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The other defendant, George Reissfelder, was arrested in a more roundabout way. Then twenty-six years old, Reissfelder already had a substantial criminal record—an armed robbery when he was seventeen, bad-check charges, and domestic violence against his wife. On the night of the murder of Michael Shaw, Reissfelder told his girlfriend that he was planning an armed robbery in South Boston. This information alarmed the girlfriend, who told her father of the plan, and he went to the police. Even though South Station is not in South Boston, the tie was close enough for the police, and they rousted Reissfelder the following afternoon. They found a gun, which tests later showed had not been fired, but which a witness said looked like one that had been brandished during the South Station murder, and Reissfelder was charged as Sullivan’s accomplice. Prosecutors asked for the death penalty for both men.
One night during the trial, in July of 1967, a lawyer from Reissfelder’s defense team, John Costello, met the head of homicide investigations for the Boston Police Department. The officer made an astonishing revelation: he knew Reissfelder was innocent. “He told me, ‘We know your guy wasn’t there,’” Costello said recently. “They didn’t want to lose the conviction of Sullivan, because they knew he was the right guy, by admitting they had the wrong guy with Reissfelder.” The authorities apparently figured that if they admitted they were wrong about Reissfelder, the jury might think they were wrong about Sullivan, too. “It was a death-penalty case,” Costello went on, “and they were thinking this way. It was unbelievable.” Costello brought the officer’s admission to the attention of the judge, but the officer denied making the statement, and the trial continued. Three eyewitnesses identified Reissfelder as one of the robbers, and both he and Sullivan were convicted and sentenced to life in prison.
In 1974, Reissfelder won a one-day furlough from prison, and he fled the state. He was on the lam for three years until he was caught passing a bad check in Florida; when he was arrested, he tried to pull a gun on the police. He was returned to prison in Massachusetts, and resumed serving his life sentence. But his story caught the interest of a fellow-inmate who dabbled as a jailhouse lawyer, and in 1980 the inmate wrote a brief that persuaded a judge to assign a lawyer to represent Reissfelder. The judge chose Roanne Sragow.
Sragow visited Reissfelder in prison and told him that, given the uncertainties in the case and the fact that he had already served about ten years, she might be able to get him released on a plea bargain. But Reissfelder insisted that he was innocent and said that he wouldn’t plead guilty to anything. Sragow started digging into the case. Learning of her involvement, John Zamparelli, the lawyer who represented Silky Sullivan at trial, appeared at her office one day and said, “As God is my witness, the cops knew it, the prosecutor knew it, the judge knew it—this guy Reissfelder was not guilty.” As Zamparelli told me, “George had a record, and the cops were dying to get the case closed. The sad part was, the cops even knew who the guilty party was. And he’s still at large today.”
“Roanne was the court-appointed attorney, and I was the helper,” Kerry said. “She did the lion’s share of the work, but that case taught me a lot.”
http://www.newyorker.com/fact/content/?040510fa_fact1Another article.<snip>
Yesterday's dismissal of the murder charge marked the culmination of two years of work by Reissfelder's court-appointed Boston attorneys Roanne Sragow and her associate, John Kerry. Reissfelder won a new trial last June, largely on the basis of a deathbed statement in 1972 by his codefendant, William Sullivan of Charlestown. As he lay dying of leukemia, Sullivan told a priest that Reissfelder was innocent.
The two men had been convicted of first-degree murder and armed robbery during a $20,000 payroll holdup at the Railway Express Agency at Boston's South Station in 1966. Witnesses identified Reissfelder as being at the scene of the crime.
But for the 15 years of his incarceration, Reissfelder insisted that he did not commit the murder.
He served seven years of a life term in Walpole state prison before he was granted a one-day furlough, and then failed to return to the prison. Three years later, a Florida police officer was trying to arrest him for writing a bad check when Reissfelder pulled a gun and it went off.
No one was injured, but Reissfelder pleaded guilty to a charge of
attempted murder because he was already facing a life term in
Massachusetts and he had been told the sentences would run concurrently, according to Kerry.
http://www.amnesty133.org/ai/actionteams/dp/g_reissfelder.html - Reissfelder