Inside an interrogation room at Detroit police headquarters in 2002, a now-disgraced homicide detective ordered 22-year-old Pennington Troy McDaniels to look outside the window at the Wayne County jail.
If he didn’t confess, Detective Barbara Simon warned that Wayne County prosecutors would believe whatever she wrote down, whether it was true or not, he says.
“You might as well talk to me, and if you don’t talk to me, you’ll get life in prison,” McDaniels recalls Simon saying during an interrogation at police headquarters after his arrest for murder. “I told her I need a lawyer, and she said no lawyer is going to come in here like on TV. I asked to use a phone, but she said she wants me to talk first.”
Then, McDaniels says, another cop grabbed him by the neck and demanded, “Tell her what happened.”
Simon threatened to make up her own statement, he says. McDaniels recalls her saying, “I’m cool with the prosecutors, and I can write it up how I want to and they’ll believe me.”
McDaniels is among at least 30 incarcerated people who say Simon used coercion, threats, fabricated statements, or other abusive tactics to help secure murder convictions. Another eight prisoners have been freed because of Simon’s misconduct, and her actions have cost taxpayers more than $25 million in lawsuit settlements so far, with more pending.
Simon was so effective at getting suspects to confess that colleagues called her “The Closer.”
“She said she’s done it before,” McDaniels says.
By the end of the interrogation, Simon had written out a confession that prosecutors would rely on to convict him of first-degree murder.
“She wrote that statement herself and said I would spend the rest of my life in prison if I didn’t sign it,” McDaniels says.
After Simon promised to help him get a lenient sentence if he confessed, he says he signed the statement, which was critical because prosecutors had no forensic evidence such as DNA, gunpowder residue, or fingerprints tying McDaniels to the fatal shooting, and at least one witness described a different suspect.
Still, he was convicted and sentenced to life in prison, where he remains today.
After 23 years in prison, McDaniels has not given up trying to prove his innocence, and now may be his best opportunity ever to gain freedom.
After Metro Times revealed the alleged abuses by Simon in a series of stories in 2024, Wayne County Prosecutor Kym Worthy assembled a team in her Conviction Integrity Unit to investigate people in prison who say Simon’s abusive actions played a large role in their false convictions. In just the past two months, the CIU helped free two men whose convictions were based on statements coerced by Simon. On Sunday, CNN published an article about Simon, citing Metro Times reporting.
For those still in prison, they’re clinging to hope that Wayne County prosecutors will review their cases.
Peter Dee, an attorney who represents some of Simon’s alleged victims and has won other cases involving falsely convicted people, says the misconduct is far from isolated.
“What has come to light is not a single mistake,” Dee tells Metro Times. “It is a documented pattern of misconduct that courts have already recognized, including coercing false confessions and abuse of witnesses. Our clients are among those whose lives and families were destroyed by that conduct. They have spent decades wrongfully incarcerated and they are seeking justice and accountability.”
Metro Times interviewed 15 imprisoned men who say they are innocent and only ended up behind bars because of Simon’s coercive tactics. Most of them say Simon refused to let them call an attorney, as required by law, and wore them down by threatening them and holding them in interrogation rooms for hours.
“I think the reason we have all of those is because it’s so easy for a prosecutor to convince a jury that someone is guilty,” says Patrick Kinney, the chief of legal staff and chief paralegal at TLT Law, which is representing one of Simon’s victims. “It’s amazing how easy it is.”
These are some of their stories.
Cameron Williams
In July 2002, Cameron Williams was convicted of armed robbery and homicide in the fatal shootings of two men at Three J’s Party Store in Detroit. Prosecutors alleged he was part of a robbery crew and claimed witnesses saw him and his co-defendant at the store before the killings in December 2001.
Like many others interviewed by Simon, Williams says his conviction rested solely on false statements coerced by Simon. According to court filings, Simon pressured two of his co-defendants and witnesses to make false statements.
But Williams refused to talk as Simon and Officer Curtis Stapes, who also was accused of teasing out false confessions, peppered him with questions at police headquarters. Williams says Simon and Staples kept him sitting for “hours and hours and hours,” threatened that he wouldn’t go home unless he made a statement, denied him access to an attorney, and pushed him to adopt the version of events that were detailed in his co-defendants’ alleged confessions.
When he refused, he says Simon told him, “You’re stupid, and we’re going to fry your ass. You are cornered. … I have the power to let you go or get you convicted.”
