A Massachusetts Superior Court judge has denied a new trial for James Rodwell, a Burlington man who has spent the last 35 years in prison for the 1978 murder of Louis Rose, a crime Rodwell has maintained he didn’t commit.
The ruling comes after more than a year of hearings during which Rodwell’s lawyers attempted to convince a judge not only that the jury had come to the wrong verdict in the original trial, but that the trial and Rodwell’s subsequent attempts to overturn it had been tainted by missing and withheld evidence and by a pattern of misconduct by law enforcement officials and prosecutors.
To make that case, Rodwell’s lawyers put on the stand high-ranking members of the Commonwealth’s prosecutorial apparatus, including three former judges, and several former and current prosecutors, in an attempt to paint a coordinated effort by law enforcement officials to cover up a wrongful conviction.
Superior Court Justice Thomas P. Billings, who afforded the defense uncommon breadth to subpoena witnesses, ultimately rejected their case.
In a 115-page decision, Billings denied Rodwell’s motion for a new trial, saying the defense failed to prove that exculpatory evidence had been withheld, that the chief testimony against Rodwell had in fact been the result of an undisclosed deal with law enforcement officials, and that the main witness against Rodwell had lied on the stand.
Veronica White, Rodwell's lead attorney, says that her team intends to file what is known as a "Gatekeeper Petition" asking the Supreme Judicial Court to overturn the judge's ruling based on the facts presented in the course of the hearings. The SJC could hear the case itself, remand the case for further hearing, or dismiss the petition. If that happens, Rodwell could appeal his case to a federal court.
“We are very grateful for the time and attention Judge Billings gave this case. But we think the court is wrong in important ways,” White wrote in a statement to WGBH News. “We believe there are serious problems with the conviction of Mr. Rodwell and that governmental misconduct was committed in this case.”
The case for and against Rodwell hinges largely on one witness for the prosecution: David Nagle, now deceased, who testified at trial that Rodwell confessed the murder to him while they were cell block mates in a Billerica penitentiary.
Nagle claimed that he reported the confession to a law enforcement contact and was put in touch with State Police Lt. Thomas Spartachino, who was investigating the Rose murder. Nagle allegedly told Spartachino about Rodwell's confession, and agreed to testify.
Nagle’s testimony was crucial to Rodwell’s conviction because the other chief witness against him, one Francis Holmes who claimed to have been with Rodwell when the murder occurred, had been granted immunity from prosecution for his testimony. Commonwealth law prohibits conviction based solely on the testimony of an immunized witness.
Nagle, asked at trial whether he had been offered promises or inducements for his testimony, said he had not.
Rodwell’s defense team calls that assertion a lie.
There is little question that Nagle did receive beneficial treatment for his testimony. Nagle, facing charges for armed robbery himself while he testified, would eventually receive a greatly reduced sentenced after Spartachino intervened on his behalf. And Assistant District Attorney John McEvoy, the prosecutor handling Nagle’s case at the time, testified in a recent hearing that he was instructed by a senior DA official (whose name he could not recall on the stand) to lower a recommended sentence for Nagle.
But prosecutors maintained that even if Nagle did benefit from a “deal,” it was made after he supplied Rodwell’s alleged confessions—not in exchange.
The defense attempted to rebut that argument, pointing to new evidence—some of it supplied by Nagle himself, as he lay dying from liver disease—that Nagle had been contacted by law enforcement earlier than he’d let on and was acting not as a volunteer but as a government “agent,” or informant.
Indeed, Nagle was a longtime informant, and had been a paid Drug Enforcement Administration informant until he was "deactivated" days before he met Rodwell in prison.
Among the new evidence offered by Rodwell’s lawyers was a letter written by Spartachino to the Assisstant District Attorney prosecuting Nagle for armed robbery, in which he noted that he had been contacted by Nagle “in June” of 1981—the same time that Nagle was supposed to have been collecting statements from Rodwell without the ulterior motive of a deal with law enforcement.
While acknowledging that, if true, the “consequences for the Rodwell conviction and potentially [Spartachino’s] own career” of such a meeting would have been grave, Billings called the problematic June date “a slip of the pen.” (Lt. Spartachino is now deceased).
While the decision focused mostly on the question of whether Nagle was, as the defense maintains, acting as a government agent unbeknownst to the jury, it also touched on assertions by the defense of improper conduct by the Middlesex District Attorney’s office.
Among the more disturbing revelations to surface in the recent hearings: the prosecution's file for the original Rodwell case, supposed to be maintained by the Middlesex D.A.’s office, has vanished.
The so-called “trial file,” which the defense had hoped might contain evidence of Nagle’s supposed “deal” with law enforcement, has been missing since at least 1997, Judge Billings found, violating a state requirement that such files be kept for 50 years.
But while the defense pointed to the missing file—and the fact that its having been missing was not disclosed in prior motions—as grounds to grant a new trial, Billings disagreed, writing that the defense hadn’t “proved that the Commonwealth’s conduct was intentional, reckless, or in bad faith.”
White disagrees.
"The failure to report the loss to anyone for more than 15 years, until we specifically asked that they go looking was indefensible," White wrote to WGBH News in an email. "There are serious constitutional rights implicated in this case, rights we all enjoy and would all want if any of us were ever swept up in the criminal justice system."
The Middlesex D.A.'s Office did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Correction, June 4, 2016: This story initially misidentified the Middlesex District Attorney that handled Nagle's case. The story has been updated.
