He turned on me : Plymouth DA testifies he didn t fake racist emails yahoo.com - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from yahoo.com Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
In what is believed to be a first for the state, a pair of Massachusetts prosecutors face possible sanctions including the threat of disbarment over allegations they exchanged racist emails while handling a murder case.
Lawyer of the Year
BC Law’s Sharon Beckman recognized by Mass. Lawyers Weekly for her work with the Boston College Innocence Program
Sharon Beckman (Lee Pellegrini)
Boston College Law School Associate Clinical Professor Sharon L. Beckman, faculty director of the Boston College Innocence Program, is among
Massachusetts Lawyers Weekly’s 17 “Lawyers of the Year,” an annual distinction bestowed by the statewide law publication upon a select group of the Commonwealth’s attorneys for significant accomplishments during the previous year.
She was co-honored along with co-counsel John J. Barter for the September 2020 exoneration of their client Frances Choy, whose arson and first-degree murder convictions were vacated based on new evidence of her innocence, including substantiation that someone else confessed to the crime, and scientific proof that contradicted trial testimony of a state police chemist.
WHEN FIREFIGHTERS ARRIVED at 102 Belair Street in Brockton, Massachusetts, in the predawn hours of April 17, 2003, they observed two teenagers poking their heads out of second-floor windows. One of the teens was 17-year-old Frances Choy, who, awakened by her mother’s scream of “Frances, there’s a fire!” had called 911 on her cell phone. The other was Kenneth Choy, Frances’s 16-year-old nephew. Inside the house, a fire was burning with such intensity that it had melted wall fixtures, and thick smoke had trapped Frances, Kenneth, and Frances’s parents Jimmy and Anne Choy in their bedrooms.
Anne Choy would be pronounced dead later that morning at Good Samaritan Hospital, but as a headline in the next day’s
1. COVID hits the city hard
It would be wrong not to include the coronavirus pandemic on any list of top stories this year, but that s especially true in Brockton. The city was a top coronavirus hot spot in the state early in the pandemic, long having the second-highest infection rate. The city was disproportionately affected by the highly contagious disease, striking nursing homes, the homeless shelter, businesses and young and old residents. COVID-19 has also especially impacted communities of color and Brockton has the fifth-highest concentration of people of color among cities and towns throughout Massachusetts. The city ranks fourth in household size and also has more front-line workers than any other community in the state. More than 8,000 residents have contracted the disease and at least 340 have died from it.