MD man who spent 32 years in prison sues over wrongful conviction

A Maryland man who was wrongfully convicted of a double murder and incarcerated for three decades is suing the Harford County government and the law enforcement officials allegedly responsible for framing him.

John Huffington, who now lives in Worcester County, was 18 years old when he was arrested and sentenced to life for the murders of Diane Becker and Joseph Hudson Jr. in 1981. He was retried in 1983 and given another life sentence.

He spent 32 years in prison, including a decade on death row.

He was released in 2013 after The Washington Post obtained a letter from the FBI to Harford County State’s Attorney Joseph Cassilly stating that an agent had “testified falsely” about the hair evidence in Huffington’s case. The Post provided the letter to Huffington’s attorneys, something Cassilly had not done.

The withholding of exculpatory evidence led to Cassilly’s disbarment in 2021, after he had retired. Cassilly served as the county’s top prosecutor for 36 years.

A new trial was ordered, but rather than face a third trial and risk life in prison, he reluctantly entered an Alford plea, in which a defendant denies guilt but acknowledges that such a plea is in their best interests. He was sentenced to time served, meaning he didn’t have to return to prison.

Huffington on July 15 sued the Harford County government and several law enforcement officials, including Cassilly, allegedly involved in concealing exculpatory evidence in his case. He brings claims of malicious prosecution, false arrest and imprisonment, deprivation of liberty without due process, and more.

“I’m doing it because I owe it to my family,” Huffington said at a news conference Thursday in downtown Baltimore. “I owe it to a lot of people.”

“Neither of my parents ever got to see and understand my name was cleared and I was free,” he stated in a news release.

The lawsuit alleges both the fabrication of evidence and the withholding of exculpatory evidence, said John Marrese, one of Huffington’s lawyers. It alleges Cassilly’s office and the Harford County Sheriff’s Office “embarked upon a knowingly improper investigation.”

“There was no search for truth, certainly not a proper one in his case,” John Marrese, one of his lawyers, said at the news conference. “There was a decision to convict, the truth be damned.”

Many of the defendants are dead; the personal representatives of their estates are named.

Former Gov. Larry Hogan pardoned Huffington just before leaving office in 2023; a few months later, the state gave him $2.9 million.

He is represented by the Baltimore firm of Saller, Ernstberger & McElroy, and the Chicago firms Romanucci & Blandin and Hart McLaughlin & Eldridge. For decades, he had been represented by Ropes & Gray.

Harford County Executive Bob Cassilly, the brother of the former prosecutor, said the county government has no role in the case, because employees of the sheriff’s and state’s attorney’s offices are not county employees.

Cassilly referred to his brother as a “war hero” and noted he “cannot defend himself in this decades-old matter because he is now deceased, as are the other named defendants, except for one who is almost 80.”

“However, as Joe’s brother, and as a longtime public servant, I am proud that Harford County has always supported the professionals in law enforcement and the criminal justice system who protect innocent citizens from violent criminals,” Cassilly said in a statement provided by a spokesman.

Since his release, Huffington has worked on behalf of people reentering society after being incarcerated, the complaint notes, and he “regularly trains law enforcement cadets on avoiding the tactics that lead to wrongful convictions.”

“Now 62 years old, John Huffington has spent his entire adult life fighting to prove his innocence,” the complaint states.

“He brings this civil suit to fully expose the official misconduct that has forced him to do so, to continue to prove emphatically that he is innocent — for himself, for his loved ones, and to the families of Joseph Hudson, Jr., and Diane Becker — and to recover for the life Defendants stole.”