Onondaga County Courthouse
The old Onondaga County court building is home to the legislature. Credit: Mike Greenlar | Central Current

Onondaga County legislators on Tuesday rejected a $1 million settlement that would have ended a nearly four-decade legal saga. 

County lawyers were prepared to settle with the family of Hector Rivas, a man accused of killing his ex-girlfriend Valerie Hill in 1987, but a majority of the legislature failed to approve the settlement. Rivas had long contended he was convicted in the case with faulty evidence. 

Rivas died in prison while awaiting a retrial in the case. 

The legislature failed to reach a majority for several reasons. The legislature’s seven Republicans voted against the settlement. Legislator Ellen Block, a Democrat, was absent for the vote, and Legislator Gregg Eriksen, also a Democrat, had to recuse himself from the vote. Eriksen works for Bousquet Holstein, a law firm whose attorneys have represented Rivas. 

“To me, it’s a weighty decision,” said Minority Leader Brian May of his vote against the settlement. “One of the things we talked about was the fact that it’s almost as though — yeah, we’re talking about a civil suit settlement — we’re deciding guilty or not right in that process.”

May said after doing research on the case, the Republican caucus members decided that they could not support the settlement. Legislators voted 8-7 along party lines to approve the settlement, failing to reach a majority of the 17 legislators. 

Rob Rickner, a lawyer representing Rivas’ estate, said he would look into all their options moving forward. 

“There were good reasons for the Ways and Means Committee to recommend this settlement,” said Rickner. 

Rivas spent two decades imprisoned after initially being convicted in the 1987 murder of his ex-girlfriend before a federal court threw out his conviction and ordered a retrial in 2016. Rivas died of pancreatic cancer months before his new trial’s scheduled date. 

His lawyers accused the county of using evidence fabricated by the medical examiner to prosecute Rivas. Current District Attorney William Fitzpatrick prosecuted Rivas during the first murder trial and still argues the circumstantial evidence against Rivas was strong. 

“It’s a million dollars that could be going to school kids or police officers or ambulance services or anything,” Fitzpatrick said earlier in the week. “Instead it’s going to this scumbag’s family. It makes me sick.”

Legislature Majority Leader Nodesia Hernandez and Legislator Maurice Brown, who sponsored the resolution, both declined to comment on the case, citing legal concerns. 

Rivas’ lawyers filed the lawsuit in 2019, alleging he had been wrongfully imprisoned for 25 years. 

Hill’s time of death had become a central issue in the case. 

Erik Mitchell, who was the county’s examiner when Hill died and estimated her time of death, was being investigated by Fitzpatrick’s office when Hill was killed. Mitchell resigned as medical examiner because of his mismanagement of the office, the New York Times reported in 1993. 

Mitchell initially concluded Hill died at a time when Rivas had an alibi, Rivas’ lawyers alleged in the lawsuit. He later concluded Hill could have died a day earlier, a time when Rivas did not have an alibi. Rivas’ lawyers brought in expert testimony that questioned Mitchell’s findings about when Hill died. 

Mitchell admitted that his second estimation of the time of Hill’s death was “probably” on the “outside edge of possibility,” Judge Brenda Sannes wrote in a September 2025 ruling.

Sannes wrote that despite evidence that Fitzpatrick knew that during the Rivas trial Mitchell was also being investigated for misconduct by two separate agencies, he did not disclose the information to the jury.

Fitzpatrick maintained in an interview with Central Current that he would have prosecuted Rivas regardless of the date Mitchell estimated Hill died.  

Sannes wrote that the circumstantial evidence Fitzpatrick used to convict Rivas in 1993 “would have been essentially useless” to prosecuting Rivas without Mitchell’s testimony that Hill could have died at a time when Rivas did not have an alibi. 

Rivas’ lawyers initially sued Fitzpatrick, however Sannes removed the district attorney as a defendant because he has prosecutorial immunity, she wrote.  

Other similar cases in which a legislative body has rejected a settlement agreement have then gone to trial. The Syracuse Common Council last year rejected a settlement agreement with the family of a man killed by a Syracuse police officer. 

County Attorney Robert Durr did not immediately return a call about the case. 

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Laura Robertson is a staff reporter covering Onondaga County. Prior to joining Central Current, she lived on the edge of the Bering Strait in Nome, Alaska, where she worked as a reporter for a year. She...