Jury Awards Over $24.4 Million to Kentucky Prisoner Exonerated After 22 Years, Bringing Total Payout for Him and Co-Defendant to Almost $45 Million
by Chuck Sharman
On April 29, 2026, a jury in the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Kentucky awarded exonerated state prisoner Jeffrey Dewayne Clark $24,350,000 from Meade County officials, after finding that they fabricated evidence to wrongfully convict him and fellow exoneree Garr Keith Hardin of a 1992 murder for which they spent over two decades in prison. Clark was also awarded $74,791.75 in punitive damages against one official, former coroner Bill Adams, who used white-out to alter the estimated date of death on the victim’s death certificate in order to get around Clark’s verified alibi. Just before trial, Hardin reached an undisclosed settlement and agreed to dismiss his claims against former forensic serologist Robert Thurman, who falsely “matched” his hair to evidence from the murder scene.
That brought the total documented payout to almost $44,925,000 for the two former prisoners, who earlier reached a $20.5 million settlement with Louisville/Jefferson County Metro government in September 2023, as PLN reported—resolving their claims that Louisville Metropolitan Police Department Det. Mark Handy fabricated and manipulated evidence to wrongly convict them. Handy, then 62, pleaded guilty in 2021 to perjury and fabricating evidence in two other wrongful conviction cases. He received a meager one-year sentence, of which he served barely a month on home confinement. [See: PLN, June 2024, p.43.]
The jury hearing Clark’s claims against the Meade County Defendants agreed that former Sheriff Joseph Greer and former Dep. Clifford Wise, along with Adams, conspired to falsely convict him of murdering his girlfriend at the time, 19-year-old Rhonda Sue Warford, leaving Clark wrongfully imprisoned for over 22 years before DNA testing of crime scene evidence excluded both him and Hardin. They were released in 2016. Both were fully exonerated and all charges were dropped two years later.
Now 56, Clark and Hardin were 21 when Warford was killed, but both had a verified alibi. Greer and Adams decided to get around that by using white-out on the death certificate and charging documents to alter the estimated date of Warford’s death. That was proved by examining the original death certificate, which was not discovered until the eve of the trial by Clark’s attorneys with Loevy + Loevy in Chicago.
“Upon verifying Jeff’s alibi, Defendants had two paths: find the true killer or manipulate the evidence,” said one of those attorneys, Elliot R. Slosar. “They chose option 2 and ruined Jeff’s life in the process.”
Worse, the officials neglected to follow up on evidence that indicated the real killer was James Whitely, Warford’s former boyfriend. Warford’s friend Eletha Nicole Madison told the grand jury that Whitely confessed to the murder. But Defendant officials decided to pursue Clark and Hardin instead, working with Handy to twist Hardin’s dalliance with satanism into an elaborate narrative that framed the killing as a sacrifice to the devil. After hearing that, plus Thurman’s hair analysis testimony linking Hardin to the murder—and a fabricated confession by Clark that Greer obtained from jailhouse informant Clifford Capps—the grand jury returned its indictment. Clark and Hardin were convicted of murder and sentenced to life in prison, their exoneration not following until decades later.
Before making the damage awards, jurors found that Greer withheld exculpatory evidence; that he and Adams fabricated additional evidence; and that each not only failed to intervene but also joined together in a conspiracy to deprive Clark of his constitutional rights. The jury also found that Meade County was liable for maintaining a policy that failed to adequately train its employees to prevent the violation, as provided under Monell v. Dep’t of Soc. Servs., 436 U.S. 658 (1978).
No award has been made for fees and costs for Clark’s Loevy & Loevy attorneys, nor for those representing Hardin from Neufeld, Scheck, Brustin, Hoffman & Fredenberger in New York City. PLN will continue to update those developments as they unfold. See: Clark v. Louisville Jefferson Cty. Metro Gov’t, USDC (W.D. Ky.), Case No. 3:17-cv-00419.
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