Ben said he was innocent from the get go and he has never wavered from that. His case gained some attention in the late 80âs and early 90âs. One juror reported that another juror made racist and prejudicial remarks before and during deliberations. The courts eventually decided that the conviction should stand anyway. He lost his last appeal on that issue in 1994.
In 1998 Ben was for the first time eligible for parole. The board turned him down for not admitting to the crime. They did this in spite of the fact that he was a model prisoner and had earned a BA magna cum laude through the Boston University Prison Education Program. Along the way he had struck up a correspondence and budding friendship with BU President (now emeritus) John Silber.
Smelling an injustice Silber swung into action after the parole board decision. He helped secure a legal team that started looking for DNA. They located a box of evidence from the case and went to the courts to press for testing. Then a strange thing happened. Worcester DA John J. Conte started to oppose them at every turn. It took two years of litigation to get to testing. Part of the problem was that the labs could find little or no male DNA. Finally, when the technicians pooled just about everything they had, they barely squeezed out a male DNA profile.
Some more interesting things happened along the way. In April 2001 Ben for the first time obtained his Leominster Police file through the FOIA (Freedom of Information Act). The file revealed gross constitutional violations in the original police investigation. The worst thing was that items from Benâs apartment appeared in inventories with no legitimate paper trail. In other words, they were seized in violation of the search warrant.
In August 2001 preliminary DNA tests revealed that the State Police chemistâs report was flat wrong on key blood type evidence. The chemist had misidentified some blood as Type âBâ that turned out to belong to the Type âOâ victim.
In November 2001, also through the FOIA, a fingerprint report emerged showing that those prints Ben voluntarily gave police could have exonerated him at trial. The prints at the crime scene were on a key piece of evidence, the phone, the cord of which the perp used to hogtie the victim. The report indicated they were compared with Benâs with ânegâ results. Worse, this report had never been shared with the defense team: a BIG Constitutional no no.
Then in March 2002 came a shocker for people who had been following the case for years. That miniscule (even by DNA standards) amount of male DNA was announced to be LaGuerâs. The result was not quite as shocking to those who had studied Benâs police file and could see that underwear from his apartment (NOT the crime scene!) had been mixed in with other evidence that went to the State Police chemistâs bench. But in the public mind a DNA match is the final word. Ben was all but sunk.
Luckily for him Silber and a few others were willing to listen and look. A year later Goodwin Procter, a major law firm, took the case pro bono and a team led by James C. Rehnquist started pushing for a new trial based on revelations surrounding the fingerprint report. If the conviction were overturned based on witheld exculpatory evidence the DNA results could get a full and thorough vetting at a new trial.
The Superior Court judge ruled against a new trial as did the State Appeals court. Now the SJC (Supreme Judicial Court) has announced that it will review those decisions.
In the meantime several DNA experts have looked at the case and put into writing opinions that the procedures and the conclusions drawn from the results were deeply flawed.
There is a lot more to this story, and I plan to blog on it in the coming weeks and months. The bottom line is that Ben LaGuer has served almost 23 years for a crime people who have studied the case firmly believe he did not commit. As a convict he his legally guilty until proven otherwise. It is past time the courts gave Ben a new trial. The first one was a travesty. To those who have seriously looked at this case there is little question that Ben LaGuer, now 43 years old, is not only not guilty but also actually innocent.
AP report, for whatever it’s worth.