2013: Retrial Motion #2
Defense attorney Rosemary Scapicchio, well known in Boston for tackling tough post-conviction legal challenges and winning.
2003: Sean writes attorney Rosemary Scapicchio
On Christmas Eve 2003, Sean Ellis wrote a letter to Boston defense attorney Rosemary Scapicchio asking her to take his case. He had learned of her prowess and her fierce defense of clients that year when she won the freedom of Shawn Drumgold, another African-American man from Dorchester wrongfully accused of murder.
2004: Scapicchio begins work
Scapicchio agreed to become Sean Ellis's appellate attorney and began work in fall 2004. Almost immediately she began filing Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests to local and federal agencies for documents pertinent to the Mulligan homicide investigation. (The author of this website worked alongside attorney Scapicchio starting in 2006, extensively researching the case.)
2011-13: Waiting for FOIA documents
It took seven long years for the FOIA documents to begin trickling in. They were worth the wait.
The main FOIA revelations:
Victim John Mulligan was known to his superiors as having a long, multifaceted history of corruption (source: FBI reports)
This suggested suspects who were never pursued. One report said that a Boston police officer claimed a fellow officer killed Mulligan (both officers’names were redacted).
Victim John Mulligan was an accomplice in Dets. Acerra, Robinson, and Brazil's criminal scheme of drug dealer robberies and perjury (source: federal grand jury transcripts)
On Sept. 9, 1993 - seventeen days before Mulligan’s murder - Acerra, Robinson and Mulligan robbed Boston drug dealer Robert Martin's two Boston apartments at gunpoint. Given that Acerra, Robinson, and Brazil had key roles in investigating Mulligan's murder, this raised questions about their motives and conduct during the probe.
(Note: Two additional 1991 drug-dealer robberies by Mulligan and Robinson were under investigation by BPD Internal Affairs in 1993. This came to light in police department documents released by court order in August 2014.)
2013: Retrial motion submitted
Defense attorney Norman Zalkind
Based on the FOIA reports, Scapicchio submitted a new retrial motion on behalf of Sean Ellis in March 2013. (His first such motion was submitted by his trial attorneys, Norman Zalkind and David Duncan, in 1998 but was denied, as was their subsequent appeal (see 1998: Retrial motion #1)
She argued that the information about Mulligan’s corruption and his involvement in his associates’ criminal scheme of drug robberies should have reached jurors' ears, but was withheld from Ellis's trial lawyers.
Attorney Zalkind filed a supporting affidavit to the Ellis retrial motion enumerating 21 points of pertinent information the Commonwealth withheld from the defense team, stating: "If I had been provided this exculpatory evidence...I would have filed additional discovery motions, investigated additional suspects, investigated Mulligan, and used the exculpatory evidence to raise a reasonable doubt at trial."
“Mulligan’s involvement in illegal activities
meant that many people
had motives to harm him.”
A miscarriage of justice? Questions raised in the Ellis retrial motion:
Did the woman seen in Mulligan's car play a role in his murder?
FBI documents exposed John Mulligan's practices of extorting retailers for bogus “protection" and shaking down drug dealers and prostitutes, demanding money and sexual favors. Scapicchio believes this sordid history casts new light on an animated conversation Mulligan had with an unidentified woman in his passenger seat within the hour of his murder.
Was the pearl-handled gun planted?
A pearl-handled .25-caliber gun was found hidden under leaves in a vacant lot in Dorchester, along with Detective Mulligan's service revolver, and designated the murder weapon. Transcripts of police interviews of Mulligan’s girlfriend and her roommate show that, five days before this weapon was unearthed, detectives asked both women whether "John had a pearl-handled .25-caliber gun.”
How did police know the murder weapon had a pearl handle before it was found?
Did someone plant this gun in the Dorchester vacant lot?
Was this Detective Mulligan "drop" gun, the weapon several people said he wore on his ankle?
Was another Boston officer behind Mulligan's slaying?
"The Boston Police Department withheld and suppressed evidence suggesting that a fellow police officer was the real killer of Det. Mulligan," Scapicchio wrote – although specifics about this tip, received through FOIA, including its origin, were only revealed by the Commonwealth at the 2014-15 evidentiary hearings.
Did corrupt cops falsify evidence?
The crux of Scapicchio’s motion rests on the revelation, buried in grand jury testimony from the 1996-97 federal probe of Boston Police corruption, that John Mulligan robbed two Commonwealth Avenue apartments leased by Boston drug dealer Robert Martin three weeks before his murder, in concert with his friends, Detectives Kenneth Acerra and Walter Robinson (who later pleaded guilty to over 40 federal counts of robbery and perjury and did prison time).
This criminal link of Mulligan with Acerra and Robinson showed the detectives’ conflict of interest and possible motive to tamper with evidence. The finding calls for further scrutiny of the evidence these detectives brought forward against Ellis.
Did Detective Acerra take Mulligan's phone and clean it up?
Mulligan's cell phone, reported missing from his SUV immediately after his murder, was “discovered” a full week later in the vehicle’s center console by Detective Kenneth Acerra, although crime scene technicians had failed to find it. Did Acerra take the phone, wipe it clean, and put it back?
Did Detectives Acerra and Robinson and Brazil manufacture a witness?
Within twelve hours of the murder, Acerra, Robinson, and Brazil brought forward as a witness nineteen-year-old Rosa Sanchez -- coincidentally, the niece of Acerra’s live-in girlfriend. Sanchez claimed she was at the Roslindale Walgreens 45 minutes before Mulligan's murder and saw a young Black man peering into the detective’s SUV as he slept.
Robinson and Acerra engineered a two-try photo ID session in which Sanchez identified Sean Ellis as the man – but only on her second try. The first time through the photo arrays she chose another man. Then, after a private chat with Acerra and Robinson in Acerra’s car outside, she came back in and “changed her mind” to Ellis.
This photo ID was admitted as evidence, making Rosa Sanchez the only witness to tie Ellis to Mulligan.
Fearing that their joint crimes with Mulligan might be discovered during the intense murder probe, did the corrupt detectives "solve" the case quickly by using Sanchez?
"It cannot be said with any confidence that the results of any of the three trials would have been the same if the jury had heard the newly discovered evidence regarding Mulligan's criminality, the evidence of other viable suspects, the report that [at least] one police officer believed Mulligan was killed by another officer, and the evidence linking Mulligan to the crimes of [Detectives] Acerra, Robinson, and Brazil." — Rosemary Scapicchio
CLICK HERE to view Ellis Motion for a New Trial, March 1, 2013.
In January 2014, website author Elaine Murphy began covering the Sean Ellis case for the Dorchester Reprter as a Special Correspondent. She continued her reports until Sean’s release in 2015.