Multiple exonerees and people who are in prison with wrongful conviction claims have filed petitions with Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel's office demanding an investigation into the purging of case files from the Wayne County Prosecutor's Office when Detroit Mayor Mike Duggan was prosecutor.

The files were purged during Duggan's term as prosecutor from 2001-04. Duggan's spokesman John Roach told The Detroit News the mayor got rid of files in 2002 after water from a collapsed roof at a storage facility had destroyed some files with the potential to ruin others. But Roach said the files were only jettisoned after being determined to be non-essential by "a team of career prosecutors who were most familiar with the files and with Michigan's Records Retention Act."

An outside agency should investigate the purge, said Marlon Taylor, who filed a petition with Nessel's office on behalf of his brother, Damon Smith, who is serving a life prison sentence following his 2000 first-degree murder conviction. The Detroit police investigator in charge of Smith's case was former Homicide Detective Barbara Simon, who was in charge of multiple investigations that resulted in convictions being overturned or new trials granted, and has cost Detroit taxpayers more than $25 million in lawsuit settlements.

"We can't fight anything legally without those files, and they've been purged," Taylor said. "Someone needs to address this; they need to address Barbara Simon and find out who allowed the prosecutors to throw out these records. The only thing a person has to establish their innocence is the case files; if those are gone, what else can we do?"

Nessel's office did not return an email Thursday.

Kym Worthy, who was elected prosecutor in 2004, learned of the document purge when she first took office, Assistant Wayne County Prosecutor Maria Miller said.

"Prosecutor Worthy was informed that there was a purge of files from 1995 and earlier by several people when she first took office," Miller said in an email. "We do not know how many files were purged. We do not know if files after 1995 were purged. ... I can say that we do look for old files in storage to determine whether we have them or not."

University of Michigan Law Professor David Moran, former director of the university's Innocence Clinic, said he's certain some of the purged files would have resulted in exonerations.

"There are definitely people, and we'll never know who they are, whose cases would have been won, just like we won so many other cases, but for the fact that the case files were destroyed," Moran said.

'Triage process'

But Duggan's spokesman Roach said the files were carefully screened before being destroyed, and he said only those records that were deemed non-essential were purged.

"During Mayor Duggan's tenure as prosecutor, all historic files from all elected officials were located in a central warehouse managed and controlled exclusively by the County Buildings Department," Roach said in a statement. "The issue with now being raised about old files appears to relate to a time in 2002 when County Buildings Department notified the Prosecutor's office of severe roof damage at the warehouse which the landlord was failing to address.

"Water coming in from a failing roof had already begun damaging some Prosecutor files and had the potential to destroy large amounts of records if they were not quickly relocated," Roach said. "A team of career prosecutors who were most familiar with the files and with Michigan's Records Retention Act developed a triage process, keeping those files that were needed or were legally required to be kept and disposing of the others. They did this as the County simultaneously attempted to set up alternative warehouse space before a catastrophic loss of files occurred."

The Metro Times in September first made public Duggan's destruction of the case files during his term as Wayne County prosecutor. Roach told The News Thursday Duggan's actions didn't violate the law as the story claimed.

"Mayor Duggan never heard any suggestion from any prosecutor at the time, nor in the 20 years since, that the career prosecutor team handling that project ever violated the Michigan Records Retention Act or any other law," Roach said. "Apparently a recent media report claimed the prosecutors violated a state records retention schedule of 50 years. In fact, the 50 year retention requirement was not first enacted into state law until 2007, well after the event.

"At no point has Mayor Duggan ever seen any evidence of any violation of the law and does not believe there is any chance the career prosecutors would have violated the Michigan Records Retention Act or any other state law in their handling of the project," Roach said.

Mark Craighead, who spent seven years in prison for murder -- a conviction that was secured after a Wayne County judge said Simon "repeatedly lied" in the case -- said he filed a complaint with Nessel's office after initially inquiring about whether the office would investigate the records purge.

"They told me nobody had filed a complaint, so I filed a complaint," said Craighead, who was paroled in 2009 but spent years trying to clear his name until Worthy dropped the charges last year after a judge had ordered a new trial. "A whole bunch of other guys filed complaints, too."

Calls for probe

Craighead, who provided The News a list of eight inmates he said had also filed complaints, said he hasn't heard back from Nessel's office.

"If Dana Nessel doesn't investigate this, that's a lot of lives she's throwing away," Craighead said. "There are a lot of people whose lives were destroyed by this, and the people suffering are the families. The only thing they can do is send more money for the commissary when they should be fighting to get them out. They can't fight because the files don't exist."

Taylor said it's frustrating trying to exonerate his brother and questioned why case files involving Simon were purged.

"She did to my brother what she did to other people: She threatened him, she intimidated him, she told him if he didn't tell her who did the murder, she'd say he was the one who did it, and that's exactly what happened," Taylor said.

Repeated attempts to reach Simon have not been successful.

Lamarr Monson also petitioned Nessel's office to investigate the purged files, although his case file wasn't among them. In October, Detroit officials agreed to settle a lawsuit for $8.5 million after Monson accused Simon of tricking him into signing a false murder confession.

The settlement marked the third time in two years the city agreed to pay $8.5 million to litigants claiming Simon had lied to secure their wrongful convictions, for a total of $25.5 million in payouts tied to the ex-detective. In all the cases, Simon was accused of forcing false confessions or coercing others into providing false testimony.

"Even though my case got settled, the point is kind of moot for me, but there are a lot of other guys who are still incarcerated, and their ability to fight their cases is hindered," Monson said. "All we want is some kind of solution to this. We know those files are gone; just give those guys some idea how they can proceed."

Added Craighead: "We just want someone to sit down with us and try to come up with a solution to this, because there has definitely been harm done."