The 48-year-old says the case is obviously “bullshit.”
“Once a person looks at my case and looks at everything else, they’ll see that this doesn’t make sense,” Williams says. “It’s obvious that they were just trying to get a conviction by any means necessary.”
Jason Treadwell
In April 2006, Jason Treadwell was accused of taking part in a violent, 35-minute crime spree that ended with the fatal shooting of off-duty Detroit Police Officer Charles Phipps.
Treadwell says the problems began as soon as he got to the police station. He says he immediately asked for an attorney and told detectives that he wouldn’t talk without one, but the request was ignored.
Some of the cops wore masks, behaved aggressively, and told him he’d spend the rest of his life in prison if he didn’t answer questions. Afraid and intimidated, Treadwell made a statement to Simon, but her version of the interview was “fabricated,” he says.
“I didn’t have the privilege of having an attorney,” Treadwell, who is now 44, says. “The whole experience was meant to intimidate me.”
Treadwell was convicted of homicide and sentenced to life in prison in February 2007.
In court filings, Treadwell alleges prosecutorial misconduct, inconsistent witness statements, and police coercion.
“They didn’t find a murder weapon,” he says. “They had nothing against me to corroborate that I did anything. … The whole case is built on lies.”
All they had was a fabricated statement, Treadwell says.
When news articles and court rulings in other cases began exposing Simon’s history, he says it gave him a rare moment of hope. But now he worries that prosecutors will never get to his case.
“When the information came out about Barbara Simon, I started to see light,” he says. “But now they are trying to sweep it under the rug and say it happened to others but not you.”
Joey Dyer
Joey Dyer says the case that sent him to prison for life hinged on Simon’s fabricated version of a previous murder that gave prosecutors a false motive that he was a murderer-for-hire.
Dyer, who is now 45, has long denied the allegations and insisted the shooting grew out of a drug dispute and that he acted in self-defense. He was convicted in 2004 after prosecutors argued he killed Lornezo Horton for Avis Kassab, known as A-1, to stop Horton from testifying in a separate homicide case. In that trial, Simon testified that Horton had identified Kassab in the killing of Charles Hyche, helping prosecutors argue Horton was silenced before he could testify.
But after a 2023 Freedom of Information Act request, Dyer obtained Simon’s notes, which he says show Horton told Simon he did not see Kassab shooting at Hyche. Dyer says that contradiction discredits the state’s motive theory.
“She lied during the trial,” he says. “They’re trying to hide the extent of Barbara Simon’s baggage. This is clear.”
Dyer says Wayne County prosecutors have refused to seriously review what Simon’s own files revealed. Kinney, who is helping Dyer, is now asking the Michigan Supreme Court to reopen the case, arguing that Simon’s notes undercut her testimony and that other newly uncovered evidence supports Dyer’s self-defense account.
But Dyer is afraid he may die in prison before getting justice.
“I don’t have money to keep fighting and fighting and fighting,” Dyer says. “I think they capitalize on that and think we’ll just give up.”
Marcus Jackson
Accused of fatally shooting a man during a robbery at a beauty shop in Detroit in June 1999, Marcus Jackson says he was denied access to an attorney while police interrogated him.
After spending hours at a police station, Jackson says Simon gave him two choices: Sign the statement she wrote or risk dying in prison, according to allegations he made in court records.
He says Simon pressured him to sign “a fabricated statement” by falsely promising leniency and claiming police already had enough to convict him of first-degree homicide, which carries a maximum sentence of life in prison. If he admitted to pulling the trigger, she told Jackson he would get 10 years in prison on a second-degree homicide charge, according to his testimony at a post-conviction hearing. Only prosecutors can file charges.
“I only signed that fabricated statement because she said I didn’t have a choice because she had enough evidence,” Jackson says.
Sure enough, Wayne County prosecutors charged Jackson with first-degree homicide, and his signed statement was damning. At the trial in September 2001, Simon testified that she never made a promise of leniency.
Jackson says Simon did more than pressure him. He claims she ignored fingerprint evidence that didn’t match him and failed to compare those prints to two other possible suspects police had identified. He also says Simon took a picture of him and showed it to two witnesses right before a lineup, tainting the identification process.
“There is an extremely similar pattern of misconduct that occurred in my case as in” other cases involving Simon, the 58-year-old says.
A jury convicted Jackson of first-degree homicide, and he received a life sentence.
He continues to fight for his innocence.
