A former Philadelphia police detective was sentenced to 2 1/2 to 5 years in state prison for forcing a confession from a suspect in a 2010 deadly robbery, District Attorney Larry Krasner said Tuesday.
James Pitts, 54, was convicted of perjury and obstruction in July for violently interrogating Obina Onyiah and lying to a judge during Onyiah's trial in 2013, which lead to a wrongful conviction. Pitts was arrested in March 2022 after a grand jury investigation.
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Onyiah was accused and later convicted of attempted robbery and homicide at Glatz Jewelers in Lawncrest on Oct. 21, 2010. Onyiah was said to be one of two perpetrators. One escaped, and the other was killed in a shootout with owner William Glatz, who was also fatally shot. Police had identified an alternate suspect, but a "jailhouse informant" pointed to Onyiah as the person who got away and he was then questioned by Pitts, according to Assistant District Attorney Michael Garmisa.
"Then-detective Pitts used unlawful force on Mr. Onyiah during the interrogation and coerced him to confess to a murder he did not commit," Garmisa said.
Witnesses described the second person who escaped as "slight of build" and about 5 feet, 7 inches tall, while Onyiah is 6-foot-3. A photogrammetry and height analysis obtained by the state confirmed that the suspect couldn't have been taller than 5-foot-11, including a hat, meaning Onyiah couldn't have been the second person at the scene.
During the trial for the case in 2013, Onyiah attempted to challenge the validity of his confession, saying it had come under duress. His former girlfriend, Katherine Cardona, also testified that she heard Onyiah yelling for help and thumping noises from the waiting room during the interrogation. But Pitts denied this, lying under oath twice about his interrogation tactics, Garmisa said, and Onyiah was sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole.
In 2017, an attorney for Onyiah filed a motion for post-conviction relief, but before that was complete, the Conviction Integrity Unit from the district attorney's office began investigating the case. Onyiah was exonerated in May 2021 after serving 11 years in prison.
Pitts has a "reputation for a long time for very questionable conduct in his homicide investigations," Krasner said, and other law enforcement officials were aware of his "unconstitutional, illegal criminal tactics and the fact that he was committing perjury about them."
According to Krasner, this sentencing was the first time in almost 50 years that a law enforcement official was held criminally accountable for perjury after coercing a confession.
A number of lawsuits, complaints and allegations have been made against Pitts, and he was involved in at least seven murder cases that fell apart, the Inquirer reported. In February 2023, India Spellman was exonerated for a 2010 murder and armed robbery. Pitts had interrogated both Spellman and another juvenile suspect who identified her as the shooter. According to a petition to release Spellman, that juvenile suspect said he was coerced into the statement implicating her.
