Appeals Court Reverses $14 Million Award for Wrongfully Convicted Prisoner

On January 31, 2013, the United States Courts of Appeals for the First Circuit reversed and remanded for retrial a case that concluded with a $14,000,000 damages award for wrongly convicted prisoner Shawn Drumgold – one million dollars for every year he languished in prison. Drumgold was convicted in 1989 for the stray-bullet murder of twelve year-old Darlene Tiffany Moore who was sitting on a mailbox near the intended target in a gang related shooting. Drumgold motioned for a new trial from prison, alleging that the investigating officer, Detective Timothy Callahan, along with other officers of the Boston Police Department, withheld exculpatory evidence at his initial trial. The motion was granted, but the district attorney’s office declined to prosecute, and Drumgold was released from prison in 2003. Drumgold filed his §1983 claim shortly thereafter and the case went to trial in 2008.

At trial, Detective Callahan’s chief witness recanted his testimony from Drumgold’s 1989 murder trial, asserting that Callahan insisted in implicating Drumgold, even though the consensus in the neighborhood was that another gang member fired the fatal shot. This same chief witness testified that Callahan put him up in a Howard Johnson’s for months, regularly gave him money, and cleared up warrants for him in exchange for implicating Drumgold. There was no record of Callahan reporting any of this to the District Attorney’s office.

The jury could not decide on the causation issue, whether Callahan’s actions caused Drumgold’s conviction, and the judge declared a mistrial. At the retrial in September 2009, much of the evidence presented in the 1989 trial was also presented, but the jury charge was more succinct and the jury returned for the plaintiff, awarding him $14,000,000.

The case was appealed and appellant Callahan claimed, among other things, that he was entitled to a retrial because the causation instruction given to the retrial jury was erroneous and non-inclusive of the legal theory he would advance. The court rejected his arguments and his legal theory that the evidence in question – the fact that he did not disclose exculpatory evidence – was not a material issue because the issue predated Brady and thus did not apply.

The court, however, agreed with Callahan that the district court judge erred in describing the substance of the causation inquiry, referring to the ‘substantial factor’ test when she should have put forth the ‘but for’ test because “it diluted the standard of liability by making it possible for the jury to find that Callahan’s withholding of evidence was a factual cause of Drumgold’s constitutional injury (i.e. his wrongful conviction), even if that evidence was not the ‘but for’ cause of Drumgold’s conviction – the material standard required by Brady.”

The minority panel dissent involved Brady as opposed to Mooney definitions of the material relevancy of disclosure practices. See: Drumgold v. Callahan, 707 F.3d 28 (1st Cir. Mass. 2013).

Subscribe today

Already a subscriber? Login

Related legal case