A Matter of Conviction

If Philly cops were fabricating evidence, what happens to the people they sent to jail?

by Matt Stroud

Neal Santos

MARATHON MAN: Public defender Bradley Bridge is in the long process of following up on the "Tainted Justice" news series.

[ criminal justice ]

It's been more than two years since the Philadelphia Daily News first published allegations by a longtime confidential informant that Philadelphia narcotics officer Jeffrey Cujdik had fabricated evidence used to obtain search warrants in drug cases. The stories expanded into the Pulitzer Prize-winning series "Tainted Justice," which revealed further allegations that Cujdik, his brother Richard and a tight-knit crew of fellow narcotics officers had not only conjured information, but also groped women during drug raids, looted bodegas and trumped up minor charges against convenience-store owners for selling baggies supposedly used by drug dealers to push dope.

Five officers, including the Cujdiks, were taken off the streets and relegated to desk duty as a result of the series. And they remain there today: A police spokesperson, officer Jillian Russell, confirmed that these officers retain their full-time salaries and have not been charged with crimes. The Philadelphia Police Department is waiting, she said, for the results of a joint Internal Affairs/FBI investigation to move forward.

But Bradley Bridge, an attorney with the Defender Association of Philadelphia, is not waiting.

If an informant was helping fabricate evidence against people eventually convicted of drugs crimes, that means those cases — Bridge has found 57 so far, he says — might have been thrown out, or never otherwise made it to court, had these allegations been known. What's more, innocent people might have gone to jail.

In April 2009, Bridge began the long, grueling legal crusade to bring those convictions back before a judge and challenge them. It is not, he concedes, going to be easy.

This isn't Bridge's first far-reaching effort. The 57-year-old public defender is something of a legal long-distance runner. Bridge's forte is appeals, cases in which a verdict has already been delivered — uphill battles, in other words, and lost causes. He's good at it. Bridge was one of three attorneys who represented more than 140 protesters jailed during the 2000 Republican National Convention. They were able to get acquittals or dismissals in almost all those cases. A few years ago, Bridge and colleagues filed petitions for five people serving life for crimes they committed as kids, the outcomes having implications for more than 400 other people in similar situations in Pennsylvania. Those cases, years later, are still lingering in the courts. Perhaps because his work takes so long and yields such uncertain results, Bridge himself is cool, neat, composed and quietly ready for the long haul. Sitting neatly on his desk are piles and piles of cases — each waiting for him to do something.

Bridge came across the Cujdik cases the same way most Philadelphians did: He read about them in the paper. His next step was less obvious: He asked for, and got, clearance from his boss to challenge as many of those cases as possible, arguing before judges that the Daily News investigation makes any charges originating from Cujdik and his informant questionable enough to revisit or reject altogether.

In order to do so, Bridge has had to file a "post-conviction relief petition" for each case. The petition is then reviewed by a Common Pleas judge who can either grant the petition, thereby granting a new trial or deny the petition outright.

His goal, he says simply, is "to ensure that those who were prosecuted under questionable circumstances receive a fair shake."

The going has been slow. After two years of work, not one of 53 such challenges has been decided.

Lately, however, Bridge has been cautiously hopeful about one case in particular — the case, he hopes, that could turn the tide for the others. It involves one Jose Castro, 30 years old, who, like most of those whose cases Bridge is appealing, was arrested by one of the Cujdiks (Richard, in this case) with a search warrant based on evidence by CI-142, the confidential informant who would later say he was lying. Unlike other cases, in this one Officer Richard Cujdik was not just a witness but the only witness.

On March 11, 2008, Cujdik told the court, he had given the confidential informant CI-142 money to buy drugs. CI-142 then went to a house in the 1900 block of East Orleans Street in Kensington and purchased two glass jars of PCP with red lids. Cujdik then obtained a search warrant based on that information, and returned to the house, where, he said, he saw Jose Castro leaving and tossing aside a clear plastic baggy that contained five jars of PCP. Again, Cujdik was the only person who saw this. Castro was arrested and charged. His trial lasted only one day and he was convicted on March 26, 2009, of simple possession and conspiracy.

Four days after Castro's conviction, however, the Daily News published allegations that Richard Cujdik and CI-142 — the exact same team that had worked to convict Castro on drug charges — had planted drugs and lied in order to obtain a search warrant in an unrelated case.

Bridge worked with Castro to challenge his conviction, arguing that if Castro's original lawyer had known about the "Tainted Justice" allegations during trial, those allegations certainly would have been used to question Cujdik's testimony.

But the system moved slowly. The Common Pleas court judge rejected this argument and by the time the matter was appealed before Superior Court, Castro had already served out his sentence on the drug charge.

But Castro's case, Bridge says, is partly symbolic: If the court is going to accept Bridge's premise at all — that a damning, Pulitzer Prize-winning series about a highly specific group of officers should matter in dozens of cases where they sent people to prison — then the case of a man convicted solely on the word of one of those officers is a good place to start.

A few weeks ago, Bridge put his case to the panel of Superior Court judges who've been hearing his arguments for some time now.

"This is perhaps the only case I've found in which Officer Richard Cujdik is the only witness who testified against the defendant," he argued.

The three-judge panel nodded nearly in unison: "This is the best case in the group," agreed Judge Gene Strassberger.

There's a catch, though, and it's a big one. Two years after the allegations about the Cujdiks first surfaced, they haven't been charged, much less convicted, of any wrongdoing. The district attorney has yet to announce whether or not he will seek charges against any of the officers involved, and the officers themselves are, of course, innocent until proven guilty. Bridge is asking the court to throw out cases based on the findings of reporters, not a jury.

Meanwhile, though, his clients face a different catch: Post-conviction petitions and appeals have time limits. If those arrested and convicted by the Cujdiks have to wait for Internal Affairs and the district attorney to come a conclusion, they may be unable to bring a case, even if charges are filed.

As things stand now, everyone — the Cujdiks, the convicts, the courts and the rest of the city — is waiting.

(matt.stroud@citypaper.net)