PHILADELPHIA — Attorneys for David Turner, 69, have filed a federal lawsuit on his behalf against the City of Philadelphia and several former members of the Philadelphia Police Department (PPD). The lawsuit alleges that the officers knowingly framed Mr. Turner for a crime he did not commit and, in fact, knew nothing about. Mr. Turner spent nearly four decades in prison due to this police misconduct, and now asks a federal jury to rule on damages for his wrongful conviction and incarceration.
“The Philadelphia P.D. deliberately framed Dawud Turner for murder by coercing a vulnerable teenage girl into falsely identifying him as the shooter,” says attorney Clara Presler, of the civil rights law firm of Loevy + Loevy. “Nothing can pay him back for losing half his life in prison, but this department, and this city, must be held accountable.”
On the afternoon of February 2, 1987, Nelson Diaz was shot to death in the hallway of his building at 426 W. York Street in Philadelphia. Several neighbors heard the shots, but no one saw the shooting.
Diaz’s 19-year-old girlfriend Rosemary Morales was getting high inside their apartment at the time of the shooting. After hearing shots, she looked out in time to see a man leaving the building. She reported to on-scene investigators that she had never seen this man before, but that he was clean-shaven, wore glasses, and had grey in his hair.
No part of her description fit David Turner, who lived across town, and who was in fact known to Ms. Morales by sight. But, faced with a murder with no eyewitnesses, the police knew they could manipulate Ms. Morales—who was pregnant with Mr. Diaz’s child, intoxicated on narcotics, and traumatized—into making an identification. For reasons known only to them, they decided to frame Mr. Turner. They transported Ms. Morales to the station and, over the course of the next 12 hours, the complaint alleges, they pressured and coerced her into identifying Mr. Turner as the shooter, going as far as threatening that they would charge her with her boyfriend’s murder if she did not cooperate. Eventually, she gave them the statement they wanted.
Turner was arrested, but his preliminary hearing was delayed because Morales had initially refused to testify. At the hearing, she returned to her original and true statement: that she had not seen Mr. Turner, and that she was too high to remember anything. In response, the officers submitted her coerced statement into evidence.
At the trial in 1988, Ms. Morales said she lied in the preliminary hearing, and repeated the false statement implicating Mr. Turner. Based almost entirely on this false testimony—with no physical or forensic evidence tying him to the crime—Mr. Turner was convicted of second-degree murder and sentenced to life in prison.
Though he had been offered attractive plea deals of 5-10 years, Mr. Turner never once waivered in his insistence of his innocence, refusing to plead guilty to something he didn’t do. And, sentenced to life in prison, he never stopped fighting for his freedom. He tirelessly pursued post-trial motions and post-conviction appeals, but it was not until May 2023—almost exactly 35 years after his conviction—that evidence was discovered that changed the course of his case.
Files from the PPD and the District Attorney’s office revealed that Ms. Morales, the chief witness at the trial of Mr. Turner, had descended into a mental health crisis following her interrogation by Philadelphia detectives. After she failed to show up for the original preliminary hearing, officers discovered she had moved out of the apartment, leaving a suicide note behind. When she was eventually located, she was arrested, placed on suicide watch, and charged with witness absconding. She was offered immunity on that charge in exchange for her false testimony at the trial.
All information about Ms. Morales’s mental health crisis and possible suicidality was deliberately withheld from the jury and the court during Mr. Turner’s trial.
Mr. Turner’s prior attorneys submitted a new Petition for Post-Conviction Relief in April 2024, and this time—with this new information—the Commonwealth did not oppose. Mr. Turner was released, and, in December 2025, the Commonwealth officially dropped all charges against him. “If the jury, already struggling to reach a conviction, had known Morales suffered from mental illness that rendered her an unreliable narrator of events and vulnerable to coercion, there is a reasonable probability of a different outcome,” they stated.
“It is bad enough that the detectives bullied a traumatized and vulnerable teenager into giving false testimony in the hours after her boyfriend’s murder, but then they further coerced her into telling their lies at the trial, by threatening to prosecute her for refusing to do so,” says attorney Tara Thompson “If any of this had come out at the trial, it is highly unlikely Dawud would have lost 38 years of his life.”
The defendants in Mr. Turner’s lawsuit are charged with nine counts of violating Mr. Turner’s rights under state and federal law, including fabrication of evidence, withholding of evidence, malicious prosecution, and conspiracy. They include the estate of Det. Jeffrey Piree, the lead detective in the case (who passed away in 2025), as well as PPD officers Walter Hoffner, Robert Ballentine, Richard Bova, Walter Campbell, Victor Marcone, and Christopher Starr.
Det. Jeffrey Piree had a documented history of misconduct—summarized in Mr. Turner’s complaint—which included multiple instances of similarly coercing witnesses who later recanted, resulting in several exonerations. In 2020, one such exoneration of one of Piree’s victims—that of Chester Hollman, framed by Piree for a 1991 murder—resulted in a $9.8 million pre-filing settlement, the largest in the city’s history.
“Piree was a bad cop,” says attorney Russell Ainsworth. “His favorite trick seems to have been threatening and coercing young women, people who needed drugs, and otherwise vulnerable people into giving false testimony to frame innocent people. He did it over and over again, to tragic results, and this department let him get away with it for years.”
In addition to the individual officers, Mr. Turner is suing the City of Philadelphia itself. As the complaint argues, the actions of these officers were part of a well-documented, decades-spanning pattern of police misconduct—and specifically of manufacturing cases—which had gone unchecked and uncorrected. “Despite the wealth of evidence regarding unconstitutional and corrupt practices, the City of Philadelphia failed to enact meaningful disciplinary systems for misconduct, or to implement adequate training procedures,” the complaint states. In 2003, the City’s Integrity and Accountability Office concluded that the PPD was “simply not interested in achieving true reform.”
“It was about frankly not caring too much about whether the defendant was actually guilty,” Philadelphia District Attorney Larry Krasner has said of his city’s justice system. “It is a system that without question disproportionately picks on poor people, and picks on black people, and picks on brown people. That’s what it does, that’s what it’s always done.”
Mr. Turner is represented by attorneys Jon Loevy, Russell Ainsworth, Tara Thompson, and Clara Presler of the law firm of Loevy + Loevy. In the past two years alone, Loevy + Loevy has secured jury verdicts for four different wrongfully convicted individuals totaling between $30–60 million each.
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To read the complaint in this case, click here.