Costs soar to fight lawsuit by ex-prisoner

The city of Boston has spent nearly $600,000 on outside lawyers to fight a lawsuit filed by a man wrongly convicted and imprisoned after Boston police concluded he shot a 12-year-old girl to death.

Shawn Drumgold spent 15 years in prison before the Suffolk district attorney's office acknowledged possible misconduct by police and prosecutors, and a Suffolk Superior Court judge overturned his conviction, saying "justice was not done" and the "system had failed."

The city has paid $540,135 to outside lawyers in the case since January 2005, and an additional $45,920 in legal fees are pending, according to figures obtained yesterday by the Globe under a public records request.

Drumgold was freed in 2003 after the Globe reported that police paid one witness and dropped charges against that witness, and that police didn't tell defense lawyers that a second witness had a fatal brain tumor, which could have affected her memory. A third witness said police coerced her testimony.

Boston police, however, have never said that they believe Drumgold was innocent. No one else has ever been charged with killing Darlene Tiffany Moore, who was living in South Carolina and visiting her mother when she was inadvertently shot by two masked gunmen as she sat atop a mailbox in Roxbury in 1988.

The city has paid $199,931 to Hugh R. Curran , who worked as an assistant district attorney in the Suffolk district attorney's office at the time Drumgold was convicted, and $78,532 to Mary Jo Harris , a former lawyer for the Boston Police Department who is now in private practice. A third lawyer, John P. Roache, whose wife used to work for the Boston Police Department as a lawyer, has been paid $166,397. Two other lawyers have received a total of $95,275, according to the records.

In his federal lawsuit, Drumgold, now 41, working as a mover and living in Dorchester, contends his civil rights were violated because misconduct by police officers led to his wrongful conviction. It does not specify the damages sought.

The spending in the Drumgold case is far greater than in two other wrongful conviction cases that the city settled last year.

It agreed to pay $3.2 million to Stephan Cowans after spending about $36,000 on outside counsel on the lawsuit.

After former attorney general Thomas F. Reilly found that Cowans's conviction in the shooting of a police sergeant was the result of "personal and systemic failures" at the department, former police commissioner Kathleen M. O'Toole shut down and overhauled the department's fingerprint unit.

Cowans spent more than six years in prison after police wrongly linked him to a fingerprint left by the man who wounded the police sergeant in Roxbury in 1997.

After spending about $72,000 on outside legal fees, the city also agreed to pay $3.2 million to Neil Miller , who was exonerated by DNA evidence after spending 10 years in prison after being convicted of breaking into an Emerson College student's apartment and raping her while holding a screwdriver to her neck in 1989. Despite the settlement, the department and the city denied there was any official misconduct. Miller's lawyers, however, contended that the former head of the police crime lab lied and that detectives ignored evidence pointing to other suspects.

William F. Sinnott, the city's corporation counsel, said the Drumgold case is more expensive than the cases that were settled because it is more complicated and involves many individual defendants.

The city is paying five outside lawyers to represent four defendants and one witness, a former police official, Sinnott said. The lawsuit also names the city and the Police Department as defendants.

"The Drumgold case is a much more layered case than those other cases," he said yesterday in a telephone interview. "The sequential involvement of different witnesses . . . necessitates having individual counsel and the facts are very drawn out."

The city has its own office of lawyers, but Sinnott said it is not unusual to hire outside counsel. The Globe submitted a public records request for all outside lawyer costs since January 2005 in wrongful conviction cases.

He also said it is not unusual for lawyers with past connections to the city or the Police Department to be hired.

Sinnott, the city's top in-house lawyer, said the Drumgold case is still in the discovery phase and it is too early to determine whether the city will settle.

"Every case is not created equally, and the damages are particularly fact specific," he said. "You've got to look at the impact that a wrongful conviction had on the life of the plaintiff, but that's not a factor in our strategy right now. . . . The discovery might lead us to conclude a settlement is not appropriate."

Sinnott declined to comment on whether the city believes Drumgold is guilty or innocent, but he did acknowledge that DNA evidence backing up Cowans's and Miller's claims to innocence were factors in the city's decisions to settle those cases.

Drumgold's lawyer, Rosemary Scapicchio , said she believes the city is wasting taxpayers' money to fight the case, based on the mistaken belief that Drumgold is guilty and the conviction should not have been overturned.

"Despite the fact that there is evidence to the contrary and documents to the contrary . . . they believe the Commonwealth of Massachusetts and the district attorney's office got it wrong and they're going to be able to prove that Shawn committed this crime," she said

Scapicchio, who has made enemies at City Hall and in the Police Department after aggressively questioning a detective who admitted lying in a police report in a separate case, also alleged that the city is not including all of its costs, such as expenses and investigators' fees, in its total.

The city disputed that, saying all legal costs are included in the records provided to the Globe.

The bill for outside lawyers in the case is already double the total previously disclosed by the city. Last month, the city told the Globe it had spent $250,000. Dot Joyce , a city spokeswoman, apologized yesterday, saying the earlier figure was given in error.

Scapicchio said the costs continue to mount.

She said four of the lawyers representing the city appeared in a room the city rented for a deposition in New York yesterday, along with a videographer and court reporter.

Suzanne Smalley can be reached at ssmalley@globe.com