A Dayton, Tennessee, man who spent 31 years in prison before a Tennessee criminal court vacated his 1994 convictions for rape and other crimes and released him is suing Bradley County, Tennessee, a former Bradley County sheriff and two former sheriff’s detectives.
The county and its law enforcement allegedly violated the man’s civil rights under the Fourth, Fifth and 14th Amendments, according to a lawsuit filed in U.S. District Court in Chattanooga.
Samuel Scott Minton — 21 years old when sentenced and now 53 — is seeking unspecified damages for the years he lost in a Bradley County conviction that was achieved, according to the suit, through coercion and fabricated evidence.
As defendants, the 36-page suit names Bradley County, former Bradley County Sheriff Dan Gilley and former detectives Anthony Benefield and William Burtt. Minton is represented by Chattanooga attorneys Joseph Alan Jackson II and Katelyn Elizabeth Murdock and New York attorneys David Lebowitz and Alanna Kaufman.
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Because of his convictions and incarceration, Minton spent his 20s, 30s and 40s behind bars and was denied normal relationships with his family, the ability to find employment and a chance to find a companion, according to the lawsuit. The suit does not seek a specific amount, but compensatory and punitive damages in an amount to be determined in court. Minton also seeks prejudgment interest, attorney fees and court costs.
When contacted by email Friday for comment on behalf of the defendants in the case, Adam Lewis, spokesperson for Bradley County government, deferred to County Attorney Crystal Freiberg. A follow-up email was sent Friday to Freiberg, a social media message was sent to Burtt after a phone number could not be found, and phone messages were left for Gilley and Benefield at the numbers listed in their names, but they did not respond.
As of Friday, court records did not show the suit had been served on any of the defendants.
In December 2024, a Hamilton County Criminal Court granted a petition for post-conviction relief, and the convictions were vacated in January.
Following the January hearing, Bradley County District Attorney Stephen Hatchett said he respected Hamilton County Criminal Court Judge Amanda Dunn’s ruling but didn’t agree with it.
“We are dealing with a case that is unfortunately decades past, and the person that said they were a victim of a crime is not here to say anything,” Hatchett said in January. “I don’t think the word exoneration is necessarily accurate.”
Dunn vacated the convictions following days of testimony in an evidentiary hearing, concluding there was new, clear and convincing scientific evidence of Minton’s innocence, the suit said. During the hearing, experts testified about false confessions and flawed eyewitness identifications.
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BACKGROUND
On Halloween day in 1993, the then-49-year-old victim had been planning to go to church with her family but felt ill, the suit said. That morning, a group of people entered her Benton Pike home, and she was brutally raped, burned with a cigar or cigarette multiple times and shot in the leg with a .22 caliber pistol. A man and woman, also charged in separate cases as additional assailants, were present during the crime.
Minton confessed to the crime on Nov. 2, 1993, without an attorney present, the lawsuit claims, adding that many of his statements in the confession were actually made by a detective.
The suit describes Minton at the time he was charged as a “vulnerable and functionally illiterate 20-year-old man with an intellectual disability.”
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“At the time of the alleged incident, Mr. Minton was an hour away from the purported crime scene, running errands and working on fixing his car,” the suit said. “His ironclad alibi was corroborated by time-stamped receipts and eighteen alibi witnesses who reported seeing him that morning.”
The suit contains a timeline placing Minton in Dayton from 8:30 a.m. CDT that day until police arrived at his home in Dayton around lunchtime. The crime in Bradley County happened during that time.
The Bradley County Sheriff’s Office and its investigators “baselessly determined that Mr. Minton had committed the crime and set about securing his conviction at the cost of Mr. Minton’s constitutional and state law rights to due process and a fair trial,” the suit said. Minton was coerced “into providing a false confession, feeding him facts about the alleged incident to make the confession appear credible.”
Investigators “rigged suggestive identification procedures that were engineered to produce a positive identification of Mr. Minton as the perpetrator, and they failed to do basic police work that would have indicated Mr. Minton’s demonstrable innocence, such as dusting for fingerprints at the crime scene or investigating the complainant’s credibility,” the suit said.
Minton ended up wrongfully convicted and incarcerated for over 31 years before he was released, the suit said, because of the unlawful actions of Bradley County officials.
“To say that defendants’ unlawful actions ruined Mr. Minton’s life would be a vast understatement,” the suit said. “Mr. Minton’s wrongful incarceration caused him unimaginable suffering, and this action seeks to hold defendants accountable for the tremendous harm their conduct caused.”
Defendants in a federal lawsuit typically have 21 days to file an answer.
Contact Southeast Tennessee reporter Ben Benton at bbenton@timesfreepress.com or 423-757-6569.
