Sacramento County paid Jeremy Puckett an $8.25 million settlement in 2025 after he spent 19 years in prison for a 1998 murder he did not commit and was declared factually innocent in 2021.
Northern California Innocence Project
Sacramento County paid an $8.25 million settlement last year to a man who spent 19 years in prison for a murder he did not commit.
In 2001, Jeremy Puckett was charged with murder and robbery in the 1998 homicide of Anthony Galati, who was found dead along White Rock Road in eastern Sacramento County. A jury found him guilty, and he was sentenced in 2002 to 11 years plus life in prison without the possibility of parole, according to the lawsuit filed in federal court in Sacramento in 2022.
In 2021, after more than a dozen unsuccessful appeals and with the help of the Northern California Innocence Project, Sacramento Superior Court found Puckett factually innocent of all charges following the granting of a writ of habeas corpus by the California Supreme Court.
Galati, 19, was found shot twice in the back of the head along White Rock Road on March 14, 1998. His hands were bound behind his back with black and white electrical cords. His wallet and valuables were gone. His car was later found burned at a nearby apartment complex.
Jailhouse informant pointed to Puckett
The events that led to his death began the evening of March 12, 1998 — not March 13, as originally presented at trial. The Sacramento County District Attorney’s Office later conceded that error during habeas proceedings.
Galati had been trying to buy drugs the Thursday night before his death. He ended up at an apartment in Rancho Cordova with several people, including Puckett. According to trial testimony, another person at the apartment, Israel Sept, claimed Puckett pistol-whipped Galati, demanded money and later shot him after driving him to a rural area.
But that version of events came to light more than a year later — and only after the case had gone cold.
In October 1999, Sept — then incarcerated on an unrelated offense — contacted authorities claiming he had information about Galati’s murder. According to the civil complaint, Sept approached detectives after prison officials collected his DNA, which he believed might implicate him in Galati’s killing. Sept later admitted he feared being tied to the crime and was seeking leverage.
Sept told detectives he, Angela Dvorsky and Jeremy Puckett committed the robbery and murder. He minimized his own role and cast Puckett as the triggerman in the execution-style slaying.
With no physical evidence linking Puckett to the crime scene, Sept was the only person who identified him as the assailant at trial, according to the suit.
Timing of Galati’s killing central to case
The lawsuit names Sacramento County, the Sacramento County District Attorney’s Office and the Sacramento County Sheriff’s Office as defendants. A Sheriff’s Office spokesperson did not respond to inquiries about whether the agency had comment or had separately paid a settlement to Puckett. A spokesperson for the District Attorney’s Office directed The Bee to contact a private law firm that worked on the case to determine whether there had been a settlement.
The Sacramento Bee learned of the county’s settlement, signed in September, through a California Public Records Act request. The county declined comment via spokesperson Kim Nava.
The settlement was one of 65 agreements the county signed in 2025 and so far in 2026, records show. Among them, the county paid $2.4 million to the family members of four men who died while incarcerated at the Sacramento County Main Jail downtown.
The county was named as a defendant because, according to the suit, a person working for the Coroner’s Office told investigators and prosecutors that Galati was killed early March 14, 1998, when his death actually occurred about 24 hours earlier. The incorrect time of death made Puckett’s alibi — that he was at his mother’s house when Galati died — unusable at trial.
The suit identifies Donald Henrikson as the person working for the Coroner’s Office who provided the inaccurate time of death.
Henrikson failed to measure and record core body temperature, did not consider environmental conditions or information about when Galati was last seen alive, the suit alleged.
Henrikson was later dropped from the case and told The Sacramento Bee he had no comment on the settlement. He said he was not a full-time county employee but worked for an entity contracted by the county to assist with forensic pathology.
Evidence pointing to other suspects
The suit also alleges that sheriff’s detectives at the time possessed extensive evidence pointing to other possible suspects — including statements that another man present at the apartment had committed similar robberies with Dvorsky — but failed to disclose that material to prosecutors or Puckett’s defense team.
According to the complaint, detectives did not interview the man, did not seek to confirm an alibi and did not compare physical evidence to him, despite evidence placing him at the apartment the night of the killing and in possession of crack cocaine the following day.
The lawsuit further alleges detectives withheld hundreds of pages of investigative reports, witness statements and materials from a parallel investigation into Dvorsky’s death that could have allowed Puckett’s attorneys to argue someone else committed the crime.
It further alleges that Marjorie Durenberger, then a prosecutor in the District Attorney’s Office, knew Sept came forward only after prison officials collected his DNA and did not share that information with Puckett’s attorney.
Durenberger later became a Sacramento Superior Court judge, and retired in 2018, according to a news release from the Governor’s Office at the time.
In March 2020, Sacramento Superior Court Judge Steve White issued an order vacating Puckett’s conviction and dismissing the charges. In January 2021, the court formally found Puckett innocent of the charges.
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Theresa Clift is the Regional Watchdog Reporter for The Sacramento Bee. She covered Sacramento City Hall for The Bee from 2018 through 2024. Before joining The Bee, she worked for newspapers in Pennsylvania, Virginia and Wisconsin. She grew up in Michigan and graduated with a journalism degree from Central Michigan University.