This is the fifth 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.
Even with a plea deal that spared him the possibility of decades in prison, things weren’t going so well for Darian Dove.
The man whose testimony effectively put himself and his one-time employer, Mario Willis, in prison for the homicide of Detroit firefighter Walter Harris grew unpopular with fellow inmates.
“When he would go to the shower people would go and pee in his coffee,” said Walter Collier, who was jailed with Dove for a period after the 2008 blaze that led to Harris’s death.
Collier testified Monday and Tuesday at the Third Judicial Court of Michigan in a crucial hearing that could ultimately lead Willis, who a growing number of supporters believe was wrongfully convicted, to freedom from a 12-to 30-year sentence. Willis, 44, has been imprisoned at Saginaw Correctional Facility since Dove testified in 2010 that he set fire to an east side house, so Willis could collect insurance money from the property. Judge Margaret Van Houten granted Willis’s request to hear evidence not presented at the original trial, including multiple statements from Dove admitting he lied due to police coercion.
Collier and Nikemo Burton testified Monday that, while Dove was incarcerated with each man at different times, he admitted to both Collier and Burton that he’d accidentally started the fire at 7418 East Kirby. Consistent with a 2010 statement Dove handwrote and sent to Willis’s attention, Dove described how he’d taken a woman named Felisha to the home after midnight Nov. 15, 2008, without Willis’s knowledge, started a fire for warmth, and accidentally set the house ablaze.
Part of the reason for Dove’s lack of popularity among inmates was they knew Dove had implicated Willis, in order to reduce his own prison time, Collier testified.
With Willis observing from the defense table, his former fix-it man Dove took the witness stand Tuesday for a second time. Despite having signed a 2014 affidavit that stated, “Mario Willis had nothing to do with the fire,” Dove reverted to testifying that Willis assigned him the deed when questioned by Willis’s lawyer, Craig Daly.
“I lied. I lied. I lied,” Dove added when asked about various statements to police.
But when Jason Williams, assistant Wayne County prosecutor, asked about Dove’s statement of Willis’s innocence, Dove replied, “I don’t know how that part got in there.”
During a day and a half on the witness stand Monday and Tuesday, Dove was often verbally combative with defense attorney Craig Daly, refused to answer questions he found annoying, and claimed dozens of times that he couldn’t remember statements he made because “it was 16 years ago.” Dove largely echoed the reluctant and disjointed testimony he gave in 2010, but he repeated his earlier claims that Detroit Police officers Lance Sullivan and Scott Shea threatened him with life in prison if he didn’t tell them the story they demanded.
Dove grabbed attention from much of the courtroom when he quietly stated, “It was,” after Daly pointed out that Dove testified on Tuesday that the fire was an accident. But assistant prosecutor Williams cross-examined Dove, who then said the “accident” was letting the fire grow out of control, while again repeating that Willis told him to set it.
Asked to read multiple prior statements contradicting his accusations against Willis, or other related answers he’d given, Dove said, “Yeah, I made that up,” and issued similar denials. He also admitted to having perjured himself in court.
On Monday private investigator Julianne Cuneo, the hearing’s first witness, testified that she’d visited Dove, post-conviction, in 2013 at Michigan Reformatory, where he told her Detroit Police “badgered and pressured” him to change the original story of his night with Felisha. He’d called the fire department, with Harris among first responders to 7418 East Kirby, to report that the house was in flames, Cuneo testified, but he never told Willis that he’d been at the house.
“He didn’t want to disappoint Mario,” said Cuneo.
Closing his re-direct examination, Daly again asked Dove about the Detroit Police Department’s alleged coercion.
“They tricked you?” asked Daly.
“Yes, they did,” said Dove.
“And they told you that blaming Mario was the only way out, correct?”
“Yes.”
“The truth is, Mr. Dove,” Daly added, “Mr. Dove, you’re a pathological liar – right?”
“Yes,” Dove replied.
In 2023 the Wayne County Prosecutor’s Office Conviction Integrity Unit rejected Willis’s application for exoneration in Walter Harris’s death.
