Criminal Justice
Jury awards nearly $60M to former police officer for wrongful prosecution in sex assault case
Federal jurors in Detroit awarded about $58.5 million Tuesday to a man who was a police officer in Duval County, Florida, when he said he was wrongly charged with sexually abusing a child in Michigan. (Photo from Shutterstock)
Federal jurors in Detroit awarded about $58.5 million Tuesday to a man who was a police officer in Duval County, Florida, when he said he was wrongly charged with sexually abusing a child in Michigan.
Jurors awarded Sean MacMaster $33 million in compensatory damages against David Busacca, a Michigan State Police officer, and Brian Kolodziej, a former Michigan assistant attorney general, report the Detroit Free Press, the Associated Press and WXYZ. Jurors also awarded punitive damages of $10 million against Busacca and $15 million against Kolodziej.
Jurors said the defendants acted “intentionally, deliberately or with reckless disregard for the truth” in pursuing the charges.
Lawyers for MacMaster had alleged that Kolodziej pursued the charges to impress a woman close to MacMaster’s ex-wife, who was engaged in a custody battle with MacMaster, according to the AP.
Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel dropped the criminal sexual conduct charge against MacMaster in 2021. At about that time, Kolodziej resigned from Nessel’s office amid evidence that he was in a romantic relationship with a different woman in a sexual assault case that he oversaw. According to the AP, he pleaded no contest to willful neglect of duty and gave up his law license.
Representing himself at trial, Kolodziej said his resignation from the attorney general’s office “has absolutely nothing to do with the facts of this case supporting probable cause for an arrest warrant and a search warrant,” the AP reports.
Busacca’s lawyer said his client was a road patrol trooper supervised by others, and he was “not going out on a limb here to help Brian Kolodziej get a girlfriend.”
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