January 17, 2023
Firm brings $100 million wrongful conviction lawsuit
Our firm today filed a wrongful conviction lawsuit on behalf of the Estate of Jaythan Kendrick seeking a total of $100 million in compensatory and punitive damages against individual police detectives who caused Mr. Kendrick to be falsely prosecuted and convicted in 1994-95 for a Queens murder he didn’t commit. You can read the lawsuit here. Mr. Kendrick was released in 2020, following a joint motion filed on his behalf by the Innocence Project, the law firm WilmerHale, and the Conviction Review Unit of the Queens District Attorney’s Office. He already had served more than 26 years in prison. His health broken by his prison ordeal, Mr. Kendrick died last year, and we are bringing his lawsuit on behalf of his Estate. Our firm has recovered more than $20 million over the last three years for five clients who were wrongfully convicted in Queens due to a combination of police and prosecutorial misconduct. The Kendrick lawsuit also seeks to hold the City of New York and the New York City Housing Authority liable for their unlawful policies that brought about his wrongful conviction. Joel Rudin and David Rudin are the principal attorneys for our firm working on this case, together with co-counsel Michael Bloch and Ben White of Bloch & White, LLP, and attorney Thomas Hoffman.