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Jury one vote away from awarding damages in wrongful conviction

E-mail|Link|Comments () October 20, 2009 05:20 PM

By Shelley Murphy, Globe Staff

A federal jury indicated today that it was nearly unanimous in deciding how much money Shawn Drumgold should be awarded for the nearly 15 years he spent in prison after his wrongful conviction for the 1988 slaying of a 12-year-old girl in Roxbury, but one holdout remained.

US District Judge Nancy Gertner, who is presiding over Drumgold's civil rights trial against a retired Boston police detective, agreed to the 11-member jury's request to suspend its deliberations late this afternoon and resume tomorrow morning.

"We are 10-1 on an amount and are at a point where we can not make further progress this afternoon,'' the jury foreman wrote in a note delivered to Gertner at about 3:30 pm. "We'd like to leave now and come back tomorrow."

Any verdict must be unanimous.

Last week, the civil jury of six men and five women found that the detective, Timothy Callahan, concealed evidence during Drumgold's state trial for the Aug. 19, 1988 murder of Darlene Tiffany Moore, an innocent bystander who was struck by two stray bullets as she sat on a mailbox on a Roxbury street corner talking with friends.

The federal jury found that Callahan failed to disclose that before Drumgold's 1989 trial he had supplied Ricky Evans, a homeless teenager and key prosecution witness, with free housing at a Howard Johnson's motel, fed him repeatedly, and paid him $20. The jury found that Callahan violated Drumgold's civil rights and caused his wrongful conviction.

On Monday, jurors returned to US District Court in Boston for the damages phase of the case. They must decide how much Drumgold, now 44, should be compensated for his years in prison. They deliberated for just over an hour on Monday and all day today.

Moore was caught in the crossfire as two gunmen wearing Halloween masks fired at a crowd in what police said was a gang shooting.

Evans was a key witness in the October 1989 trial that ended with Drumgold's conviction for first-degree murder. A Globe investigative report in May 2003 challenged many aspects of Drumgold's conviction, including favorable treatment of Evans that jurors were not told about. Evans recanted his testimony implicating Drumgold in the slaying at a hearing the same year, prompting a state judge to overturn Drumgold's conviction Prosecutors decided not to retry Drumgold but stopped short of saying he was innocent.