$3.2m award in wrongful jailing

The city of Boston has agreed to pay $3.2 million to a Roxbury man whose wrongful conviction in the shooting of a police officer in 1997 led to the temporary shutdown of the Police Department's fingerprint unit and sweeping changes in how such evidence is collected and analyzed.

Stephan Cowans spent 6 1/2 years in prison after police falsely linked him to a fingerprint left by the man who shot and wounded Sergeant Gregory Gallagher in a Roxbury backyard. While behind bars, he contracted hepatitis C, according to his lawyers, and missed his mother's funeral, before finally being exonerated by DNA evidence early in 2004 through the New England Innocence Project.

Efforts to reach Cowans, 35, now living in Mattapan, were unsuccessful yesterday, and his lawyers didn't return repeated telephone calls seeking comment on the settlement. In an interview with the Globe after his release from prison in January 2004, Cowans said, ``I was one who never gave up on myself."

The award to Cowans equals what is believed to be the largest amount the city has ever paid in a wrongful conviction case. In the other case, the city agreed in March to pay $3.2 million to settle a lawsuit brought by Neil Miller, who served 10 years in prison after being convicted of raping a 19-year-old Emerson College student in 1989 before DNA tests proved another man had committed the crime.

As part of the settlement, Cowans agreed to drop claims against the city, the Police Department, and six police officers -- including Gallagher, who had identified Cowans as the shooter -- who were included in a federal civil rights lawsuit Cowans filed last year, according to William Sinnott, Boston's corporation counsel.

``We're not a party to the case anymore," he said. Sinnott said he would not talk about the case further because the entire lawsuit hasn't been dropped.

The settlement doesn't cover claims filed by Cowans against retired officers Dennis LeBlanc and Rosemary McLaughlin, the technicians who wrongly matched the shooter's fingerprint to Cowans.

A man shot Gallagher twice with the officer's gun after a scuffle on May 30, 1997, then fled into a nearby home, where he briefly held a mother and her two children hostage. He drank from a glass of water before fleeing the house, leaving a fingerprint on the glass that LeBlanc later said matched Cowans's print. McLaughlin reviewed LeBlanc's analysis and agreed the print belonged to Cowans.

In 1998, Cowans was convicted of armed assault with intent to murder, home invasion, and related charges and was sentenced to 35 to 50 years in prison.

His mother died four months before he was freed from prison, and his request to attend her funeral was denied, according to the lawsuit.

In 2003 and 2004, lawyers for the Innocence Project arranged for DNA testing on a sweatshirt and baseball cap that the shooter had discarded before fleeing and discovered it wasn't Cowans' DNA. Only then did police reexamine the fingerprint and conclude it belonged to one of the hostages who had served the shooter the glass of water.

Kenneth H. Anderson, a lawyer representing LeBlanc, said that by settling claims against everybody else, the city is trying to ``scapegoat" LeBlanc and McLaughlin, suggesting they were rogue police officers who acted on their own.

``Certainly the defense is that a mistake was made and he was working in an inadequate facility with inadequate training," Anderson said of his client. ``He made an honest mistake. . . . There was no deliberate effort here to falsely implicate anybody."

McLaughlin's lawyer, Fran Robinson, said that McLaughlin ``had minimal involvement" in the case and that she didn't know why the city wouldn't cover the technician's actions under the settlement.

After a four-month investigation of the department's handling of the case, Attorney General Thomas F. Reilly said there wasn't sufficient evidence to warrant perjury charges against LeBlanc and McLaughlin. Reilly blamed the fingerprint misidentification on ``personal and systemic" failures.

A private consultant issued a scathing report in October 2004, finding that officers in Boston's fingerprint unit were poorly trained, had low performance standards, and weren't keeping up with advanced fingerprinting work.

The fingerprint unit was shut down for more than a year by Commissioner Kathleen M. O'Toole, then reopened in January after an extensive overhaul.

``They took great pains to guard against ever being faced with a similar situation," said Elaine Driscoll, a spokeswoman for the Boston Police Department.

The department's fingerprint unit now operates from a state-of-the-art facility, and its six seasoned civilian analysts, all with advanced forensic training, work under a veteran analyst, Jennifer Hannaford, who has developed strict protocols and standards, according to Driscoll.

All analysts, including police officers, are subject to yearly proficiency tests and continuing education and training, Driscoll said.

Cowans, who had been convicted of shoplifting and served time for receiving stolen property prior to his wrongful conviction, was arrested on new charges earlier this year. In February, State Police arrested him on charges of assault and battery and breaking and entering at nighttime, alleging that he had broken into his former girlfriend's house in Mattapan and beaten her with a boot.

In April, Cowans was charged with operating a motor vehicle with a suspended license.