The metropolis agreed to pay $12 million to settle the case in October 2024, in accordance to a duplicate of the settlement the Globe obtained via a public information request. The settlement was not publicly introduced on the time and has not beforehand been reported.
“Shaun Jenkins spent nearly two decades imprisoned for a crime he did not commit because of extraordinary misconduct by the BPD,” Nick Brustin and Katie McCarthy, attorneys for Jenkins, mentioned in an announcement Thursday. “The City’s settlement demonstrates it knew it faced much greater liability if the case went to trial.”
A spokesperson for the Boston Police Department didn’t return requests for remark. Mayor Michelle Wu’s workplace declined to remark.
“It’s a terrible miscarriage of justice, and I hope a settlement like this can feel like some level of fairness or making whole for Mr. Jenkins and his family,” mentioned Joshua Dankoff, a member of the Office of Police Accountability and Transparency’s civilian evaluation board.
Howard Friedman, a Boston lawyer who has dealt with police misconduct circumstances for many years, mentioned they will generally lead to enormous payouts, together with one he labored on by which the federal authorities was ordered to pay more than $100 million for the wrongful murder conviction of four men on account of FBI misconduct.
That potential can typically give cities and departments motivation to settle a case earlier than it reaches a choose or jury. Settlements can additionally supply finality for police misconduct victims, significantly those that have suffered for years behind bars, he mentioned.
“You lose everything, [you] lose contact with your friends and family, you lose the ability to control every aspect of your life,” Friedman mentioned. “Nothing obviously can replace the years that [Jenkins] lost, but now he’ll have enough money to live comfortably.”
A choose’s transfer to vacate Jenkins’s conviction was a part of a wave of overturned verdicts due to misconduct by Boston police detectives. In 2023, the Globe reported that the town two years earlier had quietly reached a $16 million settlement for wrongdoing by the Police Department with Sean Ellis, which on the time was the most important single authorized payout the town had made in recent times, in accordance to figures the Globe obtained via a public information request.
Ellis had served 22 years in jail earlier than his homicide conviction was finally overturned in a protracted case that later was the main target of a Netflix docuseries.
The similar 12 months the town settled with Ellis, Boston paid one other $4 million to James Watson — who spent greater than 40 years in jail after being wrongfully convicted in 1984 of killing Boston cab driver Jeffrey S. Boyajian.
Frederick Clay was wrongfully convicted in that very same case and spent 38 years behind bars. The metropolis agreed to pay Clay $3.1 million in 2020.
Of the $39 million the town paid in 970 authorized settlements from 2020 to 2022, the overwhelming majority — $31 million — concerned police, in accordance to a Globe evaluation from 2023.
Jenkins sued the town three years in the past, alleging he was falsely arrested and wrongfully convicted.
Jenkins was convicted in 2005 and sentenced to life in jail for the deadly taking pictures of his cousin, Stephen Jenkins, in Dorchester in 2001. There have been no witnesses to the killing, and Shaun Jenkins had maintained his innocence.
No bodily proof tied him to the scene, and nobody testified that Shaun Jenkins, who lived in Fall River, was anyplace close to Dorchester on the time of the crime, in accordance to his lawyer.
Jenkins served virtually 20 years in jail after dropping a number of appeals. But his attorneys finally took the case to then-Suffolk District Attorney Rachael Rollins’ Integrity Review Bureau, which investigated claims of wrongful convictions. That’s when his lawyer found beforehand withheld paperwork within the prosecution’s case file.
One mentioned {that a} detective paid a reluctant witness $100 a day earlier than the witness was scheduled to present grand jury testimony.
The information additionally present that the prosecutor within the 2005 case knew that an alleged drug vendor was a possible suspect within the killing.
Also, in accordance to the federal lawsuit, investigators knew that Stephen Jenkins, the sufferer, had misplaced a stash of crack cocaine and owed his drug provider $3,000. But investigators by no means severely investigated the provider, who later died of an overdose.
Prosecutors within the 2005 case additionally withheld cellphone information that confirmed the sufferer was in repeated contact with the drug provider on the day of his killing, together with a cellphone name minutes earlier than the taking pictures. The sufferer’s physique was discovered within the driver’s seat of a operating automotive, lower than two blocks from the provider’s home in Dorchester.
The revelations and dismantling of the case in 2021 led to Jenkins’s release from prison. Prosecutors later dropped the murder charge in opposition to him.
Shea Cronin, a criminal justice professor at Boston University who focuses on police reform and accountability, mentioned there can generally be a grey space when it comes to police misconduct, significantly in use of drive circumstances when officers are making split-second selections. That’s not the case within the Jenkins’s investigation, he mentioned, calling it “outright misconduct.”
The two prosecutors concerned within the 2001 case and 2005 trial have been referred for self-discipline in 2024, however the Massachusetts Board of Bar Overseers in January discovered neither violated any rules and dismissed the push for disciplinary motion.
Andrew Ryan and Danny McDonald of the Globe workers contributed to this report.
Niki Griswold might be reached at niki.griswold@globe.com. Follow her @nikigriswold.
