At 4:08 p.m. on December 28, 2008, police in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, responded to a shooting at a house on West Oakdale Street in North Philadelphia. Inside the house, officers found Ernest Miller, a former police officer, dead of a gunshot wound. They also found a second man, 38-year-old Michael Grant, slumped over near the street. Grant died of a gunshot wound several hours later at Temple University Hospital.
The police found firearms evidence consistent with a Glock pistol and a revolver. Miller owned a Glock, but no weapon was found. Outside the house, police found a walkie-talkie, handcuffs, and a set of keys.
An officer overheard a witness named Duane Tate say that he saw a man limp from the area near Miller’s house and get into a black Honda Accord with front-end damage.
Detectives interviewed other witnesses, including a woman who said her name was Kiara Cheeves, who said she had returned to the house while the police were there and told officers she needed to go inside to get her shoes, clothes, and other personal belongings. Cheeves said that she had left Miller’s house at about 2:30 p.m. to go to a nearby hair salon, where she had a modeling job. When she returned an hour later, the police were there, and Grant’s body was in the street.
The police located Grant’s wife, Michelle Hinds, who said that Grant had gone on a “run” with a man named Kyle Reed. She said that Reed later told her that Grant “did not make it back from this one.” Hinds also told police that he had taken another man wounded in the shootout to Einstein Medical Center. That man was later identified as 51-year-old Vincent Wallace, and he had been shot in the hip.
The investigation led to Reed’s then-girlfriend, Raffinee Taylor, and Detective John Cummings applied for a search warrant for Taylor’s home. Although the application said that Taylor and Cheeves were the same person, officers realized that they were different people when Taylor drove past her house while the warrant was being served.
Detectives, including Detective James Pitts, brought Taylor in for questioning. She was held for three days and gave three statements. Miller had a photography business, and Taylor said in her third statement that she had paid Miller $500 four years earlier to take photos of her and promote her as a model. She said she never got any assignments. She said that a few weeks before the shooting, she crossed paths with Miller and then told Reed about seeing him. She said Reed became angry and said he was going to pay Miller a visit, which Taylor said she understood to mean Reed wanted his money back.
When the police arrived at the hospital to interview Wallace, he was out of surgery and heavily medicated for pain. He was interviewed twice, by different detectives, and neither officer issued him a Miranda warning. Wallace told each officer that he had been shot during a robbery at Broad Street and Olney Avenue, four miles from Miller’s house. When the second officer, Detective James Poulous, asked Wallace about possible inconsistencies in his statements, Wallace stopped talking.
Wallace would later say that Pitts visited him at the hospital and asked the doctors to remove a bullet fragment from Wallace’s hip, which he said he planned to use as forensic evidence against him. Wallace said the doctors balked because the procedure wasn’t medically necessary, and Pitts later obtained a court order to have the object removed.
Wallace was arrested on January 6, 2009, and charged with murder, robbery, and conspiracy. Reed was charged with similar crimes, but he was not arrested until April 20, 2009.
At a preliminary hearing on February 3, 2010, Tate identified Wallace as the person he saw limp into Reed’s Accord as it drove away from Miller’s house.
The joint trial of Reed and Wallace began in late December 2012 in the Philadelphia County Court of Common Pleas, with Judge Carolyn Engel Temin presiding. Geoffrey Seay represented Wallace.
Tate had died since the preliminary hearing, but his testimony from that appearance was read into the record.
Hinds testified about her conversation with Reed on the day of the shooting. She said Reed described how he tried to drag Grant to the car but ended up leaving him outside Miller’s house and taking another friend to a hospital. Hinds did not name Wallace in her testimony.
The state introduced Taylor’s three statements into evidence. In the first statement, taken at 11:55 a.m. on December 30, 2008, Taylor identified photos of Reed, Wallace, and Grant and said the men were friends. In the second statement, taken at 4:30 p.m. that day, Taylor elaborated on the friendship between Reed and Wallace. In her third statement, taken at 8:45 p.m. on January 2, 2009, Taylor told police about the photography and consulting work Miller provided, and how Reed “got mad” and said he would go see Miller. She also said in the statement that after the shooting, Reed told her, “Vince, Mike and the boy [Ernie] got shot.”
