St. Louis—More than two decades after he was wrongly imprisoned, Jonathan Irons filed a federal civil rights lawsuit this week against the officers of the O’Fallon Police Department and the St. Charles County Sheriff’s Department who falsely arrested him at age 16 and fabricated evidence to send him to prison for 23 years for a shooting he did not commit. For decades, these officers hid critical evidence showing that another person had committed the crime.

In July 2020, after spending the majority of his life as an innocent man behind bars, Jonathan’s wrongful conviction was set aside by Missouri courts when the concealed evidence finally came to light. Jonathan’s exoneration was secured with the help of WNBA star Maya Moore, who put her career on hold to shine a spotlight on the staggering injustice that Jonathan had suffered. Jonathan and Maya have since married and settled in Atlanta, where they are focused on their family and their continued fight for criminal justice reform through the Win With Justice social action campaign that Maya founded.

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Without evidence connecting Jonathan to the crime, the defendants fabricated a case against him. Given Mr. Stotler’s extreme injuries and the very limited opportunity he had to see the shooter, he was unable to describe or identify the perpetrator. When the defendants first showed him a set of photographs that included Jonathan, Mr. Stotler did not identify Jonathan. But that did not stop the defendants. They manipulated Mr. Stotler into making a wholly unreliable identification of Jonathan. They then bolstered their fabricated case by inventing a story that Jonathan had confessed to the crime, when in fact Jonathan had consistently denied any involvement in the shooting. The defendants wrote false police reports and testified that Jonathan had confessed, while simultaneously destroying their notes and recordings of Jonathan’s interrogation, which would reveal the truth.

“Jonathan’s only ‘crime’ was that he was a Black kid present in a predominantly white neighborhood. As a result, even though there was not a shred of evidence suggesting Jonathan committed the shooting, the defendants decided to frame him,” said Anand Swaminathan, one of Irons’s attorneys. “It is rare to see a case where literally every piece of evidence implicating the criminal defendant is fabricated by the police, but that’s exactly what happened in Jonathan’s case. The police took the stand and swore on a Bible that Jonathan had confessed to them, even though they knew that was a lie, and they coerced a gravely injured victim to identify their suspect in court, knowing that he had no clue who had shot him.”