Two years ago, the drumbeat of wrongful convictions in Massachusetts had grown too loud to ignore: the release of Shawn Drumgold, Stephan Cowans, and Anthony Powell led to a Boston Herald /FOX25 report on 22 prisoners statewide released in the past two decades, thanks to new evidence.
In response, Attorney General Thomas Reilly along with the state’s 11 district attorneys launched a “Justice Initiative” in early 2004. They promised a review of known erroneous convictions, followed by a report with recommendations by the end of that summer.
That deadline proved wildly optimistic. But at long last, the Phoenix has learned, the group has created a draft report, and will probably release it within the next few weeks.
The Phoenix has not seen the draft, but several people who have seen it say that the report will not include any discussion of the DAs’ reviews of past wrongful convictions. It will not point any fingers, assign any blame, or suggest any punishments. It will not require the DAs themselves to do much of anything different. Nor will it suggest any process for reviewing past convictions to find more errors; in fact, it will emphasize the relative rarity of wrongful convictions.
Its recommendations include the following:
— Improvements in methods for obtaining eyewitness identifications;
— Improvements in police interrogation procedures;
— Additional funding for state forensic labs;
— Improvements in the Office of the Chief Medical Examiner;
— Increased budget for defense attorneys handling cases for the indigent;
— Increased budget and salaries for prosecutors in the DAs’ offices;
— Additional training on police investigatory procedures.
These are the same prescriptions that Reilly and the others talked about two years ago, which begs the question of why it’s taken so long to complete the report.
Geline Williams, MDAA’s executive director, blames the delay on the logistical problem of getting 12 parties, scattered across the state, to work out small wording details. The same reason was given by Reilly’s point person on the project, Kurt Schwartz, head of the AG’s criminal division. “Getting 12 different editors to agree on the wording of anything is a slow, complicated process,” he says.
But others wonder whether Reilly ever made the Justice Initiative a high priority, and by extension, whether as governor he would similarly stall rather than implement its recommendations.
In fact, several people tell the Phoenix that they suspect the entire project was intended to forestall the state legislature from acting until the topic faded from the front pages. By claiming to be aggressively pursuing statewide reform themselves, Massachusetts’s top prosecutors convinced legislators there was no need for them to act, the theory goes.
If so, it has worked. Legislative efforts for reform, including a bill to create an independent commission on wrongful convictions, have failed to move.
Reilly and the DAs publicly opposed such a commission, and Reilly has also not lent his support to current legislative efforts to reform eyewitness identification and interrogation procedures; to provide prisoners with access to forensics testing; and to ensure the preservation of physical evidence. Some legislators and activists also criticize Reilly for holding up the approval of payments under the wrongful-conviction compensation law that passed in 2004.
And, although the MDAA’s Williams insists that the Justice Initiative has remained a high priority for Reilly, she concedes that his office’s direct involvement has been sporadic. Some others directly involved with the Justice Initiative tell the Phoenix they have had virtually no contact with Reilly or his office about it in the past year. “It seems like there has been less attorney-general involvement over time,” one says.
Some observers think that Reilly, who keeps a picture of murder victim Jeffrey Curley on his desk, simply doesn’t agree that there is a need for reforms that, many prosecutors believe, would hamper their ability to convict criminals.
“Tom Reilly has gotten where he is by winning cases, not losing them,” says one prominent local attorney. He points out that Reilly’s experience with the old, outmoded techniques and laboratories when he was Middlesex DA apparently made him more confident in their results. “This is the same guy who, in his mid 40s, after seeing the state’s criminal-justice system up-close, decided that the death penalty was a good idea.”