By the time of the trial, Taylor had recanted her second and third statements and said they were the result of coercion by Pitts and Detective Ohmarr Jenkins. She testified that Pitts handcuffed her in the interrogation room and told her he would charge her with murder and that she would never see her children again.
The state did not present any forensic evidence connecting Wallace to the crime scene. But it did introduce the clothing worn by Wallace on the day of the shooting, which included a black track suit, black boots, and a black hat. (It also displayed a black track suit on a mannequin, and during closing arguments, the prosecutor said the dark clothes supported a theory that Reed, Grant, and Wallace “went down there on a mission to take care of business.”)
Wallace did not testify, but Poulous testified about his interview with Wallace at the hospital. A prosecutor asked Poulous whether he tried to follow up with Wallace about inconsistencies in his statements. Poulous answered: “I did. Basically, he just wouldn’t give me any additional information. It was—I guess it is what it is, it was more like that. He didn’t speak to me too much after that. And I said, ‘This doesn’t make sense.’”
The jury convicted Wallace and Reed of second-degree murder, robbery, and conspiracy on December 3, 2012. Both men later received sentences of life in prison.
Wallace appealed, arguing that there had been insufficient evidence to sustain his conviction. He said the state had not presented any evidence that he removed or attempted to remove any property from Miller, that he fired a weapon, or was responsible for Miller’s death. He said he “was merely present during the incident and, therefore, not criminally culpable” as an accomplice or a coconspirator.
A three-judge panel of the Superior Court of Pennsylvania affirmed the conviction on June 8, 2015. The ruling said that the state had presented sufficient circumstantial evidence showing that Wallace was wounded during the shootout at Miller’s house. It also noted the dark clothing that Wallace was said to be wearing when he arrived at the hospital. The court said that Taylor’s statements on the relationship between Wallace and Reed tied Wallace to Reed’s actions. “Significantly, the only connection between [Wallace] and [Miller] was [Reed’s] statement to Taylor that he intended to meet [Miller] about the debt,” the court said.
Wallace, now represented by Ellen McBennett and Wendy Ramos of the Defender Association of Philadelphia, began preparing a motion for a new trial under Pennsylvania’s Post-Conviction Relief Act (PCRA) and filed a discovery request with the Philadelphia County District Attorney’s Office in April 2017.
On November 7, 2018, the attorneys received a call from Michael Garmisa, with the district attorney’s Conviction Integrity Unit, asking if they were aware of Judge M. Teresa Sarmina’s ruling from June 7, 2018, in a case involving Dwayne Thorpe, who would be exonerated in 2019. Judge Sarmina’s order said that Pitts had engaged in a pattern of coercive behavior with witnesses.
Judge Sarmina wrote: “This court found that, when he is operating under the apparent belief that an interrogation subject is untruthful or withholding evidence, Detective Pitts habitually (1) makes unreasonable threats of imprisonment or threats targeting an interrogation subject’s specific vulnerabilities, such as family members, children, or housing; (2) employs physical abuse; (3) prolongs detentions or interrogation subjects to an unreasonable degree and without probable cause; and (4) does not permit witnesses or suspects to review or correct statements before signing them.”
Prior to ruling, Judge Sarmina had held an evidentiary hearing, where 10 witnesses, including Taylor, testified about Pitts’s actions. Taylor testified that Pitts handcuffed her to a chair and “told me he was going to deal with me another way. And he started typing up stuff and keeping me there for hours and hours and hours. He left and came back the next morning. And they kept grabbing me and grabbing me and grabbing me and told me my name was going on a warrant if I didn’t sign the statement.”
Taylor said she was not allowed to make a telephone call and was denied food during the interrogation. She said she signed the statements because she was scared and “didn’t know when it was going to end.” After Wallace’s trial, Taylor filed a complaint against Pitts with Internal Affairs.
On March 15, 2019, Wallace filed his PCRA petition. It said the state had failed to disclose Pitts’s long-running practice of coercive behavior, which would have cast doubt on the truthfulness of Taylor’s second and third statements.
