Horrifying High Profile Cases In Which Cops Were Accused Of Framing Suspects

They're supposed to protect and serve, but sometimes law enforcement officers cross the line and carry out injustice. While it's not exactly common, there are plenty of cases where cops framed innocent people to "solve" a case and make themselves look good. Whether its because of a clash of personalities, a score to settle, or because they want to cover up their own wrong doings, these criminal cops ignored their oath to uphold the law. 

For people who were framed by cops, their lives will never be the same. From people framed for murder to entrapping otherwise innocent people, these cases where the cops framed someone show the law isn't always blind. Whether by making up false accusations or extracting false confessions these police frame-ups, it seems no department or agency is too big or too small to employ bad cops. 

Since 9/11, the War on Terror has had global impacts - both good and bad. FBI informants have played a pivotal role in breaking up some legitimate terrorist plots, but also have a history of entrapping otherwise innocent people in acts they never intended to commit. Eric McDavid and two other activists were sentenced to serious jail time for allegedly plotting to commit acts of ecoterrorism. The activists were entrapped by informant Zoe Elizabeth Voss, who called herself Anna. She provoked McDavid to set fire to corporate offices in exchange for a sexual relationship.

Voss was posing as 17-year-old ecoactivist Anna in 2004, trying to infiltrate a small green anarchist group, which McDavid was part of. Using funds from the FBI, Voss became close to McDavid and suggested they make bombs and obtain a cache of guns. He initially said no, but she persisted, insinuating she wanted to start a romantic relationship. He agreed to go along with the bombing. Anna recruited Lauren Weiner and Zach Jensen for the plot, telling them McDavid was the leader. She then drove them to targets she identified for a bombing and helped the group assemble bomb materials. 

McDavid was convicted based on the testimony of Jensen and Weiner, and sentenced to 20 years in prison. His lawyers asserted Anna had entrapped him by promising sex if he went along with her plot. He was convicted despite this. Then, in 2015, the FBI revealed it had withheld 2,500 pages of evidence and documents. In it was proof that Anna was the instigator of the plot, not McDavid. 

Because he helped gather the materials, he was only allowed to plea to a lesser crime. When he asked the government about why he was framed, he was threatened to be retried. 

In 1977, police officers shot and killed 17-year-old Randy Webster. They said he had stolen a van, led police on a high speed chase, spun out of control and crashing, before getting out of the vehicle with a gun in his hand. They also accused him of possessing Quaaludes, and the shooting was ruled a justifiable homicide.

However, Webster's parents were not convinced and demanded answers. The District Attorney in Houston was behind the police, and whenever they sought information the boys in blue, officials blocked their efforts or gave them the runaround. Webster's father wrote a letter to the FBI, hoping they could help him file a civil suit against the department. They did - and helped prove that Webster could not have possibly had the gun police said he had. They proved the police planted it on him. Most of the officers involved went free, but the one accused of shooting him was found guilty of perjury. He served no jail time. 

Stephen Miller, Yusef Abdullahi and Anthony Paris were framed for the murder of sex worker Lynette White on Valentine's Day of 1988. Five men were initially charged for the crime, but two of them were cleared while the others were sentenced to life in prison. Miller, who was White's boyfriend, filed an appeal on his case and in 2000, DNA from the crime scene was tested using enhanced forensic technologies. In 2002, the men were exonerated when their DNA was not a match to the alleged suspect - Jeffrey Gafoor. 

A closer examination of the case revealed the police were unable to find a suspect in the case, and rather than doing their jobs to find evidence, chase down leads, and arrest the killer, officers fabricated evidence. Ultimately 12 police officers were implicated on charges of pressuring witnesses to testify against the five suspects.

Camden, NJ, police officer Kevin Parry went above and beyond the call of duty in order to protect and serve. And in doing so he actually committed crimes himself. His actions included illegally searching people's homes, creating false reports, stealing cash, falsifying testimony, and planting evidence. Rather than just focusing his efforts on one or two cases, he victimized 171 innocent people.

A 2010 FBI investigation uncovered his activities, and also discovered three other police officers conspired with him to engage in illegal search and seizures. They were all sentenced to prison. 

