< Back to front page Text size – +

Federal prosecutor admits mistake, begs for leniency

E-mail|Link|Comments () May 12, 2009 01:59 PM

By Jonathan Saltzman, Globe Staff

A federal prosecutor today acknowledged that she withheld evidence that could have helped clear a defendant in a gun case but said it was an inadvertent mistake and implored the chief judge of the US District Court in Massachusetts not to impose sanctions that could derail her career.

Chief District Court Judge Mark L. Wolf

"It is my mistake. It rests on my shoulders,'' a composed Assistant US Attorney Suzanne Sullivan said during an extraordinary hearing in Boston that lasted more than two hours. "I also ask the court to give me the opportunity to rebuild my reputation.''

But Judge Mark L. Wolf said he was considering several sanctions because he was so appalled by Sullivan's lapse and by what he characterized as a pattern of prosecutors in the US attorney's office withholding evidence. The sanctions ranged from fining her personally -- something prosecutors said would be a first by a federal judge in the country for a lapse of Sullivan's type -- to an order that she and perhaps all 90 prosecutors in the office undergo additional training about the constitutional duty to share such evidence.

"It's unpardonable, and if I don't find it deliberate, I find it's at least ignorance and reckless disregard,'' Wolf said at a hearing during which he criticized both the US attorney's office and the Justice Department's Office of Professional Responsibility.

Wolf wrote US Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. last month to ask him to crack down on prosecutors who fail to disclose information that could clear defendants and repeated his past assessment that the Boston office has a "dismal history of intentional and inadvertent violations.'' Wolf wrote that similar appeals he made to Holder's predecessors in recent years achieved little.

Joseph F. Savage Jr., a private defense lawyer in Boston and former federal prosecutor who represented Sullivan at the hearing, repeatedly gestured toward his client and told Wolf that a sanction represented "annihilation'' of her career.

Such a sanction, said legal specialists, would be a blot on her record with the Massachusetts Board of Bar Overseers and could expose her to further disciplinary action.

Savage also said that Sullivan was a well-respected, diligent prosecutor who should not be blamed for earlier lapses by the office. She worked as a state prosecutor in the Plymouth District Attorney's office for 11 years before she joined the US attorney's office in January 2006.

Wolf took the arguments under advisement and said he will issue a written decision later.

Sullivan failed to disclose that a Boston police officer's testimony at a pretrial hearing contradicted what the office had repeatedly told the prosecutor beforehand. The defendant was Darwin E. Jones, a Mattapan man who was arrested in July 2007 in a Boston gun case.

The truth only came to light, according to Wolf, when the judge reviewed Sullivan's notes of her interviews of the police officer, Rance Cooley.

After Wolf chastised Sullivan in a sharply worded memorandum in January, prosecutors dismissed gun charges against Jones, according to his lawyer, John F. Palmer of Boston. Palmer said recently that he and prosecutors have reached a tentative plea deal on drug charges.