The others
Nathan Peterson, Deonte Howard, Terrill Johnson, and Damon Smith were among the imprisoned men that Metro Times interviewed in 2024 when we first began documenting the allegations against Simon. All four are still in prison, still say they are innocent, and still hope Wayne County’s Conviction Integrity Unit will call with news that their cases are finally being reexamined.
Their allegations differ in the details but follow a familiar pattern. Peterson says Simon isolated him for hours, threatened to publicly portray him as a murderer, warned that she could take away his son, and promised he could go home on lesser charges if he signed a statement she wrote.
Howard says Simon intimidated and threatened witnesses in his 2010 murder case, including a store owner who later said in an affidavit that Simon threatened to charge him or violate his probation if he did not identify Howard as the shooter.
Johnson says Simon coerced him into signing a false confession when he was still a teenager, denied him a lawyer, and cut him off whenever he tried to tell his version, leaving him to sign what he says were Simon’s words, not his.
Smith, who is serving life without parole, says Simon threatened to make him the shooter if he did not identify someone else, and his brother later recanted, saying Smith had nothing to do with the killing and that the family had been threatened. He had no criminal record and was 24 years old.
“Barbara Simon knew the allegations that she narrated and wrote were a lie,” Smith says. “I was given a fabricated role to play in someone else’s crime.”
For now, like so many others whose cases were impacted by Simon, the imprisoned men have nothing to do but wait.
James Jones
While Simon may be the most notorious name to emerge from that era of Detroit homicide investigations, she is hardly the only former Detroit officer accused of using coercion, intimidation, and other abusive tactics to secure convictions.
James Jones says he’s not a direct victim of Simon. Instead, he says, he’s a victim of a homicide unit she helped shape in one of the Detroit Police Department’s most troubling eras.
Jones was convicted and sentenced to life in prison in the 2001 retaliatory shooting that killed Demetris Purdue and wounded Ahmad Akins. Prosecutors said Jones was the driver of the car that circled back and sprayed gunfire into a crowd after a robbery the day before, and witnesses identified him as the man behind the wheel.
Courts later rejected his challenges to the identification procedure and his lawyer’s handling of an alibi defense.
But Jones says the real story is bigger than one lineup or one trial. He says Simon, who supervised the homicide unit in that era, taught younger detectives the same coercive tactics that later surfaced in so many of her own cases.
Jones says the detectives on his case, especially Dale Collins, used those tactics to build a conviction against him. He says Collins, who has repeatedly been accused of wrongdoing, arrested him without a warrant, even though police knew he had already hired an attorney, took him to police headquarters anyway, and questioned him when he should not have been asked anything.
Jones says he never made a statement, but that Collins later lied on the stand, and that frightened teenage witnesses were pressured into helping the police theory. He points to later claims that witnesses were threatened and coerced, including an affidavit he says was obtained in 2019 from Edward Martin, one of the key eyewitnesses.
Jones insists the case itself was weak from the start, saying it would have been nearly impossible for anyone to see the driver clearly in the dark, with masks, chaos, and dirt flying as shots came from the back seat.
“Barbara Simon is the mother of the whole tactics that the homicide unit used in the 1990s and 2000s,” Jones says. “She taught Dale Collins all of the scare tactics and schemes that she knew.”
Jones has continued collecting records on his own, including what he describes as Brady material involving an alternate suspect, while waiting in vain for Wayne County’s Conviction Integrity Unit to contact him.
“I was convicted on no evidence,” he says. “The system failed me.”
A seedy era
In a vast majority of more than two dozen cases reviewed by Metro Times, Simon’s interviews with suspects and witnesses were central to securing a conviction in homicide cases because there was no forensic evidence linking defendants to the crimes. Many of those still imprisoned say Simon manipulated them from the moment they arrived at the police station, holding them for hours in interrogation rooms, denying them a phone call or access to an attorney, and making false promises. She broke them down, they say, and lied when she testified at their trials.
None of the interviews with witnesses or alleged confessions by suspects were recorded, making it impossible for defendants to prove they were manipulated or coerced.
Those allegations emerged from a dark and often lawless period in Detroit’s homicide division. In a yearslong investigation that began in December 2000, the U.S. Department of Justice found that homicide detectives had violated the constitutional rights of suspects and witnesses for decades to obtain confessions. According to the DOJ, Detroit police had a history of false arrests, unlawful detentions, and abusive interrogations, while detectives were poorly trained and officers who engaged in misconduct were rarely disciplined.
