AG-Elect Weiser Will Seek Settlement In Moses-EL’s $1.9M Claim

DENVER, CO – By Susan Greene for The Colorado Independent. Colorado’s incoming attorney general says he hopes to settle a lawsuit filed by a Denver man who spent 28 years in prison on a wrongful conviction. Because a settlement may be pursued, current AG Cynthia Coffman has asked to postpone the financial-compensation trial of Clarence Moses-EL, now scheduled for February.

Republican Coffman says she’s seeking the delay because Democrat Phil Weiser, who was elected earlier this month to replace her in January, “strongly favors settling” Moses-EL’s compensation claim rather than fighting it, as Coffman herself has chosen to do.

State law compensates people $70,000 for each year they spent in prison on wrongful convictions.
Weiser confirms he is “interested in exploring a settlement in this case.” But until he takes office, he’s in no position to comment, let alone offer a compensation settlement.

Without a firm commitment from the state to pay Moses-EL $1.9 million for his more than 28 years behind bars, Moses-EL’s lawyers are opposing Coffman’s quest to postpone the compensation trial from February until April 2019. A postponement, Moses-EL’s attorney Gail Johnson says, “is merely a tactic to further delay justice for Mr. Moses-EL.”

Moses-EL, who turns 63 next week, filed his claim last year after a jury exonerated him for the 1987 rape and brutal assault of a woman in Denver’s Five Points neighborhood. A man named LC Jackson – the first person the victim identified to police as her assailant, but whom police failed to investigate – confessed to the attack in court in 2015.

The case has made national headlines, partly because Moses-EL had been convicted solely on the victim’s statement days after the incident that his identity as her attacker came to her in a dream.
“A dream,” Moses-EL told this reporter from prison in 2006. “I’m in here because of a dream.”

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Image: Clarence Moses-EL in November 2016. (Photo by Marie-Dominique Verdier)