"Testifying, ‘testilying’ - crack down on dishonest cops
Only the unvarnished truth can protect the reputation of the department. Any officer caught in a lie, says the commissioner, deserves no future on the force....
Same goes true for newspapers, BG.
Police officers... must be strong enough to carry the truth.
I'll never believe authorities ever again because THEY LIE!!!
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Here is what LYING COPS COST YOU, taxpayers!!!
"Ayer to pay $3.1m for wrongful conviction; DNA evidence freed man after 19 years in jail" by Jonathan Saltzman, Globe Staff | August 7, 2009
How do you compensate someone for LOST TIME?
You can NEVER GET THAT BACK!!!!
Dennis Maher, who spent 19 years in prison for two rapes and a sexual assault before DNA evidence exonerated him, has reached a $3.1 million out-of-court settlement with the town of Ayer days before his federal civil rights lawsuit was scheduled to go to trial, according to his lawyer and the town administrator.
The agreement, reached with the help of a mediator, marks the second time in recent weeks that Ayer and its insurance companies settled a civil rights suit stemming from a wrongful conviction. On July 14, lawyers disclosed that the town had agreed to pay $3.4 million to the estate of Kenneth Waters, who spent more than 18 years in prison for a slaying he did not commit until he, too, was freed as a result of DNA evidence, in 2001.
Related: The Errors of Ayer
Police and prosecutors just interested in convicting somebody, anybody. huh?
Both suits accused Ayer police of manipulating evidence to convict the defendants and withholding information that could have cleared them.
Yeah, this happens ALL the TIME in AmeriKa!!!!
The suits said one officer, who has since left the department, played a pivotal role in both cases....
Yeah, right, it was one bad cop. Where were the rest of them?
One of the Lowell officers sued is Edward F. Davis, now Boston’s police commissioner.
Wow! That explains a lot.
Maher was arrested in November 1983 and ultimately charged with raping one Lowell woman, assaulting another, and raping a woman in Ayer. At the time, the 23-year-old Army sergeant assigned to Fort Devens had no criminal record. The woman in Ayer had been staying alone at the Casa Manor Motel in August 1983 when a man entered her room and raped her at knifepoint.
The Lowell assaults occurred on consecutive nights. The first victim was a mail clerk at Wang Laboratories who got off a city bus on the evening of Nov. 16, 1983, and was heading home when a man pushed her into a yard, punched her several times, and raped her. The next night, a Lowell woman walking in the same area was attacked, but managed to fight off her knife-wielding assailant.
The attacker wore a red-hooded sweatshirt, exactly what Maher happened to be wearing as he walked near the crime scene later on the night of the second assault. Davis, a Lowell police detective at the time, spotted the red sweatshirt and detained him. Maher was charged with the Lowell attacks and then the unsolved Ayer rape and was convicted at two jury trials in spring 1984.
The lawsuit Maher filed in US District Court in Boston in March 2006 accused police in Lowell and Ayer of using improper eyewitness identification techniques, fudging chronologies, and failing to check out Maher’s alibi.
Just the guy you want running your department, 'eh, Boston?
Related: The Night the Celtics Won the Championship
They learned from the best!
After the Lowell defendants settled out of court with Maher in December, Davis said he regretted that an innocent man was convicted, but asserted that he had done his job as a detective.
“I’m really glad that DNA was able to work that issue and prove that he wasn’t responsible for it,’’ he said. “But no system is perfect.’’
Oh, how cavalier!
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An even more egregious case:
Laurence M. Adams, who served 30 years in prison before a judge threw out his conviction and was one of the last men sentenced to death in Massachusetts, has tentatively settled his federal civil rights lawsuit against the City of Boston out of court, lawyers for both sides said yesterday.
Neither side would say how much he would receive under the settlement. William F. Sinnott, the city’s corporation counsel, said the figure could become public early next week, when he expects the deal to be finalized....
You must have gotten SCREWED, Bostonian!!
I'm still waiting on that figure, Glob.
Adams was sentenced to die in the electric chair in 1974 after he was found guilty of fatally bludgeoning an MBTA porter, James C. Corry, at the Essex Street subway station during an attempted robbery two years earlier. The Supreme Judicial Court later ruled that the death penalty statute was unconstitutional, but Adams remained in prison for 30 years while he proclaimed his innocence....
This is why the death penalty is a BAD IDEA!!!
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Related: DNA clears Conn. man of killing after 20 years
Yup, it's everywhere, America.
