DEFECTIVE FINGERPRINT EVIDENCE UNCOVERED

Only DNA evidence enabled this guy to beat false police fingerprint evidence and a false police identification

A judge freed a Roxbury man from prison yesterday after Suffolk County prosecutors acknowledged that the fingerprint used to convict him of shooting a Boston police officer seven years ago was not his. The stunning reversal occurred two days after prosecutors vowed to retry Stephan Cowans for shooting Officer Gregory Gallagher, even though newly analyzed DNA evidence showed that Cowans was not the shooter. Suffolk Assistant District Attorney David E. Meier said on Wednesday that his office would retry Cowans, relying on "compelling" evidence, including a fingerprint on a glass the shooter used.


But yesterday, Meier reversed himself, telling Superior Court Judge Peter Lauriat that the fingerprint evidence used at trial did not come from Cowans. "I can conclusively and unequivocally state, your honor, that that purported match was a mistake," Meier said, based on forensic testing conducted this week.


Cowans, who had served 6 1/2 years for a shooting he insisted he did not commit, walked out of Suffolk Superior Court a free man. He became the seventh person to challenge a Suffolk County conviction successfully since 1997. Cowans, who was convicted in 1998 of shooting and wounding Gallagher in a Roxbury backyard, said he never lost hope during his years in prison, because he knew he was innocent and was confident that somehow the truth would surface. "I never thought I would never get out," the 33-year-old Roxbury man said calmly after his release, flanked by delighted relatives and lawyers. "I was one who never gave up on myself."


Boston police did the original analysis of the fingerprint lifted from a glass of water from which the shooter drank after he forced his way into a nearby house. But after Cowans's legal team presented new DNA evidence this week showing that he was not the person who drank from the glass or wore the hat and sweat shirt discarded at the scene, the district attorney's office had Boston and State Police specialists reanalyze the fingerprint. DNA analysis of evidence found at crime scenes was not routinely done at the time of Cowans's trial. Meier was told yesterday morning that the new fingerprint analysis showed that the thumbprint did not belong to Cowans, and the prosecutor contacted Cowans's lawyers.


Without comment, the judge threw out the conviction and freed Cowans. Meier said the district attorney's office has no intention of retrying Cowans "given the state of the evidence."


In a late-afternoon news conference at Boston police headquarters, Suffolk District Attorney Daniel F. Conley and Acting Police Commissioner James M. Hussey expressed regret and embarrassment over the mistake that led to the imprisonment of an innocent man. "Seven years ago, the criminal justice system failed Stephan Cowans," Conley said. "It took seven years for that mistake to be corrected, seven years of Stephan Cowans's life that he can't get back. On behalf of the criminal justice system, we extend a sincere apology to Mr. Cowans."


Conley said there will be a thorough review of "the facts and circumstances of this case, the conviction, and the error. We cannot accept a high percentage of success as sufficient; we cannot accept being right just most of the time." The Boston Police Department has asked the International Association for Identification, the world's largest and oldest forensic group, and the FBI to make recommendations about forming an outside investigative team to review Boston police procedures for analyzing fingerprints, Hussey said....

Hussey said police officials have spoken to Gallagher, now a detective, who was among the witnesses who identified Cowans as his assailant. "He's OK, and he still feels strongly that he's made the right identification," Hussey said. Cowans was convicted in 1998 of shooting Gallagher in the buttocks with the officer's 9mm Glock service pistol. Gallagher had pursued a man acting suspiciously near Rafael Hernandez School on School Street on May 30, 1997. He scuffled with the man and lost his gun.


On Wednesday, at the request of Meier, Lauriat had agreed to suspend Cowans's sentence of 30 to 45 years in state prison, pending a defense motion for a new trial based on a DNA analysis gathered by lawyers for the New England Innocence Project. Cowans had remained in jail while his family tried to raise the $7,500 bail.


The New England Innocence Project, which had taken Cowans's case, sent evidence from his trial to a forensic DNA testing company, Orchid Cellmark in Germantown, Md. Sweat from the brim of a baseball cap lost by Gallagher's assailant in the yard was tested, as well as a sweat shirt the gunman removed in a house he forced his way into on School Street. The lab also tested saliva from the rim of a glass mug in the house used by the assailant. The DNA evidence was all from the same individual, but it didn't match Cowans's, the analysis found....

Cowans, who changed into a brown suit after he was released but still wore the striped white sneakers he had on in court, said there aren't "any words in the dictionary to explain what it was like" to spend 6 1/2 years in prison for a crime he didn't commit.

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BUT THE STATE IS BEING A DEADBEAT WHEN IT COMES TO COMPENSATION

Six months after Massachusetts agreed to compensate wrongly convicted felons, 10 former inmates who have applied for money have not received a dime, prompting their advocates to accuse Attorney General Thomas F. Reilly of putting up roadblocks. The former prisoners -- two of whom spent about 19 years each behind bars for crimes they did not commit -- have filed claims dating back to January under a law that provides a maximum of $500,000 for erroneous convictions. However, Reilly, who represents the state in such claims, appears to be adopting an adversarial approach, according to lawyers for the former inmates and lawmakers....

Maher, 44, who lives in Tewksbury and works as a late-shift mechanic for a trash company, said he would use the money to buy a house to live in with his 5 1/2-month-old son and his fiancée, who is pregnant with their second child.

He said he cannot understand why nothing appears to have happened with his claim and questioned whether the political ambitions of Reilly, a Democrat considered a likely gubernatorial candidate, could be a factor. ''He's running for governor," Maher said. ''Would [agreeing to an award] make it like he's being easy and giving away money?"

Maher is being represented by Feldman, who also filed a claim for Stephan Cowans, a Roxbury man freed from prison last year after Suffolk prosecutors acknowledged the fingerprint used to convict him of shooting a Boston police officer seven years earlier was not his. He said he was stunned when Reilly filed a motion in March to transfer Cowans's claim to a slower track in the court to obtain more information. Feldman filed court papers pointing out that Suffolk District Attorney Daniel Conley issued a public apology to Cowans after he was freed from prison and that Reilly was quoted in the Globe as calling Cowans's case ''just a terrible tragedy [that] never should have happened."

The judge rejected Reilly's motion to slow the process as ''inappropriate." Last month, Feldman filed a motion asking the court to grant Cowans's claim as a matter of law. Reilly filed a response in which he agreed that Cowans was entitled to an award but reserved the right to contest the amount. Feldman said Cowans desperately needs money so he can finish his training as a barber, a pursuit he took up behind bars. Barry Scheck, a founder of the Innocence Project based at the Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law in New York, said he is puzzled that none of the former prisoners in Massachusetts has received any money.

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ROY MEADOW GUILTY

Sir Roy Meadow, one of the country’s leading experts on child abuse, gave erroneous and misleading evidence in the trial of Sally Clark which helped to convict her of murdering her two sons, the General Medical Council ruled yesterday. A disciplinary panel found that Professor Meadow, 72, failed in his duty as an expert witness to explain the limited relevance of his findings when giving evidence in Mrs Clark’s prosecution in 1999.

The paediatrician told the solicitor’s murder trial that the chances of two babies suffering cot death within an affluent family was 1 in 73 million. In his testimony and in evidence to police, the paediatrician also referred to his much-disputed “Meadow’s law” on cot deaths — suggesting that “one in a family is a tragedy, two is suspicious and three is murder”.

After three weeks of evidence at the GMC hearing in London, the fitness-to-practise panel ruled that some of Professor Meadow’s evidence was not balanced and was erroneous in parts. The panel will now decide whether the paediatrician’s actions amount to serious professional misconduct. If found guilty he could be struck off the medical register.

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