In 2003, facing a sweeping civil rights lawsuit, the Detroit Police Department agreed to federal oversight. Three years later, in response to the department’s interrogation practices, DPD agreed to videotape interrogations in cases carrying a potential life sentence.
After 13 years of federal scrutiny, the DOJ ended its oversight only after Detroit agreed to major changes in its arrest, interrogation, and detention policies, including barring detectives from rounding up witnesses and forcing them to answer questions at precincts and headquarters.
During that time, Mike Duggan was the Wayne County prosecutor, and his office never bothered to review the cases scrutinized by federal investigators. His office also illegally destroyed troves of criminal files, creating a staggering obstacle for wrongfully convicted inmates seeking to prove their innocence.
Metro Times has identified more than 20 imprisoned people who say they can’t prove their innocence because their prosecutor files are gone.
Still waiting
More than 20 years later, many of Simon’s alleged victims are still behind bars, waiting and hoping that prosecutors or judges will finally pay attention to their cases.
For many of them, the release and eventual exoneration of Mark Craighead in 2022 showed there was a path to freedom. Craighead, who falsely confessed after Simon wore him down for hours and hours, spent more than seven years in prison before his homicide conviction was overturned following new evidence showing he could not have committed the crime. During the 2021 hearing, Wayne County Judge Shannon Walker said Simon “has a history of falsifying confessions and lying under oath” and that the new evidence “establishes a common scheme of misconduct.”
“This impeachment evidence demonstrates that Simon has repeatedly lied as part of her misconduct, which would allow a jury to evaluate whether to trust her testimony in light of information demonstrating a character of truthfulness,” Walker added.
Walker’s remarks and Craighead’s exoneration opened the door for more falsely imprisoned people to be freed. Staying true to his promise to help other innocent people behind bars, Craighead never stopped fighting for others. He and another exoneree, Lamarr Monson, who also falsely confessed to a murder he didn’t commit, launched a nonprofit Freedom Ain’t Free to connect innocent people behind bars with attorneys, paralegals, private investigators, firearm experts, and other legal resources. So far, Craighead says he knows of about 30 imprisoned men who insist Simon’s illegal tactics led to their convictions.
Almost all of them said they have not been contacted by the Wayne County Prosecutor’s office.
Craighead suspects prosecutors and judges are trying to wipe their hands clean of Simon. He points to Worthy’s promise to meet family members of imprisoned people, but the prosecutor never followed through.
“They said they would investigate,” Craighead tells Metro Times. “It was all an act. They’re just trying to prolong it and push it under the rug. The system is corrupt from the top to the bottom.”
Worthy’s office tells Metro Times it is still investigating the Simon cases but declined further comment.
“The WCPO CIU continues to review the Barbara Simon cases,” the office’s spokesperson says.
Two released
Following Metro Times’s series on Simon and nearly a dozen protests calling for innocent men to be released, Worthy assembled a team to review the old cases. As a result, two men have been released from prison in a one-month period beginning in March.
First, George Calicut Jr., who spent nearly 30 years in prison after signing what his attorneys said was a false confession written by Simon, was released on March 3. DNA testing later excluded him from the crime scene.
On March 31, Roy Blackmon walked out of prison after nearly 28 years behind bars, becoming at least the sixth person freed because of misconduct tied to Simon. Blackmon was convicted in a 1998 Detroit shooting that killed one man and wounded two others, even though there was no physical evidence tying him to the crime. Witnesses later said police threatened and coerced them into implicating him.
Wayne County prosecutors agreed to vacate Blackmon’s conviction and dismiss the charges after a joint review by the Michigan Innocence Clinic and the Wayne County Conviction Integrity Unit found that the case rested on false witness testimony obtained through police threats and coercion.
For many of those still imprisoned, the release of Calicut and Blackmon provides some hope.
Kinney, who is helping Dyer with his case, says police misconduct, if not exposed, can easily convince a jury of a defendant’s guilt.
“I think the reason we have all of those is because it’s so easy for a prosecutor to convince a jury that someone is guilty,” Kinney says. “It’s amazing how easy it is.”
Then when innocent people try to prove they were wrongfully convicted, prosecutors often dig in and defend police actions.
“They work with police every day,” Kinney says. “It’s probably embarrassing as well to have to admit someone is wrongfully convicted, and that opens up a lawsuit. It’s too bad that they take into account all of those considerations. It’s so frustrating.”
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