The power of law enforcement to influence the justice system
Victor Rosario spent more than 30 years in jail after he was convicted in 1983 on charges relating to a fire in Lowell that killed eight people, including five children. The key evidence against him included a signed confession and testimony from fire investigators, who said evidence at the scene indicated the fire had been set.
In 2014, a judge overturned the case, citing advances in fire investigation techniques and questions about Rosario’s confession. The state Supreme Judicial Court upheld that ruling, and Middlesex County prosecutors ultimately said they would not retry him. Last week, the city of Lowell agreed to pay him $13 million for that wrongful conviction.
Rosario’s story is yet another example of the power of law enforcement to influence the justice system and deliver injustice, often for the poor, the mentally ill, and people of color. But it also shows the power of police to shape a public narrative. As a phrase that first surfaced on the editorial pages of The Washington Post put it, journalism creates “the first rough draft of history” — and when it comes to crime reporting, the police obviously contribute mightily to that first draft. Correcting it when it’s wrong takes lawyers committed to fighting for the truth and journalists committed to digging for it. Both eventually happened, but it took a very long time. Rosario was 24 when he was convicted. He spent 32 years in jail and is now 65.
As a young, general assignment reporter, I wrote two news stories about the Lowell fire — one about Rosario’s arrest, co-bylined with Peter Mancusi, a former Globe reporter and editor; and one about his arraignment. Both stories relied primarily on statements from police. The story reporting his arrest floated an alleged motive — “revenge” involving an unspecified drug-related incident. The arraignment story cited an affidavit signed by Rosario in which he supposedly told police he watched two other men make three Molotov cocktails in the basement of a house and “left the house knowing that we were going to burn the building on Decatur Street.”
Mark Loevy-Reyes, one of Rosario’s lawyers, said that police pressured Rosario, whose first language is Spanish, into a confession he did not fully understand or was in any condition to give. As far as an alleged revenge motive over a drug deal, Loevy-Reyes told me, “If you read the trial transcript, there is no evidence of anyone dealing drugs or of any drug deal. That only comes from the coerced confession. It was made up.” In every wrongful conviction case that he has worked on, Loevy-Reyes said, “Police have decided they know who the suspect is, they know what happened, and they ignore things that show that person is not the person who did it.” It’s hard to shake that belief. According to Loevy-Reyes, the police investigators he deposed as part of Rosario’s suit against Lowell still believe in his guilt. Also, according to the Associated Press, when the judge overturned the conviction in 2014, arson investigator Harold Waterhouse, who investigated the fatal fire, called the decision “ridiculous” and stood by his original findings.
Rosario’s lawyers, with assistance from the New England Innocence Project, used discoveries in the field of fire science to show that the case against him was based on false evidence. They also exposed details of the circumstances surrounding his confession. For example, in her account, “A Quest for Justice: The Story Behind the Exoneration of Victor Rosario,” lawyer Andrea Petersen writes that Rosario was “in the throes of delirium tremens during the interrogation” and a translator who was present said Rosario “was so incoherent by the end of the interrogation that he could not understand what was being said to him.”
Eventually, journalists also played an important role in helping to uncover the truth. In a piece written for the New England Center for Investigative Reporting and published in The Boston Globe in July 2014, reporters Jack Nicas and Dick Lehr detailed “a series of grave shortcomings in the police inquiry and the prosecution of Rosario, findings that suggest Rosario was wrongfully convicted and that buttress legal efforts underway to reopen the case.” Among the findings: Lowell police quickly concluded the fire had to be arson, based on assumptions about fire scene evidence that have since been debunked. Astonishingly — given what Rosario supposedly confessed to — no accelerant, bottle, glass, or other physical evidence of any Molotov cocktails was discovered at the scene.
Today, the first police report about a crime is less apt to be taken as gospel. “Now, more attention is paid to disparities in policing, who gets charged and how people of color are treated,” said Mancusi, who teaches journalism and public relations at Northeastern University. Even so, breaking-crime stories still rely on general assignment reporters who quickly move on to another assignment, like I moved on from covering the Lowell fire to covering John Belushi’s funeral on Martha’s Vineyard.
It took 31 years from Rosario’s conviction for a legal and journalistic reckoning to take place and more than 40 years to get to that $13 million settlement with Lowell. Not to be glib about it but the consequences of taking police statements at face value are a reminder of another old journalistic maxim: “If your mother says she loves you, check it out.”