Mr. Sapp, 39, spent 13 years in prison due to the deliberate misconduct of Cincinnati Police Officers, complaint alleges.
CINCINNATI — Last week, attorneys for Marcus Sapp, 39, filed a federal lawsuit on his behalf against the City of Cincinnati, its former Chief of Police Thomas Streicher, and eleven individual members of the Cincinnati Police Department (CPD). The complaint alleges that the defendants conspired to frame Mr. Sapp for assault and murder, costing him his freedom and 13 years of his life.
On the evening of January 5, 2008, two men armed with assault rifles entered the Oakley home of Andrew Cunningham and Tyler Irvine, who operated a drug enterprise from that location. Irvine was beaten but managed to flee the house; Cunningham was shot to death. The perpetrators ran up and down the stairs at the home.
The Cincinnati Police had a lot of evidence to work with. They had fragments of the blue latex gloves the assailants wore, which contained blood and DNA. They had cellphones collected from both victims, which allegedly contained information about the perpetrators. Most importantly, they had the account of Irvine, who provided them with the names of several potential suspects and physical descriptions of his attackers that matched the descriptions provided by other eyewitnesses in the neighborhood.
Marcus Sapp, then only 21, was not among the names provided as likely suspects, nor did he match eitherof the descriptions Irvine provided. It was also impossible for Mr. Sapp to have committed the crime, as he was recovering from a severe leg injury, wore a leg brace, and walked with a pronounced limp: he could not have run at all, let alone run up or down a flight of stairs.
Police investigated, and had what the complaint calls “a wealth of evidence” that the crime had been committed by a man who did match one of In two separate photo line-ups, Irvine identified that suspect as one of the men who had attacked him and Cunningham.
However, despite all the evidence pointing towards this man as one of the perpetrators, the detectives chose not to pursue him as a suspect. Instead—two years later, after the case had gone cold—the officers allegedly decided to fabricate a case against Marcus Sapp, though there was no probable cause and no physical evidence tying Mr. Sapp to the crime.
“Marcus Sapp had nothing to do with this crime, and the Cincinnati Police Department knew it,” says attorney David B. Owens, a partner at the law firm of Loevy + Loevy and Assistant Professor of Law at the University of Washington School of Law. “For reasons only they could explain, these detectives hid or destroyed evidence pointing to the likely perpetrator, and they manufactured evidence against Mr. Sapp. This was a frame-job, plain and simple, to put an innocent man in prison.”
In the complaint, Mr. Sapp alleges that the defendant officers fed information to a jailhouse informant to falsely implicate him, and used suggestive and unreliable tactics to coerce a false identification from Irvine. At the trial, the defendants suppressed evidence of the alternative suspect from the jury, including the fact that Irvine had twice identified a different person as the perpetrator. Without even a scrap of forensic evidence linking him to the crime, Mr. Sapp was wrongfully convicted and sentenced to 27-years-to-life.
Through 13 years of incarceration, Mr. Sapp maintained his innocence and fought for his freedom. Finally, in 2023, Mr. Sapp was released and his conviction was vacated, due to the work of the Ohio Innocence Project, which uncovered a trove of evidence the defendants had suppressed, including records of Irvine’s identifications of another suspect, notes on the detectives’ interactions with the jailhouse informant, and physical evidence from the crime scene that was never tested for DNA.
In 2026, Mr. Sapp was officially exonerated, and declared a Wrongfully Imprisoned Person under Ohio law.
Now Mr. Sapp has filed a civil rights lawsuit that names Chief Thomas Streicher, Detectives Colin Vaughn, John Horn, Douglas Lindle, John Heile, Cory Bonner, Fledhaus, Matthew Thompson, Brian Trotta, Bob Liston, J. Briede, William Kinney, Evan Evans, and additional unknown current and former officers of the CPD, as well as the City of Cincinnati itself. The complaint charges them with ten counts of violating Mr. Sapp’s civil rights under Ohio and federal law, including malicious prosecution, intentional infliction of emotional distress, destruction of evidence, and conspiracy.
“No one can give Mr. Sapp back the years he lost, and nothing can repay him for the physical and emotional distress he has been through,” says Owens. “But these officers conspired to make it happen, and the City of Cincinnati permitted it happen. For the good of all Cincinnati residents, these people must be held responsible for the illegal and unethical actions of these officers.”
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To read the complaint in this case, click here.