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
BROCKTON The controversy began with a lawsuit from a disgruntled former employee.
Veteran prosecutor John Bradley sued the Plymouth County district attorney’s office for wrongful termination, alleging his former bosses retaliated against him after he stopped volunteering time and money to District Attorney Timothy Cruz’s reelection campaigns.
The litigation lasted years, generating testimony from former prosecutors and troves of internal documents that offered an unprecedented window into the politics inside the DA’s office, the arm of state government that turns arrests into criminal convictions in Brockton and 26 towns in Plymouth County.
Among the documents entered into the public record were Bradley’s emails thousands of them at the former prosecutor’s own request. And while Bradley won a settlement of $250,000, the emails, which contained scores of inappropriate remarks about defendants he and his colleagues sent to prison, set off a series of unintended