The Fence - Dick Lehr [132]
In a weird way, Kenny was truly looking forward to Cox’s trial; he was going to testify—finally tell his story. That was going to be a huge relief.
Maybe, then, Burgio would finally get his due.
Mike Cox was doing his best to make that happen, working with his attorneys to gear up for the civil rights trial. His lawyer Steve Roach had early on asked another Boston lawyer with extensive trial experience to join the case. Robert S. Sinsheimer was, in many respects, Roach’s mirror image: intense—to the point of seeming hyperactive—indefatigable, and physically unimposing. Slight in build, Sinsheimer topped out at five-five, and Roach wasn’t much taller. The Brooklyn-born lawyer had grown up north of Boston and then attended Dartmouth College, majoring in government and graduating in 1975. He went directly to law school, attending Suffolk University Law School in Boston, where during his last year he was on the winning moot court team. Upon graduation in June 1979, he taught legal writing at Suffolk for two years, which was when he met Steve Roach, a student in his legal writing class. Sinsheimer then worked as an assistant district attorney in Plymouth County, gaining his sea legs in the courtroom, and beginning in 1983, he started out in private practice specializing in criminal defense work.
Sinsheimer had far more trial experience than Roach, but that wasn’t his sole appeal; he’d had a taste of what it was like to take on the Boston Police Department. In the early 1990s, he’d represented a man falsely accused in the murder of a drug dealer in Dorchester. During the trial, Sinsheimer shredded the credibility of the police investigation, and the jury quickly acquitted his client, deliberating for less than two hours. Sinsheimer afterward filed a civil rights lawsuit against the department. While accepting Roach’s offer to help out in the Cox case, Sinsheimer was busy representing another man wrongfully convicted of attempted murder. He uncovered that police perjury—or testilying—had helped convict his client. By late 1997 he succeeded in getting the conviction thrown out. In his ruling, the judge condemned the police investigation, calling sworn testimony by officers “a fraud upon the court” and a “disgraceful episode.”
The Cox case, then, was “right up my alley,” Sinsheimer said later.
Trial preparations were growing increasingly intense during 1998, a hectic pace of analyzing police records, deconstructing the failed internal police investigations, and taking depositions from up to twenty police officers and officials. Sinsheimer and Roach sat through most of Ted Merritt’s successful prosecution of Kenny Conley in June, looking for pointers on a plotline for their own civil rights case. They came away with an unexpected bonus when Smut Brown testified that Dave Williams hit Mike at the fence. “Brown gave up Dave Williams,” Sinsheimer said, “and actually hearing Brown say Williams hit Mike was new.” It was a eureka moment of sorts, and the lawyers knew they were going to call Brown to the stand in the civil rights case to do a replay of his testimony from the Conley trial.
Sinsheimer thought another eureka moment came when a top police official filed a sworn affidavit openly acknowledging the department’s blue wall of silence. “Officers are reluctant to break the ‘code of silence’ and to testify against their colleagues,” Ann Marie Doherty, chief of the Bureau of Internal Investigations, had written as part of her explanation for why departmental probes into the beating had failed. During three days of deposition in June 1998, Sinsheimer could tell Doherty wished she could take back the affidavit that helped Mike’s effort to expose a police culture of lying. “It was an admission that would cost the department,” he said. By then, too, Doherty was gone, transferred by Police Commissioner Evans to a new post overseeing the police academy. To succeed