Attempts by two Springfield police detectives to find who stole a wallet and used a debit card inside it to buy about $1,000 in retail items in 2019 would end with a proposed $70,000 payment to two people allegedly illegally detained and questioned but never charged in the theft.
Alfred Clayborne, 37, and Andrea Erley, 44, and their attorneys would share the money in an out-of-court settlement to the lawsuit Clayborne and Erley filed in 2020 in Springfield’s U.S. District Court against city officials and police officers Michael Brown and Ryan Maddox.
The Springfield City Council, without debate, decided at its committee-of-the-whole meeting June 13 to put the settlement on the fast track for approval. As a result, the council could vote to finalize Mayor Misty Buscher’s proposed payment to the couple as soon as June 20.
Haley Wilson, spokesperson for Buscher, declined comment on the potential settlement. She also wouldn’t say whether Brown, 49, or Maddox, 42, faced any discipline in connection with the case.
Clayborne and Erley, an unmarried couple, alleged that the detectives violated their federal rights through “unreasonable seizure” and “false arrest.” Also violated were state laws protecting them from “intentional infliction of emotional distress,” according to their lawsuit.
City officials argued in a request for summary judgment in August 2022 that the detectives “acted reasonably under the circumstances.”
Officials said the detectives “may have been mistaken” about Clayborne and Erley’s involvement in the wallet theft, but the mistake didn’t make the detectives’ conduct “extreme and outrageous,” then-Corporation Counsel Jim Zerkle and Assistant Corporation Counsel Steven Rahn wrote in their motion for summary judgment.
District Court Judge Sue Myerscough on March 20 turned down the city’s request to throw out the case. The city’s legal office appealed Myerscough’s denial of summary judgment in April to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 7th Circuit in Chicago.
In the wake of the appeal, Buscher, who defeated former Mayor Jim Langfelder in the April 4 election, took office in May and installed a new chief lawyer for the city, Greg Moredock, on June 1.
No one has been charged in the theft case.
Police have the right to investigate crimes and question people they believe may be involved in crimes, but they don’t have the right to detain them without justification, said Clayborne’s attorney, Scott Sabin of Springfield.
“They don’t have unfettered discretion to conduct their investigation simply as they wish,” Sabin said. “When you take shortcuts, sometimes bad things happen.”
Clayborne and Erley were detained and questioned by police for up to two hours in June 2019. The case was set in motion, according to court documents, when a nurse manager at Prairie Heart Institute at HSHS St. John’s Hospital reported her wallet stolen the prior month and learned soon after that her debit card had been used at a Target store and other retail outlets in the area.
A Target security video identified a Black man with a short goatee as the person using the stolen card, and the owner of the wallet told police the man might be Erley’s boyfriend, who is Black. Erley, a certified nursing assistant, was one of the woman’s employees at Prairie.
After another police officer viewed a photo of Clayborne on Erley’s Facebook page, Maddox and Brown parked outside Erley’s home in two unmarked police cars on June 14, 2019. After Clayborne left the residence, Brown and Maddox conducted what Maddox described as an “investigatory stop” of Clayborne’s car as he headed to his job at a wholesale seafood distributor and retail store, according to court documents.
Both detectives – Brown, a 23-year veteran of the police force, and Maddox, a Springfield officer for 17 years – testified in depositions that they hadn’t established probable cause for an arrest and told Clayborne they wanted to speak with him about an ongoing investigation.
Clayborne later was placed in the back of a squad car without handcuffs. He was patted down, his keys, cellphone and identification were taken from him, and he was told he was a potential suspect in the theft, according to documents.
After being escorted to an unlocked but guarded interview room at the police department, Clayborne told Brown and Maddox that he wasn’t the person in the Target video and resented detectives trying to suggest it was him to get him to admit guilt, court documents said.
Clayborne said he wanted an attorney present when advised of his Miranda rights, and detectives stopped questioning him.
The detectives then went to Prairie Heart to bring Erley to a separate room in the police station, didn’t tell her she was under arrest, didn’t read her her Miranda rights and didn’t handcuff her. She never was told she was a suspect in the crime and said she and Clayborne weren’t involved in the theft.
After Erley was interviewed, the detectives left both Clayborne and Erley in the separate interview rooms and drove to Clayborne’s employer to check out his alibi – that he was working when the wallet was stolen, according to court documents. The employer confirmed Clayborne was working at the time of the theft, and Clayborne’s manager viewed a photo from the Target video and told police Clayborne wasn’t in it, documents said.
When driving Clayborne back to his car, Brown stopped at an ATM, withdrew $40 of his own money with his debit card and gave the money to Clayborne to reimburse Clayborne for lost wages, according to Brown’s testimony in a deposition.
Brown testified that the police department’s internal affairs division “reviewed this case and they found I did nothing wrong by giving Mr. Clayborne $40.”
Brown said he told Clayborne: “I hope the next time that we see each other, it’s at the mall, and you think highly of the police department and that you know you were treated fairly.”
Myerscough wrote in her ruling to let the case proceed, and potentially be argued in front of a jury, that city officials believe the detectives had “reasonable suspicion, and even objective probable cause, to detain Clayborne.”
But the judge wrote there is a “genuine dispute of material fact whether the detectives had reasonable suspicion to conduct a traffic stop on Clayborne.” She said a “reasonable jury” could decide Clayborne’s detention was “unreasonable and more intrusive than necessary.”
Myerscough added: “The presence or absence of probable cause turns on the resemblance of Clayborne to the suspect in the low-resolution Target security video.”
Sabin told Illinois Times, “All Black men don’t look alike.”
Sabin and Frederick Schlosser, Erley’s attorney, said city officials wouldn’t discuss a potential settlement until the city’s motion for summary judgment was denied. Most of the pending settlement would be used for legal fees, they said.
Schlosser and Sabin said their clients are satisfied with the proposed settlement and hope that it leads to more careful investigations.
“The purpose of civil rights lawsuits is not only to compensate aggrieved citizens for the indignity of being unlawfully detained but also to change the behavior of the police,” Schlosser said. “In that regard, I believe Mr. Clayborne and Ms. Erley’s lawsuit was a worthy endeavor.”
Dean Olsen is a senior staff writer at Illinois Times. He can be reached at dolsen@illinoistimes.com, 217-679-7810 or twitter.com/DeanOlsenIT.
This article appears in Juneteenth 2023.
