The defendants were wrongfully convicted of a wide range of crimes, including burglary, drug possession, traffic offenses, and resisting arrest. Two received sentences of five years in prison, but most of the 29 men and two women received much shorter sentences or probation.

The Florida Department of Law Enforcement and the Miami-Dade State Attorney’s Office’s joint independent investigation suggested police targeted many of these people because they were Black.

Biscayne Park is a village about 12 miles north of Miami. It has a population of just over 3,000 residents. Raimundo Atesiano joined the village’s police force in 2008. He won praise for his aggressive approach to policing, and the Florida Police Chiefs Association named him officer of the year for small departments in 2011.

That year, Atesiano made 305 arrests and wrote 2,236 traffic tickets, according to the Biscayne Times. Atesiano and Officer Charlie Dayoub arrested Peter Jean-Gilles on January 1, 2012, in connection with several burglaries. The officers would later say in court statements that Jean-Gilles gave them a statement about his involvement in the crimes, but that they had not recorded it. Jean-Gilles pled guilty to several counts of burglary and was sentenced to five years in prison. Atesiano and other officers arrested Clarens Desrouleaux on January 23, 2013, charging him with three burglaries earlier in the month.

Police said they focused on Desrouleaux after he was found to have forged and cashed a check stolen from one of the houses. No evidence linked Desrouleaux to the other two houses, but officers falsified an arrest affidavit and arrested Desrouleaux, a 35-year-old native of Haiti with permanent-resident status in the United States. They interrogated him at the police station, and the officers said he confessed to all three burglaries.

As with Jean-Gilles, officers neither wrote down nor recorded Desrouleaux’s confession, but they gave sworn depositions attesting to the statement. Desrouleaux had previous convictions for drug-dealing and other non-violent crimes. If convicted at trial, he faced sentencing as a habitual felon with up to 30 years in prison. Instead of taking that risk, he pled guilty on May 23, 2013, to three counts of burglary and three counts of grand theft. He was sentenced to five years in prison. He served four years; after he was released in 2017, he was deported to Haiti.

The village council promoted Atesiano to chief of police in 2013. On July 9, 2013, at a council meeting, Atesiano boasted that he and his officers had a 100 percent clearance rate on burglaries. In 2014, the Biscayne Park town manager received anonymous letters, later understood to come from concerned officers, complaining about Atesiano’s policing tactics. “The letters said police were doing a lot of bad things,” Village Manager Heidi Shafran told the Miami Herald. “It said police officers were directed to pick up people of color and blame the crimes on them.” Shafran ordered an internal investigation of the department by the Florida Department of Law Enforcement and the Miami-Dade State Attorney’s Office.

Officers told the investigators that Atesiano instructed them to file false charges against defendants to improve the village’s arrest statistics. Atesiano resigned during the probe. The state indicted Atesiano, Dayoub, and former Reserve Officer Raul Fernandez on June 7, 2018, on two counts of violating the civil rights of a teenager known in court documents as T.D. The indictment said that Atesiano told Dayoub and Fernandez to arrest T.D. on four burglary counts, even though no evidence connected T.D. to the crimes. Fernandez wrote the narratives of the arrest affidavits, and Dayoub signed the documents. The state later dropped the charges against T.D.

On July 25, 2018, the state indicted former Officer Guillermo Ravelo on two counts of violating the civil rights of two men in Biscayne Park. The first count of the indictment said that Ravelo beat Jonathan Pereira after a routine traffic stop on April 7, 2013, and then charged Pereira with battery on a law-enforcement officer, resisting arrest, and other offenses. The state dismissed Pereira’s case on August 5, 2014.

The second count said that Ravelo falsified arrest reports tying Erasmus Banmah to five burglaries in February 2014. The indictment said Atesiano ordered Ravelo to make the false claims, which included stating that Banmah had taken Ravelo to the sites of the burglaries and confessed to what he had taken. The state dismissed the charges against Banmah before trial.

Ravelo pled guilty to both counts on July 25, 2018. He was ordered to pay restitution of $9,453 to Pereira, and sentenced to 27 months in prison. Dayoub and Fernandez each pled guilty to a single count of deprivation of civil rights on August 3, 2018, and each later received a sentence of one year in federal prison. Atesiano pled guilty to a single charge of conspiracy against rights on September 14, 2018, and later received a sentence of three years in prison.

After the pleas, the Miami-Dade State Attorney’s Office began reviewing convictions involving Atesiano and the other officers. The earliest arrest for any of these convictions occurred in 2010. At the time of the review, none of the men and women whose convictions were tainted by the misconduct of the Biscayne Park officers were in prison.

A judge vacated Desrouleaux’s conviction and dismissed his charges on August 10, 2018. Most of the remaining vacation and dismissals, including Jean-Gilles’s case, occurred in 2019. The final dismissal, for a defendant named Sam Andre, who had served 90 days in jail for possessing fraudulent identification, occurred in 2021.

Desrouleaux, who remained in Haiti, filed a federal lawsuit against Atesiano and Biscayne Park in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Florida on September 14, 2018. He received a $90,000 settlement in 2019. T.D., who wasn’t convicted, received a settlement of $125,000.

Members of this group

​Here are the names of defendants who had their convictions vacated and charges dismissed based on misconduct in this case. 

Felony cases: Clarens Desroleaux, Jason Suprinvil, Juan Raudez, Octavius Banks, Demetris Durden, Asterio Duvalon, Donald Davis, Javier Falcon, Craig Barra, Peter Jean-Gilles, Jose Mendez-Natal, Brandon Navarette, Pierre Binby, Leonardo Rosado, Cherisma Wynn, Joseph Burns, Simon Almonte, Sam Andre, Terry Fanford, Lenny Hernandez, Daphen LaGuerre, Ernstlatta LaFrance, Jane Lomax, Ariel Washington, Francois Jamesty. ​

Misdemeanor cases: Daniel Abraham, Andre Young Smith, Alio Contreras, Stacie McCullough, Christopher Saunders, Derek Walker.