LM: Quite a while ago, in 2010, Finnegan reached out to NEIP to ask if we could assist with a case. We believed that our deep bench of attorneys well-versed in both the sciences and litigation might be a good fit for their work. Luckily, NEIP agreed and assigned us to a particularly challenging case. That got us started on a years-long odyssey working for justice on behalf of our NEIP client.

The case involved a young man wrongly convicted of murder in the 1980s and sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole. His conviction rested in part on items found in our client’s home that the jury was told had the victim’s blood on them. Importantly, none of this physical evidence was tested for DNA. While there were many issues with the trial evidence that suggested our client’s innocence, the conviction was upheld on appeal. Fast forward to 2012, and a then-recent Massachusetts law allowing for post-conviction DNA testing. Finnegan targeted its research and investigation on a motion to test the evidence, but we had an initial problem: in the 1980s, physical evidence from criminal trials wasn’t kept as a matter of course. Luckily, after searching several evidence facilities, we found the evidence in one of them, in a cardboard box, untouched for nearly 30 years.  Based on this new evidence, the court granted Finnegan’s motion to test the evidence for DNA.

The new testing showed that items taken from our client’s home could not be tied in any way to the murder. In fact, the victim was excluded as a source for all of it and, as a result, there was no physical evidence at all linking our client to the crime.  After a hearing in which Finnegan presented this evidence to the court, the court granted our client a new trial, finding that the new evidence demonstrated that there was a substantial risk of a miscarriage of justice in our client’s case.

Every Finnegan attorney and staff member who worked on the case - and there were many over the years, including Sara Leiman, Chris Schultz (now at Burns & Levinson LLP), and Nishla Keiser, Rachel Emsley, Mary Ferguson, and Kristin Creed (all now at Intellia Therapeutics, Inc.) - were thrilled to be a part of such an important case, both for our client and for NEIP. I’m so proud of the team for the relationship they built with our client and for sticking with this case despite the lack of cooperation on the part of the police department and state attorney’s office. While the case was a large and lengthy undertaking, completely outside our area of expertise, we never felt overwhelmed by the project.  NEIP provided an excellent mentor for us to work with: Professor David Seigel, Director of the Center for Law and Social Responsibility at New England Law School.  Over the years, David consulted with us regularly, also providing sometimes much needed moral support.  I recommend taking a case like this - or any project with NEIP - without hesitation.