Seeking the Path to Justice
By Yvonne Abraham Globe Columnist,Updated July 12, 2023, 6:16 p.m.
Whose job is it to make sure everyone hurt by rogue police officers gets justice?
Three years after an explosive report from the Department of Justice detailed shocking patterns of brutality and deception in the Springfield Police Department, a lawsuit seeks an answer to that question.
One one side is the American Civil Liberties Union of Massachusetts, the Committee for Public Counsel Services, and criminal defendants who want the Supreme Judicial Court to order a top-to-bottom investigation of officer misconduct in Springfield, similar to the investigation that uncovered years of misconduct at the Massachusetts drug lab and led to the dismissal of tens of thousands of drug convictions.
On the other side is Hampden District Attorney Anthony Gulluni, who says he’s doing plenty to right the wrongs of the police department and that asking for more is impractical and unreasonable.
And in the middle: those convicted based on testimony from police in a department where there has been so much misconduct it calls all officers’ credibility into question.
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The July 2020 DOJ report, which focused mostly on the department’s narcotics bureau, described a unit staffed by rogue officers who were needlessly brutal and who lied to cover up their assaults. The most infamous example was that of narcotics detective Gregg Bigda, who was captured on camera threatening to kill and plant drugs on three teenage suspects, assuring them he could get away with it. “Welcome to the white man’s world,” Bigda allegedly said, according to his federal indictment.
The federal findings were preceded by dozens of complaints and lawsuits alleging police brutality, for which the city paid out millions of dollars in settlements. Some of the officers accused of misconduct kept their jobs, the fate of other arrestees and defendants in their dirty hands.
The police department and the Justice Department entered into a consent agreement that overhauled Springfield’s use of force policies and strengthened supervision. The narcotics bureau was dissolved. But holding rogue officers accountable is difficult in the best of times. Despite the videotape, a jury acquitted the poster child for police brutality in Springfield: Gregg Bigda is now suing the city for violating his civil rights, asking to be put back on the job. Others involved in incidents described in the Justice Department findings and other reports remain on the force.
If people who have no right to be police officers keep their jobs, those who face convictions on the say-so of those officers should know who they’re dealing with. But plaintiffs in the lawsuit say the DOJ report — which named few names and provided few actionable specifics — showed only fragments of the whole picture when it comes to the Springfield Police Department, and that someone must conduct a thorough investigation to reveal all of the misconduct, which, like the drug lab scandals, potentially compromises thousands of criminal cases and convictions.
“There has been under-investigation here and under-disclosure,” said Matthew Segal, senior staff attorney at the ACLU State Supreme Court Initiative, who brought the case as legal director of the ACLU of Massachusetts. “And the entity responsible for that is … the Commonwealth.”
Gulluni’s spokesman says the DA has done all he can to get to the bottom of the DOJ findings, that he has sued — unsuccessfully so far — to get specifics on the underlying cases described in the 2020 report, and that he has passed along everything he has to defense lawyers. His office has relied on a report by a Springfield officer, a former head of the narcotics bureau, who tracked down most of the specifics and prepared a rebuttal a few months after the DOJ findings. Gulluni passed along the names of police officers accused of misconduct to defense attorneys for some 8,000 cases.
“The office … sought, compiled, and disseminated thousands of pages of discovery to defense counsel to ensure that defendants’ rights are protected,” said James Leydon, the spokesman. “The Hampden District Attorney’s Office has always and will continue to operate by the highest ethical standards.”
Gulluni’s critics say that’s not enough, that his definition of misconduct is far too narrow, and that the district attorney turned over the information to defendants only after he was sued. And that his office is taking far too passive an approach to the police department here.
“If their position is, ‘We don’t have to investigate … one of our team members,’ that is a recipe for keeping police misconduct under wraps,” Segal said.
As part of the case, First Assistant DA Jennifer Fitzgerald testified that such an investigation would be “an unprecedented sweeping investigation into the practices and protocols of a department that we don’t control,” and that it would be duplicating a federal investigation conducted with far greater time and resources than the local office could ever muster.
The DA should have been far more proactive here, but Fitzgerald has a point about resources. Part of the problem is that, when it comes to its investigations into patterns of police misconduct, the Justice Department has been vague on how district attorneys should respond and how far they should go to protect defendants against unscrupulous police officers who are, after all, integral to their prosecutions.
Guidance from the state’s highest court is sorely needed here. Without it, we won’t know if the cases that have come to light are all the corruption there is to see in Springfield — or just the tip of a very ugly iceberg.
An earlier version of this story did not explain that a quote attributed to a Springfield officer was an allegation made by the Department of Justice in its 2018 indictment of the officer.
Globe columnist Yvonne Abraham can be reached at [email protected]. Follow her on Twitter @GlobeAbraham.
This article was originally published on July 12th, by the Boston Globe.