Unfinished justice

Unfinished justice
By Brian McGrory, Globe Columnist February 23, 2007

What goes on in the corridors of government that our leaders so rarely, too rarely, own up to their mistakes?

No, not Deval Patrick and his car again. He admitted fault. Well, he tried. The topic today is the city of Boston and what it did to a young man named Shawn Drumgold by sending him to prison for 15 years on ridiculously flawed evidence and by refusing to make good to him ever since.

Drumgold, people may recall, was convicted of the 1988 slaying of Darlene Tiffany Moore, the 12-year-old girl felled by a stray bullet as she sat on a mailbox in the middle of a gang-infested section of Roxbury. Her death came to represent the lawlessness that existed on the streets at the time, marked by shootouts between rival gangs of drug dealers.

Some 14 years after Drumgold's conviction, the Globe's Dick Lehr wrote a 5,000-word story that made a veritable mockery of the police and prosecutors' case. One key eyewitness was suffering from a brain tumor that caused severe memory loss, a fact never reported to the defense. Another witness said she was pressured by police to place Drumgold at the scene of the crime.

A crucial eyewitness, a homeless teenager, told Lehr that police gave him months of free housing, food, and walking-around money, and wiped clean his criminal record, to testify against Drumgold. He told the Globe and a judge that his testimony was a bunch of lies.

Local residents told Lehr that they could confirm Drumgold's alibi that he was a couple of blocks away at the time of the shooting, but were afraid to tell police at the time.

Six months after the 2003 Globe story, the Suffolk district attorney issued a report saying that in the interests of justice, the conviction should be overturned. The DA said he had no plans to retry Drumgold, who was set free.

The only issue remaining is what the city owes a man for taking away 15 years of his life. Drumgold filed a federal civil rights suit in 2004, so it's up to the city to make a nice offer and make the whole thing go away. Right?

Wrong again. Here's what the city has done instead: It has gone out and hired a battery of law firms that have rung up legal bills that officials said totaled $250,000, but that Drumgold's appellate lawyer, Rosemary Scapicchio, estimated at closer to $1.5 million. In defending the city against Drumgold's suit, the city's lawyers are insisting that Drumgold was guilty of a crime that the district attorney himself won't touch. Very cute.

The city has deposed virtually everybody involved in the old case, packing conference rooms with high-priced private sector lawyers getting paid by you and me. It gets worse. The city is trying to depose Scapicchio on some seemingly Hail Mary argument that she personally persuaded witnesses to change their stories and is withholding documents. The obvious goal: Force her off the case and gut Drumgold's suit.

In the city's eyes, his conviction was everybody's fault but its own, never mind the fact that a few rogue cops paid off one witness and bullied others. No settlement offer has been made.

"I took Shawn's case on for nothing," Scapicchio said yesterday. "I worked on it forever. I thought what happened to him was outrageous. They're saying that I did something wrong, which is so incredibly obnoxious they shouldn't be able to get away with it. I didn't do anything but work as hard as I possibly could to get this guy out from a conviction of a crime I didn't think he did."

Drumgold's life is spiraling. He was laid off from his foreman's job with a construction company. He has a wife and a couple of children, and they've gone from a two-bedroom apartment to a one-bedroom to a homeless shelter. He faced a recent drug charge.

Mayor Thomas M. Menino declined to comment, though his spokeswoman said he has asked his Law Department to "expedite" the case.

It's a little late for that. The city has dragged its feet. It rings up huge legal bills. And a man's life gets further trampled by the day.

Brian McGrory is a Globe columnist. He can be reached at mailto:mcgrory%40globe.com.

http://www.boston.com/news/local/massachusetts/articles/2007/02/23/