Worcester is still a winner in my book
Worcester isn’t the most secretive in the country, but it’s still way up there
Listen up! Members of the No New Women’s Prison movement are calling on people to testify in favor of a bill that would establish a five-year moratorium on the construction of new jails and prisons in Massachusetts (S.1979). The moratorium would block the state from implementing a plan to build a $50 million women’s prison.
Advocates will be rallying outside the State House on Tuesday at 10 AM then heading inside to testify at a legislative hearing in the Gardner Auditorium at 11 AM. There’s more information from Families for Justice as Healing here. You can attend the hearing virtually here.
In April 2022, I wrote about the horror of MCI Framingham, the state’s only women’s prison, and why advocates are trying to stop the new prison from being constructed. There’s also some recent reporting from The Shoestring about how the state is heavily redacting meeting minutes related to the new women’s prison project.
Now, on to the main story...
The Worcester city officials who wasted hundreds of thousands of tax dollars on an illegal effort to keep records of police misconduct investigations hidden from the public might be way up there, but they aren’t the most secretive in the county.
That distinction belongs to the Nebraska Department of Environment & Energy for its “staunch commitment to blocking the release of internal emails about a growing public health risk,” according to a new release by the group Investigative Reporters and Editors Inc.
Every year for the past decade, IRE has bestowed the Golden Padlock Award on the government agency or officials it deems the most secretive. This year, IRE named Worcester as one of four finalists, but the group announced the Nebraska state agency as the winner on Saturday.
According to IRE’s release:
The agency originally quoted the Flatwater Free Press a fee of $2,000 to access internal emails referencing nitrate, a chemical in fertilizer linked to cancer that has been increasingly showing up in Nebraska drinking water. When a reporter submitted a simplified request to reduce the fee, it instead increased by 2,000 percent to $44,103.11.
“The easiest way not to give documents is to deny documents. And you can deny documents in one of two ways,” said Daniel Gutman, attorney for the Flatwater Free Press. “One is to say there are documents but you don’t get them. The other is to say you have to pay $45,000 dollars for them. Both avenues lead to the same result, which is no documents and less public awareness – less transparency.”
The Flatwater Free Press sued, and a judge ordered that the Nebraska Department of Environment & Energy provide a fee estimate reflecting the actual cost of making the records available. Nevertheless, the agency has held firm in its resolve to withhold the information pending a state supreme court appeal.
“This is the story of a public agency funded with public money in the public interest working diligently to undermine the public’s right to know,” said Robert Cribb, chair of the IRE’s Golden Padlock committee that reviewed nominations from across the country. “The relentless commitment displayed by Nebraska officials who are keeping vital information from public view is a distinction worth honoring.”
You can read the Flatwater Free Press’s “Our Dirty Water” series here.
Worcester lost the Golden Padlock, but the city is still a winner in my book. Just like the Nebraska Department of Environment & Energy, the city went above and beyond to conceal vital information from the public in violation of the law.
In 2018, the city refused to provide internal-affairs records to Brad Petrishen, a reporter for the Telegram & Gazette daily newspaper. At the time, the T&G had already successfully sued the city for withholding internal-affairs records not once but twice. City officials didn’t let that deter them.
Petrishen was looking into a voluminous complaint submitted to prosecutors by civil rights lawyer Hector Pineiro, who accused officers of beating people, conducting illegal searches, staging evidence, falsifying reports, and more. Since then, the US Department of Justice has opened a civil rights investigation to determine whether the Worcester Police Department engages in a pattern or practice of racially discriminatory and gender-biased policing and excessive force.
Officials used a preposterous argument to deny Petrishen’s records requests, claiming that the city did not need to release records about officers who were being sued to protect taxpayers from liability. The newspaper filed its third lawsuit, meaning the taxpayers the city claimed it was trying to protect were again on the hook for the city’s refusal to follow the state’s public records law.
After a four-day trial, Worcester Superior Court Judge Janet Kenton-Walker ruled in June 2021 — just a few days shy of the three-year anniversary of Petrishen’s requests — that officials were wrong to withhold the records.