The motion also said that Seay had provided ineffective representation in numerous ways. First, he had failed to move to sever Wallace’s trial from Reed’s. The motion also said Seay failed to object or ask for a limiting instruction to hearsay statements attributed to Reed by Taylor and Hinds that mentioned Wallace by name or inference.
The motion also said that Seay should have objected to the introduction of Wallace’s statements to the police, because of his medical condition at the time he made these statements. In addition, the motion said Seay should have objected to Poulous’s testimony on how he interpreted Wallace’s decision to stop talking to the police because that was an unconstitutional infringement on Wallace’s right to remain silent.
In addition, the motion said that Seay had pursued a flawed trial strategy that argued both that Wallace was not at the crime scene and that his “mere presence” at the crime scene was insufficient to support a conviction. The motion called this approach “self-contradictory and nonlogical.”
The state opposed the petition. In a motion filed December 8, 2021, the district attorney’s office said that it would not defend the validity of the statements that Pitts said Taylor provided but also asked the judge to limit testimony at any evidentiary hearing to witnesses directly involved in Wallace’s case. It defended Wallace’s conviction and said there was sufficient evidence against him even without Taylor’s tainted statements.
After an evidentiary hearing, Judge Glenn Bronson granted Wallace a new trial on August 23, 2022. He said that had the jury known of the unreliability of Taylor’s statement, the outcome at trial would likely have been different.
Wallace remained in prison. In early March 2023, his attorneys moved to dismiss the case, asserting that without Taylor’s statement there was no way to prove Wallace had any involvement in the crime other than as a bystander.
In a filing, Wallace’s attorneys said: “Here the Commonwealth simply cannot show that Mr. Reed and Mr. Wallace came to any agreement whatsoever. Without the unreliable out-of- court statement, the Commonwealth cannot prove there was any debt to be collected, that Mr. Reed in fact wanted to collect the debt, that Mr. Reed enlisted anyone to help him do this, or that Mr. Reed and Mr. Wallace had any mutual connection to the crime scene other than there is admissible testimony that they knew each other and Mr. Reed did in fact take Mr. Wallace to the hospital.”
The motion dismissed the amount of stock the state put in Grant, Wallace, and Reed wearing dark clothing as evidence of a conspiracy and its use of the mannequin at trial. “This display and this argument that just because three Black men were wearing dark clothing, even taking all inferences in favor of the Commonwealth, must have been up to something nefarious is frankly racist and a scare tactic not a prima facie case of conspiracy robbery and second-degree murder.”
On March 9, 2023, the state moved to dismiss the case. At a hearing, an assistant district attorney said, “The Commonwealth has ultimately come to the determination that without being able to use Detective Pitts, we would not have enough evidence to survive defense’s motion to quash or even a judgment of acquittal at this stage.”
A judge dismissed the case, and Wallace was released from prison.
Pitts was arrested on March 3, 2022, and charged with two counts of perjury and three counts of obstruction tied to his testimony and police work in the case of Obina Onyiah. He was convicted of those charges on July 16, 2024, and later sentenced to 32 to 64 months in prison.
On January 17, 2025, Wallace, represented by Michael Pomerantz, filed a federal civil-rights lawsuit against the city of Philadelphia, Pitts, Jenkins, and other officers, seeking compensation for his wrongful conviction.
Wallace, a contractor, said in the complaint that he had accompanied Reed and Grant to Miller’s house, because Reed said it could lead to some construction work. He said he waited in the car while Grant and Reed went inside. He said he decided to leave and had exited the car to catch the bus when Reed motioned for him to come into the house. He said he grabbed his clipboard and went inside. He said he had just made his introductions when Grant and Miller began shooting at each other.
The complaint also said that Pitts’s actions had not just led to Wallace’s wrongful imprisonment but also extreme pain and suffering because of the removal of the bullet fragment. “It should also be noted,” the complaint said, “that the ballistics evidence which Detective Pitts went to such destructive ends to retrieve was never used at trial.”
– Ken Otterbourg
Posting Date: 11-12-2025
Last Update Date: 11-12-2025
