Drumgold testifies he was beaten in prison and called a 'child killer'

By Jonathan Saltzman, Globe Staff

Shawn Drumgold told a federal jury today 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 in 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 wrongfully imprisoned after the 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. I was 24 years old.''

Drumgold, subdued and occasionally tearful, described the sound of clanging prison doors, the attacks one can provoke by accidentally taking an inmate's seat without permission at the chow hall, the repeated head counts correction officers make each day, and the desperation he said he felt knowing his daughter was growing up without him.

Drumgold testified for about 45 minutes as his legal team sought to persuade a jury in US District Court in Boston that a retired Boston police detective, Timothy Callahan, was responsible for his wrongful conviction and that the former inmate should receive damages. Drumgold was released after a judge concluded in 2003 that he was wrongfully convicted.

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

But US District Judge Nancy Gertner allowed the case to continue on the only one of the 11 claims in which jurors sided 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.

Callahan's lawyer, Mary Jo Harris, made a painstaking argument today after Drumgold's testimony. She told the jury that the witness in question, Ricky Evans, a former homeless teenager who placed Drumgold near the murder scene before and after the shooting, was not a crucial witness.

Harris said that even if jurors at the murder trial in Suffolk Superior Court had known that Callahan had given Evans cash, Drumgold would probably have still been convicted. The key evidence against Drumgold, she said, was the testimony of teenagers who witnessed the shooting of Moore at a Roxbury street corner on Aug. 19, 1988.

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

Suffolk prosecutors agreed in 2003 that Drumgold did not get a fair trial, prompting a superior court judge to toss the conviction. However, he has never been exonerated by prosecutors or Boston police.

Harris, a former legal counsel to the Boston police, opted not to cross-examine Drumgold today and told jurors that "there is no question that jail is a terrible place.'' But she said jurors had to set aside sympathy and determine whether Callahan was liable for the wrongful conviction, which, she contended, he was not.

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