened with police
Pruett, 26, a General Motors customer service worker, was shot to death overnight June 25-26, 1997, in his east-side Detroit apartment.
Painters discovered his body late the next morning, hours after police found his burning SUV in Redford Township.
The investigation went nowhere until three years later, when police focused on Craighead, one of the last people to see Pruett alive. Craighead lived 5 miles from where Pruett's SUV was found.
He said the detective who took him in for questioning turned him over to Simon, who taunted him all night.
She also subjected him to what he said he believes was a fake polygraph test, in which the examiner accused him of lying, Craighead said.
"He kept telling me I failed and that if I didn't tell the truth, they'd send me up the river for life, and I'd never see my wife and kids again," Craighead said. "It was a nightmare."
The next morning, Craighead said he signed a sheet of paper indicating that he had been advised of his rights.
He said it turned out to be a three-page confession -- in Simon's handwriting -- in which he admitted getting into an argument with Pruett, struggling over a gun, shooting his friend and fleeing in his SUV. At the time, Detroit didn't record homicide interrogations.
At trial in June 2002, Simon said Craighead confessed voluntarily, but she conceded she didn't ask him what they argued about or anything about the gun.
Simon, who retired in January, told the Free Press she couldn't comment on the case because she couldn't recall it.
What happened in court
A Sam's Club supervisor testified that Craighead typically worked the midnight shift, when the crew was locked inside the store to prevent theft -- then a store policy. But the boss couldn't remember whether Craighead had worked that particular night.
Early in deliberations, jurors asked the judge for time records to support Craighead's testimony that he was working.There weren't any. They had been destroyed in a fire sprinkler malfunction. Jones told jurors to decide based on trial evidence.
Jurors convicted Craighead of manslaughter rather than first-degree murder. And Jones sentenced him to 40 months to 15 years in prison, plus two years for the gun.
Craighead appealed, saying his confession should have been thrown out because detectives lacked probable cause to bring him in for questioning.
He lost and did his time. That would have been the end of the story, but for a lawyer who told Moran about the case. The Innocence Clinic tackled it in March 2009 because it was based entirely on what Moran described as a questionable confession.
Law students spent months prodding Walmart -- the parent company of Sam's Club -- and AT&T for phone records that might substantiate Craighead's recollection that he called friends from work.
In August 2009, AT&T produced 42 pages, which showed someone had called Craighead's brother Randle Craighead, and Craighead's friend, Detroit radio personality Ike (Megaman) Griffin, between 11:01 p.m. and 2:27 a.m. Police found Pruett's burning SUV at 2:35 a.m.
Jones rejected the clinic's request for a new trial, even though both men said Craighead frequently called them from work, and they didn't know anyone else at the store.
She said the records didn't prove Craighead made the calls, that he could have gotten out of the store without tripping the alarm, and that the issue should have been raised before trial.
"I was singularly unimpressed with all of these phone records," Jones said. "And before I would upset a jury verdict, I want to be sure that there is really good reason so do so..."
The clinic appealed.
Moran predicted that it would take two to three months for the appeals court to decide whether to review the case, and another year to issue a decision.
What a father and juror say
Pruett's father said Craighead is guilty.
"Mark was no dummy," said Charles Pruett Sr., a retired bus driver. "He would not have confessed to something he didn't do. ... You'd expect that of a teenager, but not a grown man."
But Richard Leo, a law professor at the University of San Francisco and an expert on confessions, said innocent people often confess.
He said 25% of the prisoners exonerated by DNA falsely confessed or made incriminating statements.
"Interrogations aren't designed primarily to get at the truth, but to get a confession from someone the police have decided is guilty," Leo said.
Janice Bruhnsen, a domestic violence advocate who served on Craighead's jury, said jurors were torn between the confession and Craighead's claim of innocence.
"I was one of the more sympathetic jurors and wanted him to be innocent," Bruhnsen said, explaining why she asked the judge for the time sheets.
Had the time sheets or phone records been produced, she said, the verdict likely would have been different.
Asked what should happen now, she said: "I think they should give him a new trial."
Contact David Ashenfelter: dashenfelter@freepress.com
