This is the seventh installment in “Exploring Integrity: Reviewing Wrongful Conviction Remedies,” a series examining the impact of conviction integrity units on the American judicial system’s rate of wrongful conviction. Presented by the O’Brien Fellowship in Public Service Journalism, the investigation is supported by Marquette University in Milwaukee, Wisconsin.
Detroit’s top man at the Fire Department still hasn’t broken public silence about one of his career’s most high-profile cases — but he came closer to it than ever on Thursday.
Commissioner Charles “Chuck” Simms avoided a subpoena to testify in a hearing for Mario Willis, who’s widely believed to have been wrongfully convicted in a firefighter’s 2008 murder, after a prosecutor said Simms acknowledged conducting an interview that supports Willis’s innocence claim.
Willis, wearing Wayne County Jail clothing, attentively listened as Amanda Smith said the city official who Willis and his supporters have repeatedly asked to come forward about the 2009 interview finally confirmed the authenticity of a video recording of the interview. Simms was an arson investigator in the death of Walter Harris, a well-regarded first responder, who died after Willis’s employee Darian Dove admitted to accidentally setting 7418 East Kirby ablaze while entertaining a woman. Dove later changed his account, saying Detroit Police detectives threatened him into claiming Willis paid him to set the fire.
During Willis’s second-degree murder trial in 2010 Detective Scott Shea testified that neither Willis nor his wife Megan had offered an alibi for their activities on Nov. 15, 2008, the night of the blaze, but Willis and his defense team say the Simms video proves otherwise.
“That was not revealed or played for the jury at any time, and that’s the difference,” Willis’s co-counsel Craig Daly told Third Judicial Court Judge Margaret Van Houten on Thursday.
In the video, Simms identifies himself to Willis before saying, “You remember what you told me, right? … I remember you told me y’all went out that night. Y’all went out to dinner or something.”
A clip of the exchange can be viewed at the website justiceformariowillis.com.
At root of the discussion between Daly, with co-counsel Wolf Mueller and Smith, the assistant Wayne County prosecutor who said Simms acknowledges conducting the interview, is a possible Brady violation, which occurs when prosecutors hide evidence that could help a defendant. The Simms interview was saved to a police department disc labeled “Megan,” Daly told the court, after detectives recorded a conversation with Willis’s wife. The video camera, aimed over Simms’s shoulder, had not been turned off before Willis sat with Simms in an empty interrogation room that neither man knew Megan Willis had occupied.
Simms ignored repeated requests to discuss the video in 2022 when Metro Times began investigating Willis’s claims of innocence. Through an assistant, Simms asked Metro Times for details about the footage, but never agreed to be interviewed after learning that his conversation with Willis was recorded.
Several months later, when WDIV Channel 4’s Devin Scillian reported on Willis’s possible innocence, Simms was silent again. City of Detroit spokesman John Roach instead deflected questions about the video, saying the fire department wasn’t responsible for Willis’s fate.
Willis disagrees.
“The prosecution rested on that,” he told Metro Times in an earlier phone interview from Saginaw Correctional Facility. “One of the last things they said was that I tried to deceive the court by telling Megan to lie on the witness stand and say we were together that night.”
He added, “That hurt me even more than Dove.”
Willis says he hadn’t remembered what he and Megan had done Nov. 15, 2008, since the interview with Simms took place eight months after the fire, but Simms validated what the couple had already told police. Despite the charge that he’d only paid Dove to start the fire, Judge Michael Callahan even cited “perjury” when sentencing Willis to prison.
Maxine Willis, Mario’s mother, shared with Metro Times a 2023 letter to Commissioner Simms, directly appealing for his help, in which she wrote: “Post conviction, a withheld interrogation video was discovered between you and my son that shows you were made aware of the exact alibi information provided at trial… In our efforts to have the complete truth established on record, we are calling upon you NOW, to please confirm the information my son provided you. As a fire commissioner, I’m sure you took an oath which includes to accept responsibility for your actions and for the consequences of your actions.”
Simms never replied, she said.
Thursday’s stipulation that Simms, 15 years later, has verified Willis’s statement of an alibi followed three days of cross-examination of fire expert Marc Fennell that began in December. The prosecution spent hours of the hearing, questioning dozens of details in Fennell’s testimony that science supports Dove’s confession: An accident, not an arson, killed Walter Harris.
Mueller, who initially called on Fennell to testify, followed the cross-examination by asking the Grand Rapids-based consultant and ex-firefighter if he found credible Detroit Fire Department Captain Rance Dixon’s statements that he’d never heard the name Darian Dove before last month. Fennell described firefighters as “family,” saying their bond compels interest in details of what led to a loss or tragedy within their ranks.
Despite intense media coverage in 2010, and a heavy presence of firefighters and Harris supporters in and out of the courtroom at Willis’s trial, Dixon — who investigated the scene at 7418 East Kirby — testified last month that he didn’t learn Dove was in the house until Willis’s current hearing began.
“Did you find that astounding?” Mueller asked Fennell.
“I was shocked, yes,” Fennell replied.
In 2023 the Wayne County Prosecutor’s Office Conviction Integrity Unit reviewed Willis’s case, but denied his request for exoneration.
Related story
Expert testimony casts doubt on 2008 arson case that sent Detroit man to prison
This is the sixth installment in “Exploring Integrity: Reviewing Wrongful Conviction Remedies,” a series examining the impact of conviction integrity units…
