Four Denver law enforcement officers may be sued for the coerced confession of a cognitively-impaired 14-year-old boy, resulting in false information that led to his wrongful conviction for murder, the federal appeals court based in Colorado ruled on Friday.

A three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 10th Circuit upheld a strongly-worded lower court decision that rejected the attempts of three detectives and a lieutenant to point fingers at each other to escape civil liability. Key to the outcome was the the U.S. Supreme Court’s precedent in Franks v. Delaware, which established that warrants are invalid when they are based upon knowingly or recklessly false statements relevant to guilt.

Lawrence Rubin Montoya, the panel agreed, had plausibly claimed that, had all the false information in support of his arrest been removed, it would have failed to implicate him in a crime. Because the Denver officers had all participated in the events that led to his arrest warrant, they were liable.

“Mr. Montoya specifically alleges three detectives coerced a false confession for use in an arrest-warrant affidavit. That readily satisfies Mr. Montoya’s burden to allege their personal participation in the Franks violation,” wrote Judge Veronica S. Rossman in the June 3 order.

The panel also rejected the defendants’ attempt to dismiss a claim of conspiracy against the law enforcement personnel.

Montoya’s involvement with the justice system has spanned more than two decades, beginning with the slaying of teacher Emily Johnson, 29, in the early morning hours of Jan. 1, 2000. Detectives Martin Vigil and Michael Martinez investigated the crime, eventually learning that friends of Montoya’s relatives had taken Johnson’s stolen car for a joy ride.

On Jan. 10, the detectives and Lieutenant Jonathan Priest sat down to question Montoya around 8 p.m. Montoya, an eighth-grade student with a developmental disability, acknowledged that he participated in the joy ride, but that was the extent of his involvement. Montoya’s mother was present during the interview for the first 40 minutes, after which she left and the interrogation continued for nearly two hours.

U.S. District Court Senior Judge John L. Kane, who is now overseeing Montoya’s civil lawsuit, explained in stark terms what happened to Montoya that night.

“The officers then pressured Mr. Montoya to admit greater and greater levels of involvement in the crimes. They lied about evidence, threatened Mr. Montoya, made false promises of leniency, fed him the details surrounding Ms. Johnson’s murder, yelled at him, and insulted him,” Kane wrote in March 2021. “When Mr. Montoya was alone with the officers, he cried and even sobbed heavily at times.”

Montoya repeatedly gave answers that did not match the facts of the investigation, prompting the detectives to correct him until Montoya had adopted the police version of the narrative. Detective R.D. Schneider Jr. then used the coerced confession to draft an affidavit supporting Montoya’s arrest. 

The affidavit claimed that Montoya went to Johnson’s residence to steal her car with two others, then beat her when she awoke. Schneider’s description contained clear misstatements of what Montoya had said in the interrogation, but a judge signed off on the warrant and prosecutors charged Montoya with felony murder and other related crimes.

Montoya’s trial was reportedly plagued by other missteps, including Priest and Vigil’s improper reference to suppressed parts of Montoya’s confession, and testimony from another juvenile detainee claiming Montoya had confessed to him. In reality, the witness had never been housed with Montoya.

A jury found Montoya guilty and he received a life sentence in prison without the possibility of parole.

After 13 years, Montoya filed a petition for postconviction relief claiming that he was actually innocent. Following DNA testing on some of the physical evidence, the prosecution acquiesced to the overturn of Montoya’s convictions. In exchange, Montoya pleaded guilty to being an accessory after the fact, and he left incarceration immediately.

Montoya then filed a civil lawsuit seeking to hold his interrogators and Denver accountable for violating his rights. A trial judge initially gave a favorable ruling to Montoya, but the officers appealed to the 10th Circuit.

In 2018, a three-judge panel decided the first appeal in Montoya’s case, ruling that the individual officers deserved qualified immunity on Montoya’s claims of malicious prosecution and testifying falsely against him. Qualified immunity shields government employees from liability unless they violate a clearly-established legal right.

