C&P Attorney Susan Simpson's Investigation Results in the Release of Fifth Wrongfully Convicted Man
Susan Simpson and Jeff Titus
Clinton & Peed Of Counsel Susan Simpson’s investigative work has now resulted in the release of a fifth wrongfully convicted man from prison. Back in October 2020, we posted the New York Times profile of Simpson and the sixth season of her podcast Undisclosed. This is an update to that story. After more than two decades in prison, retired Marine and former police officer Jeff Titus—the subject of Undisclosed’s sixth season—was been released from prison earlier this morning.
The judge presiding over the case threw out the murder convictions under an agreement between the attorney general’s office and the Innocence Clinic at University of Michigan law school. David Moran of the Innocence Clinic said much of the credit for Titus’s release belongs to Simpson and her colleague Jacinda Davis, whose investigation raised doubts about Titus’s guilt and another suspect’s possible role.
Simpson flew out to Michigan earlier this week to be there for Titus’s release, which ended up being delayed by several days due to a series of unfortunate last-minute circumstances.
As the New York Times article explained about this case back in 2020, Titus had been imprisoned for nearly two decades for the murder of two hunters in Michigan that the original detectives on the case were convinced he didn’t commit:
The bodies of Doug Estes and Jim Bennett were found on Nov. 17, 1990, in the woods of Kalamazoo County. The men had been hunting, separately, on a piece of land known as the Fulton State Game Area. The murders went unsolved until 2000, when cold case detectives took a closer look at a suspect cleared a decade earlier: Titus, a Marine veteran and police officer at a nearby Veterans Affairs hospital, whose land bordered the preserve on which the killings took place. Titus was convicted in 2002 and is currently incarcerated at Lakeland Correctional Facility, in Coldwater, Mich. He has always maintained his innocence. . . .
“The evidence in this case struck me as underwhelming to begin with,” Simpson said, “but you never know what’s going to turn up once you start investigating. After a month in Kalamazoo, everything I’ve found has confirmed the conclusions reached by the case’s initial investigators: The evidence for Jeff Titus’s guilt just isn’t there.”
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Susan is Of Counsel to the firm, and frequently assists the firm’s lawyers on civil and criminal matters that involve factually complex issues requiring her specialized investigative skills. Susan’s latest podcast Proof: A True Crime Podcast is widely available, and already resulted in the release of two wrongfully convicted men in its first season. It second season is expected to premier later this year.