A win for transparency and police accountability
A judge excoriated Worcester for its unlawful three-year campaign to keep police-misconduct records secret from a local newspaper
In January 2022, Kenton-Walker further ruled that officials acted in bad faith by advancing legal arguments they knew to be incorrect and trying to mislead the court. She ordered the city to pay $5,000 in punitive damages to a state fund and to cover the T&G’s legal fees and expenses — however, she cut the paper’s requested fee award from $217,000 to $101,000.
The T&G filed an appeal, arguing that Kenton-Walker’s 54 percent cut was excessive and unjustified. A panel of three Appeals Court justices overturned parts of Kenton-Walker’s ruling and returned the case to her to determine a higher amount. The city agreed to a $180,000 settlement in February.
During the trial, Worcester was represented by Wendy Quinn, the city’s chief litigator at the time. Quinn left the city for a job with Hassett & Donnelly in March 2022, but the city signed a contract with the law firm so that she could fight against the T&G’s appeal.
The city had paid Hassett & Donnelly $18,000 for Quinn’s work on the appeal as of February 7, shortly before the settlement was signed, according to documents provided by the city. It’s not clear how much the city paid Quinn to fight the T&G while she was employed there. The city said in response to a records request that it didn’t track this information. In 2021, Quinn’s total pay was about $130,000.
In addition to being under federal investigation, the police department is facing a class-action lawsuit alleging that officers used excessive force, made false arrests, filed false reports contradicted by video evidence, damaged property, used racial slurs, and made threats of rape against demonstrators, bystanders, and journalists during a 2020 Black Lives Matter protest.
The class-action lawsuit is the latest in an endless string of allegations of depraved behavior by Worcester police officers in recent years.
In September, a federal jury awarded $8 million to Natale Cosenza after finding that two detectives, John Doherty and Kerry Hazelhurst, conspired to conceal and fabricate evidence to convict Cosenza of a violent burglary. Cosenza spent 16 years in prison before a judge vacated his conviction.
While Cosenza languished in prison, Doherty and another detective interrogated Nga Truong, a 16-year-old mother who prosecutors then charged with suffocating her baby to death. Truong spent nearly three years in prison before Kenton-Walker threw out her confession, the only evidence against her.
The judge found that the detectives failed to give Miranda warnings and used interrogation methods that were “potentially coercive to the point of making an innocent person confess to a crime,” including lying about the existence of evidence and promising the “frightened, meek, [and] emotionally compromised” girl leniency and help for her younger brothers if she confessed.
Truong sued, and the city settled with her for $2.1 million in 2016.
In a pending lawsuit, Dana Gaul alleges that he spent five months in prison on a murder charge because Worcester detectives fabricated evidence, including coercing people who were not eyewitnesses into falsely identifying him as the perpetrator. Prosecutors later dropped the charges against Gaul.
In September, the city agreed to a $275,000 settlement with Christopher Ayala-Melendez, who was attacked and arrested by a group of officers, two of whom filed false reports contradicted by video evidence, outside his apartment in 2019.
In May, the city agreed to pay $248,500 to settle allegations that two officers used excessive force when they fractured the arm of a 10-year-old autistic boy in 2017.
Worcester’s leadership will spend as much as it takes to keep the police-violence machine running. They want the cruelty to continue — they just wish everyone would stop noticing.
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Thanks to C.J. Ciaramella of Reason for writing about my pending public records lawsuit against the Northwestern District Attorney’s Office, which is refusing to release the names of cops accused of crimes and misconduct. Ciaramella notes that my lawsuit “is a small part of a larger legal battle by journalists and advocacy groups to pry free police misconduct records” throughout the country.
According to his story:
Quemere noted that a judge recently ruled that the city of Worcester illegally withheld records about police misconduct and advanced bad-faith legal arguments in court, dragging out a fight with a local newspaper for three years at taxpayer expense.
“Now a district attorney is doing the same thing,” Quemere said. “We shouldn’t have to fight the same battles over and over again to access public information.”
Unfortunately, that fight is playing out in states across the country. In New York, police unions have been trying to claw back disciplinary records after the state repealed a notorious secrecy law in 2020. A group of journalists and activists had to file a class-action lawsuit to force Oakland to comply with changes to California’s records law that made police misconduct files public.
You can read more about my lawsuit here:
Mass Dump sues Northwestern DA for withholding names of cops accused of crimes
David Sullivan’s office said releasing the names of cops accused of crimes and other misconduct would violate their privacy
That’s all for now.