The panel relied on the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision in Heck v. Humphrey, which held that a criminal defendant may not sue for damages stemming from an unconstitutional conviction unless that conviction is reversed or otherwise invalidated. Despite the prosecution’s agreement to the reversal of Montoya’s murder conviction, that was not convincing enough for the 10th Circuit.

“Montoya still admitted guilt for a crime that was related to the earlier crimes of conviction. This fact makes the termination of proceedings here seem less like a vindication of Montoya’s innocence, and more like a settlement that says very little about Montoya’s guilt,” wrote Chief Judge Timothy M. Tymkovich in the August 2018 opinion.

After the appellate decision, Montoya refiled his lawsuit. Now, there were eight claims, ranging from false arrest and fabrication of evidence to alleged liability by the city itself. Although the defendants attempted to dismiss the amended version of the lawsuit, Kane, the trial judge, allowed three claims to proceed: inadequate training by Denver, a conspiracy involving the law enforcement officers and a violation of Montoya’s rights under the Franks decision.

With the latter claim, Kane determined that, without the false statements that Schneider included in the affidavit, there was no probable cause to arrest Montoya.

“To add insult to injury, Mr. Montoya also contends that Officer Schneider omitted key facts from the affidavit,” Kane wrote, describing the lack of physical evidence or witnesses tying Montoya to the crime. Such facts “are of the type a judicial officer would want to know.”

Kane did not excuse Schneider because he was absent from the interrogation, nor did he excuse the other officers because they were not involved in drafting the affidavit. The judge observed that Vigil, Martinez and Priest “knowingly, intentionally, or recklessly coerced a false confession from him with the intent that it be used to obtain a warrant for his arrest,” with Schneider completing the final step for the warrant. Therefore, they all personally participated in the constitutional violation.

The 10th Circuit heard a second appeal in March 2022 following Kane’s decision, with the police defendants again seeking qualified immunity. Tymkovich, who authored the first appellate decision, sat on the panel hearing the case, along with Rossman and Judge Joel M. Carson III. 

“You have to watch that video to see the despair and the distraught in Mr. Montoya’s face as these detectives over and over refuse to take his denial 65 times,” attorney David Fisher argued on behalf of Montoya.

Peter Doherty, the lawyer for the interrogators, attempted to separate their conduct in the interview room from that of Schneider, prompting a dubious response from one appellate judge.

“They were not involved in the actual drafting of the warrant,” Doherty said. “They didn’t have the personal participation -“

“So eliciting a false confession is not enough for ‘personal participation’?” Rossman interjected.

“Not in this case, Your Honor,” Doherty answered.

The appellate panel upheld Kane’s decision to allow Montoya’s handful of claims to proceed, finding the allegations clearly supported the personal participation of each defendant in Montoya’s ultimate arrest without probable cause.

“Mr. Montoya’s allegations of conspiracy are not impressively detailed, and some of the boilerplate language he uses might not hold up in every case. But under the circumstances here, and in the context of this complaint viewed as a whole, nothing more is needed,” Rossman wrote.

This year, state lawmakers in Colorado introduced Senate Bill 23, which would have made a juvenile’s statements inadmissible in court if law enforcement knowingly used deception during the interrogation – including lying about evidence or offering unauthorized leniency for a confession.

Proponents argued that deceptive tactics, such as saying police have proof a suspect is guilty, can lead to juveniles confessing to crimes they did not commit out of fear or confusion. Montoya testified in favor of the legislation.

“I was lied to by the detectives about being involved in this horrible crime. I was told I would be going to prison for life if I didn’t tell them what they wanted to hear,” Montoya said to the Senate Judiciary Committee. 

The House of Representatives’ sponsors of Senate Bill 23 chose to kill the bill less than an hour before the end of the legislative session last month after its provisions were weakened.

The case is Montoya v. City and County of Denver et al.

Colorado Politics reporter Hannah Metzger contributed to this article.