Man Wrongly Convicted of Murdering Parents to Get $10 Million

Martin Tankleff, who was imprisoned for 17 years after being wrongly convicted of murdering his parents, has reached a $10 million settlement with Suffolk County, New York.

The Ways and Means Committee of the Suffolk County Legislature voted Thursday to approve the settlement with Tankleff, who also reached a $3.4 million settlement with New York state in 2014. Jason Elan, a spokesman for the Suffolk County executive, declined to comment.

Settlements do not always include an explicit admission of wrongdoing by the party paying them, and it was not clear whether this one did. But Emma Freudenberger, a lawyer at Neufeld Scheck & Brustin, one of three firms representing Tankleff, said it was “a long-awaited acknowledgment of Mr. Tankleff’s innocence and the suffering he’s gone through.”

Tankleff, 46, said in an interview Thursday evening that while he knew the committee was meeting that day, he had not expected the approval to come so quickly. When his lawyers called to give him the news, he was sitting in a doctor’s office with his wife.

Though the settlement felt like vindication, he said that even in the moments after he heard it had been approved, he was “more interested about what was happening tomorrow than about the settlement.”

What was happening Friday was the last session of a class he has been teaching at Georgetown University with a lifelong friend, Marc Howard, who decided to go to law school because he wanted to help overturn Tankleff’s conviction. Tankleff himself recently passed the bar exam and expects to be admitted to the bar this year.

In the class, called “Making an Exoneree,” students have re-examined the cases of four imprisoned men. They have interviewed the prosecutors and defense lawyers; spoken with experts in forensics, ballistics, witness testimony and false confessions; and created websites and documentaries explaining why they believe the men’s convictions were wrongful.

This is the first time Tankleff and Howard have taught the semesterlong class, but Tankleff — now an adjunct professor at Georgetown — said he hoped to teach it once a year.

It was nearly three decades ago that Tankleff, then 17, woke up on a September morning in 1988 to find that his parents, Arlene and Seymour, had been slashed and bludgeoned in the family’s Long Island home. In 1990, Tankleff was convicted of killing them and sent to prison, where he would remain until 2007.

His conviction was based on a confession that was written by a detective and then attributed to Tankleff. The detective had told Tankleff during his interrogation that investigators had found forensic evidence incriminating him, and that his father had woken from a coma and accused him of the killing. In fact, his father had never woken up. According to the lawsuit, Tankleff was “encouraged by the detectives to believe he could have experienced a ‘blackout’ and killed his parents without remembering it.”

The detectives then described their version of events to Tankleff, persuaded him to acknowledge it, and wrote out a confession that made it seem as if Tankleff had volunteered the account, according to the lawsuit. Tankleff never signed the confession and quickly renounced it, but was still convicted.

Seventeen years later, an appellate court overturned his conviction on the basis of new evidence, and New York officials decided in 2008 not to retry Tankleff.

The settlement the committee approved Thursday stems from a lawsuit Tankleff filed nearly a decade ago, in 2009. In the lawsuit, Tankleff and his lawyers alleged “a widespread practice of coercing confessions among the homicide detectives of the Suffolk County Police Department” and argued that his imprisonment was “a direct result of gross misconduct by Suffolk County law enforcement officials that violated his constitutional rights.”

Looking forward, Tankleff said he had invited the Suffolk County district attorney to sit down with him, his lawyers and his private investigators to hear “every new piece of evidence we’ve developed” regarding the killings that put him in prison.

“This way,” he said, the district attorney “can develop the case and prosecute the people who were responsible for my parents’ murders.”

And after that?

“I look forward to being admitted to the bar in the next few months,” he said, “and working on wrongful convictions to make sure there’s no more Marty Tankleffs.”