Sgt. Ronald Watts of the Chicago Police Department was doing more than making arrests and stopping crime: he was a criminal himself, who framed those who wouldn't play by his rules. He would plant evidence to trump up charges, before allowing suspects to pay their way out of a trip to jail. He also took drug money from drug dealers without submitting it as evidence, and threatened to arrest the dealers if they ratted on him.

Watts was arrested in 2012 and sent to prison for planting evidence on residents of Chicago public housing units, where he was a police officer. Two other officers, Shannon Spalding and Daniel Echeverria, worked with the FBI to provide the evidence to put Watts and another officer in jail. 

Rather than being rewarded for their fine police work putting a member of the force behind bars who betrayed the public trust, their fellow officers intimidated the two whistleblowers. They were denied promotions and given unfavorable assignments in retribution. In 2016, Spalding and Echeverria won a $2 million suit against Watts and the department. 

In 1993, New York State Police lieutenant Craig D. Harvey and four other officers faked fingerprint evidence in drug, violent crime, and mafia cases. The investigation uncovered cases dating back to 1982 in which the officers created evidence to convict people they picked up for crimes much worse than the ones they had committed.

A special prosecutor was appointed by the governor of New York who discovered widespread evidence planting across more than a decade in the force. The crooked cops weren't even discreet about their activities, and one of them even bragged to the CIA -during a job interview about his exploits. Officers implicated in the scandal were sentenced to prison sentences of two and a half to up to 18 years in jail.

In 2012, Douglas Dendinger - a disabled Army veteran working as a process server - handed a lawsuit to Bogalusa, LA, police officer Chad Cassard. It shouldn't have been that big of a deal: a process server's job is to make sure people receive legal summons. But Cassard wasn't having it. 

Cassard and some fellow officers quickly surrounded Dendinger, throwing the paper back in his face and yelling at him. Scared, he walked away from the situation and went home. But things didn't end there - Cassard accused Dendinger of attacking him, and he was arrested. Seven eyewitnesses, including two prosecutors, came forward and said Dendinger assaulted Cassard, but cellphone video of the incident ultimately set him free in 2015. No charges have been brought against Cassard or any of the witnesses who lied in the police report. 

Perhaps no case has had more twists and turns than that of Steven Avery. The Wisconsin man was found guilty and convicted of sexual assault in 1985. In 2003, his conviction was vacated after DNA evidence proved he was not the suspect involved. He sought a $36 million lawsuit against his local sheriff's office, and a few months later was charged with murder. 

Avery's case gained national attention in 2015 when the Netflix documentary Making a Murderer became one of the streaming service's most popular titles. Avery was found guilty in 2007 of killing 25-year-old photographer Teresa Halbach, but new evidence sheds doubt on whether that really was the case, and has some asking whether evidence was planted by vindictive sheriff's deputies. 

Avery's lawyer, Kathleen Zellner, said some of the evidence found on Avery's property - including Halbach's car - was planted there. As well as the blood found inside of it. She claimed Avery's blood could have come from a sample that police had from his prior false conviction. Zellner further contends the eyewitness accounts that led to his imprisonment were false, and that Halbach's ex-boyfriend Ryan Hillegas is the real killer.

Not all evidence presented in the court of law is truth. For William Broghamer, a Pasadena, CA, detective, the fact the courts were supposed to only discern truthful facts didn't deter him from pressuring witnesses to testify against other criminals. He was proud of his misdeeds - in 2011 he bragged on tape about lying and framing those accused of crimes. Then, in 2012, someone caught on to Broghamer and complained. Two years later, the tapes surfaced and an internal investigation was launched by the chief of police.

One lawyer said Broghamer threatened to have a woman's car seized if she didn't identify a certain person in a photo line up. On the tape, Broghamer said he would "just pin it on anybody" to solve a case. He bragged about lying to get people convicted of major crimes - including in death penalty cases. He was suspended from the force, and in 2015 was found guilty of misconduct.

In 2012, officials found the Special Cell of Delhi Police framed 16 people on charges of terrorist activity. This group was a special counter-terrorism force that wrongly accused people of being operatives of various terrorist organizations on little to no evidence at all. 

Human rights groups say that pressure on police to convict suspects in cases of terrorism causes them to fabricate evidence against suspects. What makes this even more troubling is the backlog of cases the Indian government has to deal with - 20 million cases currently clog the courts - and the fact that serious sentences like terrorism carry a life sentence. Those accused can wait years in jail before being found not guilty.