| On June 15, 2017, New York City police detective Joseph Franco arrested 33-year-old Tameeka Baker after he allegedly saw her sell drugs in the vestibule of a building at 280 Madison Street in New York City. Franco said that the person Baker sold drugs to almost immediately sold the drugs to someone else, who happened to be an undercover police officer.
In July 2017, Baker pled guilty in New York County Supreme Court to selling drugs. She was sentenced to four years in prison.
In 2018, Franco came under investigation by the New York County District Attorney’s Office after video surveillance of the lobby showed that Baker entered the lobby of the building with another man and went past the elevator bank to a staircase in the rear of the lobby and disappeared from sight. There was no drug sale in the vestibule of the building as Franco claimed in his reports.
The investigation also showed that the video showed that Franco was never close enough to the building to observe anything that might have happened between Baker and the man she entered the building with.
On November 18, 2018, after an investigation by the New York County District Attorney’s Office, prosecutors asked that Baker’s conviction be vacated and the charges were dismissed.
In April 2019, Franco was indicted on 16 counts, including perjury and official misconduct for framing Baker and two other people— Turrell Irving and Julio Irizzarry. The charges against Franco were dismissed by a judge in 2023, after he found that prosecutors had failed to turn over evidence to Franco's attorneys.
In January 2020, Baker filed a civil rights lawsuit against the City of New York in U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York. She settled the lawsuit in 2021, receiving $25,000.
– Maurice Possley
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