Sixth Circuit Upholds $10 Million Wrongful Conviction Verdict for Exonerated Michigan Prisoner
by Chuck Sharman
On May 14, 2026, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit affirmed a jury verdict awarding $10 million in damages to exonerated Michigan prisoner Alexandre Ansari, who served six and a half years in a state prison for murder before his conviction was tossed and he was declared “actually innocent” in 2019. The jury rendered its verdict in his subsequent civil rights suit filed under 42 U.S.C. § 1983 against the Detroit Police Department (DPD) and Det. Moises Jimenez, who later admitted that he was afraid to investigate the likely killer, Jose Sandoval, because of Sandoval’s connections to a powerful drug cartel.
It was unclear where the timid cop found the nerve to challenge the verdict, much less the chutzpah to claim that qualified immunity (QI) shielded him from liability for failing to disclose material exculpatory evidence at Ansari’s trial. But the Sixth Circuit rejected the claim, agreeing with the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Michigan that the disclosure obligation was clearly established over six decades ago by the Supreme Court of the U.S. (SCOTUS) in Brady v. Maryland, 373 U.S. 83 (1963).
Jimenez also threw a legal Hail Mary of sorts with an argument that finding him guilty of failure to disclose the exculpatory information would necessarily implicate Ansari’s conviction, something that a § 1983 suit is barred from doing under Heck v. Humphrey, 512 U.S. 477 (1994). To that the appellate Court shook its metaphorical head in bemusement, noting that even “a cursory review of the procedural history shows that Ansari’s convictions and sentence have in fact been ‘invalidat[ed]’” already—so there was nothing to which the Heck bar might apply.
The murder victim, Ileana Cuevas, was riding in September 2012 in the rear seat of a car being driven by her older sister, Rosalind Barley, when Barley’s boyfriend, Miguel Figueroa, got into the backseat with her. Barley later testified that she heard a sound that proved to be gunfire, when she realized that the passengers in the rear seat had been shot. Cuevas died. But Figueroa survived, joining Barley to claim that they saw Ansari standing on the street holding a gun. He was arrested for the killing, but not before Figueroa’s brother was also fatally shot four days later. Jimenez accused Ansari of that, too, but he was acquitted at trial.
At trial for Cuevas’ murder, Ansari called another eyewitness who described the shooter as a much larger man than he was. But Jiminez testified for the prosecution that the other eyewitness had appeared “shaky” when interviewed immediately after the shooting. Along with the unchallenged accounts of Barley and Figueroa, jurors found sufficient evidence to convict Ansari in 2015 of first-degree murder and two counts of assault with intent to commit murder. He was sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole.
Three years later, the Conviction Integrity Unit (CIU) of Wayne County Prosecutor Kym L. Worthy reviewed the case. Its investigators found that Sandoval had been under DEA investigation, so there was tracking information from his cars and cellphones to determine that the most likely chain of events unfolded like this: Barley and Figueroa stole heroin from Sandoval, her ex-boyfriend, and when he orchestrated the revenge shooting that killed Cuevas, Barley and Figueroa fingered Ansari as the killer to throw cops off the trail. The CIU investigation “was particularly critical of Jimenez,” the Sixth Circuit recalled, because he “admitted to deliberately failing to investigate Jose Sandoval because Sandoval is tied to a powerful Mexican drug cartel”—something that threatened Jimenez because he “has family in Mexico,” and “feared his family would be killed.”
Worthy’s office joined Ansari in moving the state court to vacate his convictions, and he was released from prison in March 2019. That same month, his pending federal habeas corpus petition was dismissed as moot by the district court because Ansari’s “conviction and sentence ha[d] been vacated based on newly discovered evidence of actual innocence, and the charges dismissed.” Ansari then filed his § 1983 suit in the district court, which dismissed claims against the City of Detroit and sent those against Jimenez to trial, where the jury returned its verdict.
On appeal, the Sixth Circuit first dispensed with Jimenez’s argument that Ansari’s claim was Heck-barred. It did the same with his QI claim. Jimenez based that on a hairsplitting argument that the appellate Court’s 1990 extension of Brady obligations to police officers was never reviewed by SCOTUS, which had since suggested that circuit court precedent might not be sufficient to make a right “clearly established” and defeat an officer’s QI claim. While this might be true, the Sixth Circuit allowed, SCOTUS “has never squarely held that circuit precedent is insufficient.” Therefore, its 1990 decision that made “police officers’ Brady-derived … duties … ‘clearly established’” was still binding, the Court said, pointing to Moldowan v. City of Warren, 578 F.3d 351 (6th Cir. 2009), an earlier ruling that referenced that date.
Jimenez’s further arguments—that some of the district court’s evidentiary and other procedural rulings prejudiced his case—were also rejected. The district court made its decisions after weighing the possible prejudice against the probative value of the disputed points, and the Court said it found no abuse of discretion in that. Accordingly, the judgment of the district court was affirmed. Ansari was represented in his suit by attorney Wolf Mueller of his eponymous law firm in Novi, and before the Court by attorney Beth A. Wittmann, of Granzotto & Wittmann, P.C., in Berkley. See: Ansari v. Jimenez, 2026 U.S. App. LEXIS 13909 (6th Cir.).
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Related legal case
Ansari v. Jimenez
| Year | 2026 |
|---|---|
| Cite | 2026 U.S. App. LEXIS 13909 (6th Cir.) |
| Level | Court of Appeals |