Boston D.A. Credits Stonehill for his Passion for Law

October 01, 2008

Suffolk County District Attorney Daniel F. Conley `80 has been nationally recognized for his efforts to address, correct, and prevent wrongful convictions.

The Stonehill alum was recently honored by the Boston Bar Association with its Distinguished Public Servant Award for his efforts in reversing the convictions of men who were wrongfully imprisoned for rape, murder and other offenses that occurred before he took office in 2002.

"Shortly after I became D.A., a number of injustices came to light," Conley explained.

"Prior to 1997, DNA science did not have an application in Massachusetts criminal law. When I took office in 2002, I began to permit the use of (DNA) to rule defendants out as suspects just as much as to rule them in. …We then discovered several instances where the person in prison was not the person truly responsible for the crime. In those instances, I moved as quickly as I could to free those individuals."

Those wrongful convictions, Conley said, came about through human error in a human system.

"These convictions resulted from honest mistakes. Nobody was framed," Conley said. "Those convictions occurred because the victim or witness identified the defendant either in a lineup, or a photograph, or in court, and did so in good faith but mistakenly. Human beings aren't perfect; memories aren't perfect."

It was with that in mind that Conley empanelled a Task Force of police, prosecutors, defense attorneys, and the nation's leading academic expert on eyewitness identification. Together, they developed a set of 25 recommendations to ensure that eyewitness identifications were made as cleanly, as ethically, and as free from contamination as possible.

Conley adopted every single one of those recommendations, surpassing even the best practices set by the U.S. Department of Justice.

"It wasn't enough to get the (innocent men) out of jail," he said. "We have to make sure, to the best of our human ability, that this never happens again." As a result, some legal scholars have called Boston a national model for eyewitness identification procedure. "It's something we are very proud of in our office".

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