Man Spends 22 Years in Prison After Virginia Cops Hid Exculpatory Evidence and 'Scared Up' A Jailhouse Snitch Who Claimed He Confessed

Photo by Rennett Stowe.

By RYAN ABBOTT
A man imprisoned for 22 years for the murder of a friend claims in court that Newport News police withheld evidence that would have cleared him and scared up a "jail house snitch" to falsely testify that he had confessed to the crime.

David Boyce, who was exonerated by DNA evidence 22 years after his conviction, sued Newport News and "various former and/or current Newport News Police Department officers" in Federal Court.

According to the 69-page complaint, Boyce's friend Timothy Askew was robbed and stabbed to death in a Newport News motel in 1991. The two men lived together in one of the motel rooms, though Askew was murdered in another room, where he partied and had sex with an unknown man.

Askew was found the next morning by a maid, and Boyce says he was arrested, wrongfully convicted and sentenced to two terms of life imprisonment for robbery and murder.

"Boyce proceeded to spend the next twenty-two years of his life behind bars for a crime he did not commit," he says in the complaint.

He adds: "Even more tragically, Boyce's wrongful conviction and continuing incarceration were no inadvertent mistake. They were caused by the intentional, bad faith, or alternatively, reckless acts of defendant officers Thomas E. Bennett, the lead detective on the case, Patricia L. Montgomery, the evidence technician assigned to the case, as well as the intentional, bad faith, or alternatively, reckless acts of various former and/or current Newport News Police Department officer John Does 1-4, who, in the years following Boyce's conviction, were responsible for collecting, organizing, storing, retrieving and otherwise maintaining investigative materials and other police information, including that related to the Askew murder investigation."

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