Plaintiff details a hell in prison

Drumgold testifies in suit on conviction

The jury in Shawn Drumgold's civil lawsuit is expected to begin its deliberations this morning.

Shawn Drumgold told a federal jury yesterday that prison inmates and correction officers repeatedly beat him and called him a child killer during the more than 14 years he spent in prison for the killing of 12-year-old Darlene Tiffany Moore.

With the number 5,182 displayed on courtroom computer screens to underscore the number of days he was imprisoned after his 1989 conviction, Drumgold said his time behind bars was an ordeal for himself and his family.

"I was terrified when I first got to Walpole," said Drumgold, 42, referring to MCI-Cedar Junction, where he was brought on Friday the 13th in October, immediately after a Suffolk County jury convicted him. "It was probably one of the most scariest moments of my life."

A state judge freed Drumgold in 2003 after ruling he had been wrongfully convicted because law enforcement officials withheld and manipulated evidence that could have cleared him. But neither Suffolk prosecutors nor Boston police ever exonerated him.

Appearing subdued and occasionally tearful, Drumgold described the sound of clanging prison doors, the attacks an inmate can provoke by unknowingly taking another prisoner's seat at the chow hall, spending 16 hours a day inside a cramped cell, and the desperation he felt watching his daughter grow up without him.

Drumgold testified for about 45 minutes as his lawyers sought to persuade a jury in US District Court in Boston that a retired Boston police detective, Timothy Callahan, was responsible for the wrongful conviction and that the former inmate should get damages.

Last Wednesday, the jury all but cleared Callahan and another retired detective, Richard Walsh, whom Drumgold sued for allegedly violating his right to a fair trial in the infamous 1988 slaying.

But US District Judge Nancy Gertner allowed the case to continue on only one of the 11 claims in which jurors sid ed with Drumgold. The jury found that Callahan violated Drumgold's civil rights by concealing that Callahan had given a prosecution witness cash before the witness testified at the murder trial.

In a painstaking argument after Drumgold's testimony, Callahan's lawyer, Mary Jo Harris, said the witness in question, Ricky Evans, was not crucial to the prosecution's case. Evans, a former homeless teenager, testified at the criminal trial that he saw Drumgold carrying a gun near the murder site before the shooting. Evans testified at the federal trial that he made up the account in exchange for food, hotel lodging, and favors.

Harris said that even if jurors at the murder trial had known that Callahan had given Evans cash, Drumgold would still have been convicted. The key evidence against Drumgold, she said, was the testimony of several teenagers who saw two or three men in Halloween masks shoot Moore at a Roxbury street corner on Aug. 19, 1988. Moore was felled by stray bullets in an apparent gang-related shooting.

"Ricky Evans, I would submit to you, is a secondary player," Harris said. "He was not an eyewitness to the shooting."

Harris told jurors that "there is no question that jail is a terrible place." But she urged jurors to set aside their sympathy and determine whether Callahan was liable for the wrongful conviction, which, she contended, he was not.

John Roache, a lawyer defending the City of Boston in the suit, said the most compelling testimony at the murder trial came from a young woman, Mary Alexander, who lived where Moore was shot. She said in a police report that she saw Drumgold walk past her house immediately after the shooting and put what appeared to be a gun inside his pants.

"I'll never forget those eyes, because they were, like, staring," she had testified.

Drumgold's suit alleged that the officers concealed the fact that Alexander had a fatal brain cancer when she implicated him and that the illness could have affected her memory. But that was among the 10 alleged civil rights violations that the federal jury rejected.

Drumgold's lawyer, Rosemary Scapicchio, accused the lawyers defending Callahan and the city of rewriting history.

She noted that at Drumgold's murder trial, his defense lawyer called Evans the linchpin of the case.

"This case teeters on Ricky Evans," Scapicchio said. "How can you say that it might not have made a difference in the mind of one juror," she said, if the jury had known that Callahan had given Evans cash?

The jury is expected to begin deliberating this morning.

Jonathan Saltzman can be reached at jsaltzman@globe.com