George Calicut Jr. walked out of a Michigan prison Tuesday after prosecutors agreed that the confession that helped send him away more than two decades ago was coerced. Calicut, 56, had served a life sentence in Coldwater after being convicted in the 1999 killing of Virgie Perkins, and he long professed his innocence.
Prosecutors said Calicut’s confession was coerced by a rogue police officer, a concession that led to the case’s collapse. Calicut was released from prison soon after a judge dismissed the case at the request of lawyers on both sides, according to the prosecutors and defense attorneys involved in the matter.
At the time of the killing, prosecutors accused Calicut of choking Perkins and cutting her neck while stealing money and a phone from her home in 1999. In court, Calicut disputed the statements attributed to him and said he never saw the purported confession until confronting it at trial; he also testified in his own defense.
Calicut was represented by the Innocence Clinic at the University of Michigan Law School and the Cooley Innocence Project at Cooley Law School, which had a role in seeking relief. In filings and statements connected to the dismissal, lawyers for Calicut and the prosecutors described DNA testing submitted in recent efforts as further supporting the lack of evidence connecting him to the killing.
The case hinged in part on the circumstances surrounding the confession and what happened during the interrogation. At trial, Detroit homicide investigator Barbara Simon, who was retired from the department, acknowledged that she wrote Calicut’s alleged confession before he signed it.
Prosecutors and Calicut’s attorneys described a four-page agreement outlining how the conviction was to be dismissed and tied the confession to suggestions made by Simon about how Calicut could potentially receive a reduced charge. They said Simon told Calicut, who had no prior interactions with police, that she could help him by creating a statement that would reduce the charge to manslaughter and allow him to seek bond and go home.
Valerie Newman, head of the Wayne County prosecutor’s conviction integrity unit, said clearing Calicut reflected what the office described as an unwavering commitment to the integrity of convictions and the credibility of the system. She said the action aligned with the prosecutor’s stated conviction-integrity goals, as the case moved from a long-held life sentence to dismissal.
Simon could not be reached for comment. A phone number associated with her was unanswered, and the outcome followed prosecutors’ acknowledgment of coercion and defense lawyers’ argument that the evidentiary record did not support Calicut’s conviction.
Records also show that the trial prosecutor was Mike Cox, who later served as Michigan attorney general and is now a Republican candidate for governor. An email seeking comment about Calicut’s exoneration was not answered.