Lawyer fights to clear man in drug case

DETROIT (AP) — An attorney says he’ll make a final appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court in the case of a Detroit-area man whose drug trial was marred by misconduct by a judge, prosecutor and police officers.

A federal appeals court recently ruled against Alexander Aceval.

He pleaded guilty to a drug crime and spent 10 years in prison. But he’s been arguing for years that all charges should have been dropped forever after a 2005 trial ended in a mistrial in Wayne County.

It was discovered that the judge at that trial had allowed perjury to conceal the role of an informant.

Attorney David Moffitt says Aceval’s guilty plea should be erased based on the extraordinary misconduct at trial.

The prosecutor and two Inkster police officers were sent to jail.