Stefon Morant Wrongful Conviction Trial Targets New Haven Police

A federal civil trial opening Wednesday in Hartford will put decades-old New Haven police conduct under a courtroom microscope, as Stefon Morant seeks to hold the city and former officers accountable for what he says was a manufactured case that cost him more than twenty years of his life.

Morant was convicted in June 1994 of two counts of felony murder in the deaths of Ricardo Turner, a former New Haven alderman, and Turner’s partner, Lamont Fields. The two men were shot inside a second-floor apartment on Howard Avenue in New Haven in October 1990. Morant has maintained his innocence ever since, and the legal record has gradually moved toward supporting that claim.

No physical or forensic evidence ever connected Morant or a co-defendant, Scott Lewis, to the killings. According to Morant’s lawsuit, investigators initially focused on a major cocaine dealer and his brother as the likely perpetrators. That changed after a January 1991 police interview with a 16-year-old witness, who Morant alleges was pressured into implicating him and Lewis.

The lawsuit names former New Haven detective Vincent Raucci, as well as former officers Vaughn Maher and Michael Sweeney, among roughly half a dozen defendants. Morant alleges Raucci coerced witnesses, fabricated evidence, and withheld information that would have undermined the prosecution’s case.

The case began unraveling well before any formal exoneration. During a federal court hearing, one of the officers testified that Raucci had engaged in misconduct during the investigation and that a key witness initially told police he knew nothing about the murders. At Morant’s 2015 sentence modification hearing, a state’s attorney acknowledged in open court that the witness “was not honest in his testimony,” and that “it’s public information that a certain police officer involved in this had put him up to contriving a story.”

Morant was released in 2015. The Connecticut Board of Pardons and Paroles granted him a full pardon in 2021 and his convictions were expunged. The state later awarded him $5.8 million through a wrongful conviction claim. The federal civil trial beginning Wednesday is a separate action against the city and the individual officers, and it is expected to force a reckoning with how the New Haven Police Department handled cases during a particularly troubled stretch of its history.

That stretch was not unique to Morant’s case. According to the National Registry of Exonerations, more than a dozen people convicted in New Haven and surrounding communities from the 1980s through the early 2000s were later exonerated because of official misconduct by police or prosecutors. Student journalists at Yale University have spent years documenting potential additional cases from that period.

The pattern has drawn calls from activists and attorneys for Connecticut to conduct a comprehensive review of convictions from that era. So far, no such statewide review has been launched, though the pressure has grown as more cases surface.

The New Haven Police Department has faced sustained scrutiny over integrity questions tied to past leadership and investigative practices. The civil trial will not change Morant’s conviction status, which is already resolved, but it could establish a legal and financial record of what went wrong and who bears responsibility.

For Morant, the lawsuit is about more than money. It is about establishing, through a jury verdict if necessary, that specific officers did specific things to send an innocent man to prison. That distinction matters, both for the individuals named and for the city that employed them.

The trial is scheduled to begin at 9 a.m. Wednesday at federal court in Hartford and is expected to run for several days. Jury selection and opening arguments will begin the proceedings. The outcome will likely ripple beyond this single case, giving advocates for wrongful conviction review in Connecticut fresh evidence, and fresh momentum, for demanding answers about what else from that era has never been examined.