The City of Woonsocket, Rhode Island, will pay $550,000 to settle a lawsuit by a homeless Black man falsely arrested and jailed for 31 days for crimes he didn’t commit.
The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) of Rhode Island last week announced the settlement on behalf of Woonsocket resident Mack Blackie, who was twice arrested and detained for breaking and entering into an apartment on the strength of police reports and arrest warrants that his lawyers say purposely misidentified him.His jail stay was protracted due his inability to afford the $100 cash bond on a $1,000 bail fee.
In August 2022, the Woonsocket apartment of William Grover and Veronica Higbie was broken into. Grover told an investigating police officer that the individual who had entered his home was known to him as “Black,” and that if he saw him again he’d be able to identify him, according to the lawsuit filed in U.S. District Court in Rhode Island in October 2024 and obtained by Atlanta Black Star.
A week later, then-Detective Timothy Hammond, a 15-year veteran of the Woonsocket Police, followed up, asking Grover multiple times if Mack Blackie was the perpetrator. Grover — who knew both “Black” and Blackie from the neighborhood — explicitly stated it was not Blackie, a Liberian, and described the differences in physical characteristics between the two men…