D.C. judge awards compensation to NSB client Santae Tribble, for 25 years of his wrongful imprisonment

On Friday, February 26, D.C. Superior Court Judge John M. Mott issued his post-trial decision awarding Mr. Tribble $13.2 million to compensate him for 25 years of wrongful imprisonment, a “journey of injustice” which “subjected Mr. Tribble to all the horror, degradation, and threats to personal security and privacy inherent in prison life, each heightened by his youth, actual innocence, and life sentence.”

In 1980, at age 17, Santae Tribble was convicted of murdering a taxicab driver in a trial which relied largely on FBI forensic expert testimony concerning hair analysis now seen as exaggerated, flawed and unreliable, as well as the false testimony of witnesses who were coerced by Metropolitan Police Officers to provide false statements against Mr. Tribble. After DNA tests cleared Mr. Tribble of involvement in this crime in 2012, he was exonerated. NSB partner Nick Brustin and associate Alexandra Lampert litigated the damages trial last June, along with Jeff Gutman and NSB paralegal Colin Lubelczyk.

Read the Washington Post’s coverage of the award here.