Criminal Blunders Force Courtwide Reappraisal in Massachusetts

Massachusetts will reconsider thousands of cases tainted by faulty breathalyzers, dishonest police officers, and even a racist attorney as the courts fight to rebuild trust after more than 20,000 drug cases were corrupted by scandal.

The extensive second look by the country’s oldest appeals court is a stark departure in a system where police sought shortcuts like falsifying records or skipping lengthy drug testing to speed up prosecutions, putting the onus on those who were wrongfully convicted to prove that the state violated their rights, case-by-case. The work comes at a time the public increasingly doubts whether the system provides equal justice for all.

The extent of the corruption forced the state Supreme Court to author its own framework for addressing the tainted cases that’s already opened the door to a raft of new challenges to other systemic problems like police violence.

But it hasn’t become mainstream—yet.

“I don’t think anyone believes that these outbreaks of wrongful convictions are unique to Massachusetts,” said Matt Segal, senior staff attorney for the ACLU’s State Supreme Court Initiative and former legal director of the ACLU of Massachusetts.

“The powers that they are wielding are powers that all state supreme courts have,” Segal said.

Not ‘Radical’

The seven justices currently on the Supreme Judicial Court’s bench makes the court the most demographically diverse it’s ever been.

The court has set progressive precedents on issues related to policing, including a recent decision that makes it easier for pedestrians to contest arrests over racial profiling.

“It is a stark contrast from where the court was maybe five or ten years ago,” said Martin Healy, chief legal counsel for the Massachusetts Bar Association.

But members of the legal community still say the court is moderate, overall. Several of the justices are former prosecutors, and none are former public defenders.

Supreme Judicial Court

In 2016, the court made a significant statement, issuing a unanimous decision which found that Black men who flee the police may have a legitimate reason for doing so, given Boston’s history of stop-and-frisk practices that targeted them.

That decision was penned by former Associate Justice Geraldine Hines, who served the court from 2014 to 2017. Hines also dissented from her colleagues in 2017, wishing they would go further to restore the public’s faith in the criminal justice system.

“Courts are not radical institutions,” Hines said in an interview about the Supreme Judicial Court’s major criminal justice decisions.

“The justices are not sitting in their ornate conference room thinking about ‘what can we do next?’” Hines said. “They don’t want to do anything they don’t have to—they only act in response to issues that are presented to them,” she said.

One of those issues presented to the court was what to do about a state chemist that tampered with evidence, compromising thousands of drug cases.

No other court had handled systemic government misconduct at that scale, so the justices created their own framework that went “beyond interpreting the law,” Hines said. “The court is also the guardian of the justice system, and part of that responsibility of the court is to do what it can to maintain trust,” Hines said.

The court ultimately ordered the largest dismissal of wrongful convictions in US history in 2017, which led to 36,707 convictions dismissed in 21,332 cases. One year later, the court’s response to tampering at another drug lab, coupled with prosecutorial misconduct, resulted in another 24,075 charges dismissed in 16,449 cases.

Those opinions established an important principle: “Where there is egregious misconduct attributable to the government in the investigation or prosecution of a criminal case, the government bears the burden of taking reasonable steps to remedy that misconduct,” the justices wrote.

The decisions had a seismic impact on the tens of thousands of people burdened by a wrongful conviction. Beyond that, they signaled that the Supreme Judicial Court “is concerned about institutional maladies,” which could have inspired ambitious attorneys to bring similar arguments, Hines said.

Organizations such as the ACLU and the Committee for Public Counsel Services, an agency that provides legal resources for indigent people, have crafted their arguments in other cases around that framework, said CPCS’ Chief Counsel Anthony Benedetti.

The drug lab scandal “set a tone for the importance of oversight and accountability that continues to permeate in Massachusetts as part of our legal and judicial culture,” said Iván Espinoza-Madrigal, executive director of Lawyers for Civil Rights.

Growing Field

The Supreme Judicial Court’s opinions contribute to a growing field of mass exonerations, Segal said.

Pennsylvania has vacated 1,100 convictions after it found members of Philadelphia’s Narcotics Field Unit planted drugs on defendants, robbed them, and falsified reports to cover up their misconduct. The state also dropped more than 250 defendants’ drug possession or distribution charges after a former officer repeatedly lied and falsified records.

Maryland vacated 759 defendant’s convictions after members of the Baltimore Police Department’s Gun Trace Task Force were found to have engaged in racketeering, steeling money and drugs, and falsifying reports.

New York, Illinois, Texas, Washington, and Pennsylvania have also laid the groundwork for bulk remedies, albeit at a smaller scale.

Still, these cases “are really huge exceptions,” said Radha Natarajan, executive director of the New England Innocence Project. Courts “want to assess individual guilt, and therefore they want to assess how misconduct affected an individual case,” Natarajan said.

The Supreme Judicial Court called global remedies “very strong medicine,” in a 2017 opinion, and the justices will only prescribe it as a last resort.

The court’s June decision about whether a Black Muslim man deserved a new trial due to his attorney’s virulent racism demonstrates that approach.

The court became the first in the nation to rule that racism like that entitled the defendant to a new trial. However, it declined to offer a global remedy for the droves of Black and Muslim defendants whose trials could have been tainted by the same attorney’s racism.

The court also made it less burdensome for almost 30,000 defendants to request a new trial in April after being convicted of operating a vehicle while under the influence of alcohol by police who failed to properly calibrate a breathalyzer. But the justices didn’t go further by dismissing the cases without prejudice because of the difference between proving drug offense cases and operating under the influence convictions.

More opportunities to consider the framework have already been taken on by the court. The Supreme Judicial Court agreed to hear a case about whether the state has a duty to investigate violence and misconduct in the Springfield, Mass., police department.

The US Justice Department in 2020 found officers in the Springfield Police Department wrote false reports to cover up their use of excessive force, which the ACLU and CPCS told the court could have impacted more than 8,000 cases where defendants were charged with resisting arrest, disorderly conduct, or assault and battery.

“Individual attorneys can litigate on behalf of an individual,” but “the only way you’re going to send a message and hold a party responsible is by the court delivering one of these kinds of decisions,” Benedetti said.