The city of Portland is poised to pay $300,000 to settle a lawsuit filed by a man who spent more than five years in prison for selling heroin that police told him had caused a fatal overdose, only to learn after completing his sentence that his victim was actually alive.
Adam Gregg had pleaded guilty in Portland to dealing heroin after a prosecutor told him that the man who took the drug he sold had died of an overdose.
The prosecutor who negotiated the plea deal told Gregg that if he didn’t accept an offer of nearly seven years in state prison, he could face 20 years to life for the crime in federal court because of the death.
Gregg accepted the offer, was convicted of delivering heroin in Multnomah County Circuit Court and served nearly five and a half years.
But shortly after he completed his sentence, he discovered the man who supposedly died of an overdose was actually alive.
Gregg, now 39, then sued two Portland police officers and two former Multnomah County prosecutors, alleging malicious prosecution. The civil case was filed in federal court and then moved to Multnomah County Circuit, where a judge dismissed the claims against the prosecutors.
Attorney Jesse Merrithew, Gregg’s lawyer, said he hopes the Police Bureau “learns from this incident and that no one has to go through what Adam went through again.”
Portland’s city attorney, the Police Bureau and the city’s risk management division have recommended that the lawsuit be settled, noting there’s “risk the City may be found liable.”
“Therefore, in order to avoid the risk of an adverse jury award, it is prudent to compromise the lawsuit at this time,” says the ordinance that goes before council on Wednesday.
Gregg was in prison from Feb. 8, 2016, through June 3, 2021.
Once Gregg got out of prison, he started looking for the victim’s family “because he felt bad,” he said.
He also wanted to ask if they would support his effort to seek some type of relief from the district attorney’s office so his conviction wouldn’t bar his desire to attend law school.
Gregg was aware of a 2022 state law that allows for a so-called “second look,” giving a person convicted of felonies the chance to petition a court for relief from their conviction or sentence with the support of a district attorney.
As he searched for Culver’s family, he discovered Culver’s Facebook page and found Culver had an arrest while Gregg was in prison, suggesting that he was alive.
“It seems insane. I thought I had gone crazy or something,” Gregg recalled.
Gregg’s defense lawyer then alerted the district attorney’s office in June 2022, prompting the office’s Justice Integrity Unit to find out what had happened.
The district attorney’s office acknowledged errors in the police reports.
The Justice Integrity Unit’s investigation found that the report by the initial responding Portland police officer Matthew Brown listed Cole Culver’s name under the heading, “PERSON — DECEASED #1.”
Early on May 23, 2015, Culver and several of his friends used heroin together. Culver, already drunk from alcohol, had gotten the drug from his roommate, according to court records.
About an hour after he ingested the heroin, Culver was alive, snoring loudly. But four hours later around 6:30 a.m., one of Culver’s friends noticed blood coming out of Culver’s nose and couldn’t wake him. The friend called 911.
Portland police and medics responded. An initial police report said Culver didn’t have a pulse and wasn’t breathing when medics took over. The medics performed CPR for about 25 minutes and were able to get a pulse and Culver was taken by ambulance to a local hospital.
The Police Bureau assigned two officers – Tequila Thurman and Carrie Hutchison — from its Drugs and Vice Division to investigate and they quickly focused on trying to identify who sold the heroin to Culver’s roommate.
The same morning of Culver’s overdose, Thurman spoke with Culver’s girlfriend, who was at the hospital and told the officer that Culver was alive, the suit contends.
Three days later, though, Thurman’s police report noted her conversation with Culver’s girlfriend but didn’t include the crucial fact that Culver had survived, the suit alleged.
Meanwhile, Hutchison wrote in her report a day after Thurman’s report that Thurman had interviewed two people who were with Culver the “night before his death,” the suit said.
The police investigation identified Culver’s roommate as buying a half of a gram of heroin from Jeremiah Cook and identified three other men, including Gregg, higher up in the drug supply chain.
In questioning Cook and Gregg, the police investigators told the men that they needed to cooperate because they had supplied heroin that led to an overdose death, according to the suit.
Gregg, who supplied the heroin to the man who sold the drug to Cook, gave police his consent to search his apartment “based on this lie,” his suit said.
After police found 80 grams of heroin in his apartment, Gregg agreed to cooperate and gave up the name of the source who gave him the drug.
Then-Multnomah County prosecutor John Copic, who was assigned as the lead prosecutor, said he “simply believed what was in the police reports when negotiating” the case, according to the investigation.
The district attorney’s office subsequently moved to dismiss convictions against Cook, Gregg and two other co-defendants.
In response to Gregg’s suit, Senior Deputy City Attorney Michael K. Porter wrote that while Culver didn’t die from the overdose, the men charged still sold the heroin that led to his serious injury.
Hutchison admitted she made a reference to Culver as dead though she knew he was alive at the time she wrote her police report. That information “was an error, made inadvertently without the intent to deceive,” her lawyer, Andrea D. Coit, wrote in a response filed in court.
Senior Assistant Attorney General Michael R. Washington, who represented the former prosecutors, successfully argued for the dismissal of Gregg’s suit against the them, alleging it was filed beyond the statute of limitations and that the prosecutors are immune from liability because they were members of a public office. Gregg’s lawyer is appealing that ruling.
Shortly before Gregg filed his lawsuit, he learned Culver had died from unrelated circumstances last year.
Gregg is now attending Lewis & Clark Law School, considering civil practice based on his personal experience.
“I am pleased with the outcome of this settlement. Exposing this injustice and achieving the outcome is the result of immense personal commitment as well as exceptional advocacy from my attorneys,” he said. “One day I hope to be able to offer that same quality of representation to people who have been harmed by those with power.”
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