Dwayne Provience may be a symbol of all the dysfunction that led to Detroit's bankruptcy and a symbol for the difficult moral decisions that must be made during the bankruptcy process.
Provience was arrested, charged, and wrongly convicted of a murder in 2000. Nine years later, he was exonerated and took legal action against the city for false arrest and malicious prosecution. Good looking out, DPD.
A mediator recommended he receive a $5M settlement, but the city balked so the case remains in process. Or, rather, the case was in process until Detroit's Chapter Nine filing shut that whole thing down.
Detroit News: Provience’s case illustrates the personal toll of the city’s financial crisis and the pain hidden behind balance sheets, bankruptcy petitions and lists of faceless Wall Street creditors, legal experts said.
“And it shows you one of the ugliest parts of the bankruptcy code that creditors have to be treated equally, and sometimes that’s not fair,” said John Pottow, a bankruptcy law professor at the University of Michigan who considers Provience a creditor.
Provience, who spent nearly a decade behind bars for a crime he didn't commit, currently helps support three kids making $9/hour as a personal trainer.
Just remember that next time someone like BlackRock's Randolph and Mortimer Duke Peter Hayes says his $102B bond portfolio deserves to get paid first because "a promise is a promise."
UPDATE: Provience's case is heart-wrenching. According a 2009 report in the Metro Times, police had seven eyewitnesses to the murder. However, only one, a drug addict named Larry Wiley, testified again Provience. Neither the prosecution nor his defense attorney called the other witnesses to testify. A couple years after the conviction, his attorney was disbarred on unrelated charges. But that's not even the worst of it...
Metro Times: But now, as Provience attempts to win his freedom, his attorneys are pointing to the fact that, in 2003, the Wayne County Prosecutor's office argued in a second but apparently related murder trial that it was two other men who killed Hunter.
"It's awfully distressing that nobody in the Prosecutor's Office apparently went back and asked, ‘What happened in this first murder while we're prosecuting the second?' and saw, ‘Hey. We argued something different,'" says David Moran, co-director of the Innocence Clinic at University of Michigan Law School who now represents Provience.
