Nearly forty years after a Connecticut murder sent two teenagers to prison, Ralph “Ricky” Birch has won a landmark civil verdict against the town whose investigation helped destroy his youth. In 2025, a federal jury awarded Birch $5.7 million for the decades he spent wrongfully imprisoned, concluding that New Milford police officers contributed to the flawed case that led to his conviction.
The decision comes six years after courts overturned Birch’s 1989 murder conviction, exposing a sequence of investigative missteps and forensic falsehoods that once carried the authority of science. But now, the town of New Milford is asking the judge to throw out the jury’s verdict, claiming its officers did nothing unlawful and that the award is legally unsound. Birch’s attorneys say the evidence tells a different story—one of fabrication, neglect, and a refusal to stop an investigation already veering off course.
A Case That Began With Assumptions
The crime that set this saga in motion was the 1985 killing of 65-year-old Everett Carr, who was found stabbed and bludgeoned inside his New Milford home. Birch, then seventeen, and sixteen-year-old Shawn Henning were suspects almost immediately. The two teens, who had been living in a stolen car and committing small thefts, fit the profile investigators wanted: young, transient, and expendable.
Without fingerprints, DNA, or eyewitnesses, police and prosecutors built their case on circumstantial threads—a disputed blood-stain theory and the word of a jailhouse informant who claimed Birch confessed. It was enough to convince a jury. Both young men were sentenced to lengthy prison terms and would spend nearly three decades behind bars.
The Forensic Collapse
The linchpin of the state’s case was testimony by Dr. Henry Lee, the famed Connecticut forensic scientist whose reputation carried weight in courtrooms across the country. Lee told jurors that he had performed a presumptive test on a towel from the victim’s home and found it contained blood—an observation that prosecutors used to argue that the killers had cleaned up after themselves.
Years later, that assertion unraveled. Investigators discovered that Lee never tested the towel at all. The brownish stain that jurors had been told was blood turned out to be something else entirely. No physical evidence ever tied Birch or Henning to the crime scene. In 2019, the Connecticut courts vacated both convictions, and the state agreed to pay the men $25 million to settle their wrongful-imprisonment claims.
From Freedom to Accountability
Exoneration, though, did not explain how the system failed so completely. Birch filed a federal civil-rights lawsuit contending that local officers ignored the limits of their own evidence, relied on tainted information, and allowed a fabricated story to take hold. According to the lawsuit, one detective coached a jailhouse informant by feeding him inside details about the crime. Other officers allegedly knew—or should have known—that the account could not be true, yet they took no steps to intervene.
During the civil trial, jurors heard recordings, police reports, and testimony illustrating how easily an untested assumption became “proof.” The evidence, Birch’s lawyers argued, showed a pattern of tunnel vision and indifference to reliability. After two weeks of testimony, the jury agreed, holding New Milford’s officers liable and awarding Birch $5.7 million.
The Town’s Pushback
Lawyers for New Milford immediately moved to overturn the verdict, insisting that the officers merely assisted a state investigation and that there was no evidence of intentional wrongdoing. They argue that the federal jury blurred the line between state forensic failures and municipal responsibility, and that the earlier $25 million state settlement should offset any local damages.
Birch’s attorneys counter that the misconduct extended far beyond laboratory errors. “These officers knew the evidence was shaky,” one lawyer said after the verdict. “Their duty wasn’t to win a case—it was to protect the truth.”
The presiding judge has not yet ruled on the town’s motion. Whatever the outcome, the hearing will determine whether the verdict stands as a model for accountability or becomes another chapter in a long struggle for acknowledgment.
The Larger Pattern
The Birch case fits a national pattern familiar to anyone studying wrongful convictions. Investigations go astray when assumptions harden into certainty, when forensic experts exceed the limits of their testing, and when informants are treated as reliable simply because their stories confirm official theories. Oversight tends to falter most where multiple agencies share responsibility, each presuming the other will ensure accuracy.
In Birch’s trial, all these forces intersected: a celebrated expert whose word went unchallenged, a local department reluctant to contradict the state, and a courtroom culture that rewarded conviction over caution.
Why the Case Still Matters
Most exonerations end with release, not reckoning. Civil trials like Birch’s ask the harder question: Who bears responsibility when the machinery of justice produces error? The answer matters not only to the wrongfully convicted but to the public’s faith that truth and accountability are inseparable.
“Clearing your name is only the first half of justice,” said one Connecticut civil-rights advocate. “The second half is making sure the same system doesn’t do it again.”
The judge’s ruling on New Milford’s challenge will determine whether the jury’s verdict stands. Either way, the Birch case has already expanded the conversation about what justice requires after innocence is proven—not just freedom, but accountability for how freedom was lost.
