BY ADAM ATKINSON

North Country This Week

POTSDAM — The last remaining appeal filed by Oral Nicholas Hillary against a U.S. District Court judgment in favor of Potsdam Village Police Chief Mark Murray has been dismissed in appeals court.

The United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit issued a ruling on June 26, which upheld a summary judgment leveled by the United States District Court for the Northern District in Sept. 24, 2021. That 2021 ruling was in favor of Murray and effectively dismissed Hillary’s second lawsuit, an equal protection claim, against the village of Potsdam and Murray.

Hillary was acquitted after a 2016 jury trial of the 2011 murder of 12-year-old Garrett Phillips, the son of a former girlfriend.

In the years following the acquittal, Hillary, a former Clarkson University soccer coach, has launched lawsuits at Murray, the Village of Potsdam, the county and other government actors who were involved in the investigation and failed prosecution, over their handling of case and for what he claimed were racist motivations and actions. Hillary is black.

Prior to this most recent ruling, those lawsuits launched by Hillary have been either dropped, dismissed or were lost in court.

The judgment handed down by the appeals court on June 26 states in part:

“United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit Considering all the evidence presented, Hillary has not raised a genuine dispute as to any material fact related to whether his alleged selective treatment ‘was motivated by an intention to discriminate on the basis of impermissible considerations, such as race or religion, to punish or inhibit the exercise of constitutional rights, or by a malicious or bad faith intent to injure the person.’”

The judgment goes on to say: “To show an impermissible motivation, he relies on circumstantial evidence about the racial composition of the police department and the treatment of other black individuals associated with the homicide investigation and prosecution. However, he has not offered any admissible evidence to support that either circumstance was motivated by racial animus or an intent to discriminate. In addition, he has failed to put forth evidence that Murray had a personal motivation to discriminate or that such a motive was a cause of his treatment of Hillary.”

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second District finally states in the ruling that it had “considered Hillary’s remaining arguments and find them to be without merit. Accordingly, we AFFIRM the judgment of the district court.”

Attorney Thomas J. Mortati, who represented the village and Murray against Hillary’s lawsuits from around 2011 to September 2017, said the most recent appeals court affirmation of the dismissal obtained by the village’s and Murray’s current defense attorney Gregg Johnson is just the latest in a list of court decisions which refute Hillary’s claims.

“The bottom line is that every single one of the claims Mr. Hillary made in both of his lawsuits were dismissed at one stage or another,” Mortati told North Country This Week.

“Basically over 11+ years of various allegations Nick Hillary leveled against various people/entities, he lost every case he filed and at every level. The reason for that is his claims were all baseless and were shown to be baseless over and over again,” said Mortati.