The city of Miramar should not have been ordered to pay $3.6 million to a man who spent more than 25 years in prison for a rape and murder he did not commit, an appeals court ruled this week.
Anthony Caravella, 56, was one of the most prominent cases in Broward County of a convicted inmate exonerated by DNA evidence. His federal lawsuit in 2013 accused law enforcement of fabricating evidence and covering up information that would have cleared his name.
Caravella won a $7.5 million judgment in federal court against the two Miramar police officers he accused of coercing him into confessing to the 1983 slaying of Ada Jankowski.
Of that amount, Broward Circuit Judge Carlos Rodriguez late last year ordered Miramar to pay $2.5 million in compensatory damages and nearly $1.1 million in interest and attorneys’ fees.
But Rodriguez was wrong to make the city foot the bill, according to the Fourth District Court of Appeal, which issued its ruling Wednesday. The appeals court cited a Florida law that says a city can’t be required to pay a judgment where an officer was determined “to have caused the harm intentionally,” as the federal jury decided.
The court emphasized in its opinion the importance of the law stating “intentionally.” The federal jury was instructed in the 2013 lawsuit to specifically decide whether the officers’ actions were intentional.
“Because the jury found the officers liable on all three constitutional rights claims, the jury necessarily found the officers to have ’caused the harm intentionally”’ to Caravella, the court wrote in its opinion.
Broward man freed by DNA describes 25 years in prison for crime he didn’t commit
Miramar’s City Manager Dr. Roy Virgin said in an emailed statement Thursday evening: “This ruling reaffirms our commitment to upholding justice and the rule of law. We are relieved that the appellate court recognized the error in the previous judgment and ruled in favor of the City.”
Caravella’s civil lawyer, Barbara Heyer, declined to comment on the ruling Friday.
At 15 and with an IQ of 67, Caravella, who had past run-ins with law enforcement for theft, was arrested on a juvenile charge unrelated to Jankowski’s murder. He was then questioned for hours at a time over several days.
At the federal trial, Heyer introduced evidence showing the officers, who have since retired, fed Caravella details he did not know about the murder when he was first arrested. He finally ended up saying he killed the victim and acted alone.
DNA evidence was not available at the time. It would later be used in 2009 to demonstrate conclusively that Caravella was actually innocent.
By then his youngest brother and the South Florida Sun Sentinel had been raising concerns about the case and conviction for eight years. He was freed in 2009 and formally exonerated the following year.
Accused officers George Pierson and William Mantesta denied the accusations that they coerced Caravella, saying he gave his statements voluntarily.
After Caravella’s name was cleared, Miramar Police and the Broward State Attorney’s Office identified a different man as a person of interest — Anthony Martinez, who was 17 years old at the time of the murder and earlier a suspect. Martinez died of natural causes two months after authorities said he was a person of interest.
Donald Spadaro, an attorney acting as Caravella’s legal guardian in the case, did not return voicemails seeking comment Thursday and Friday.
Information from the Sun Sentinel archives was used in this report.
