The Fence - Dick Lehr [157]
Kenny right away said, No way. The lawyers urged Kenny to sleep on it, talk to Jen. But Ken had the same answer the next morning: No way. “I can’t do a no contest,” he said. “In my eyes this is a guilty plea, and I wasn’t guilty.” Taking the deal would also mean he could never return to the police force, “and that’s the thing I wanted.”
They kept up the fight in court. By now, a centerpiece of the appeal was a document they could thank Bobby Dwan for. During his own legal wrangling after he was put on administrative leave, Bobby devoured documents his attorney secured from the department as part of the discovery process. He came across one that seemed weird—the FBI agent’s report about Richie Walker wanting to be hypnotized to better recall Woodruff Way. Bobby realized this had never come out at Kenny’s trial and, after he notified Kenny, his attorneys were enraged they’d never seen the FBI memo before.
The lawyers took over from there. The FBI report on Walker, they argued, should have been disclosed prior to Kenny’s trial for impeachment purposes. While Bennett raised other issues on appeal, it was the FBI memo that ultimately proved to be the smoking gun needed to finally turn Kenny’s conviction on its head. “For me, the sockdolager is the FBI memorandum,” wrote the federal judge, employing a fancy word meaning “conclusive blow.” The jurist presiding over the appeal happened to be Judge Young, and, on August 14, 2004, Young decided that Kenny had been wrongfully convicted by federal prosecutor Ted Merritt. “Because the government has withheld crucial information, Kenneth M. Conley did not receive a fair trial,” he ruled.
When the court of appeals upheld Young’s decision the next July, and the U.S. attorney decided to drop the case, Kenny Conley was at last free and clear. When he showed up for the midnight shift on October 4, 2005, at his old station in the South End, the usually perfunctory roll call just before midnight erupted into a welcome back celebration, where Kenny was presented his old badge—number 1016—as a keepsake.
He was thirty-six now, happy to be back in the only job he’d ever wanted. “Knowing me, I’ll be a cop until I’m sixty-five.” He was promoted to detective in 2007. In a recent interview, he said that while working the streets had changed—more guns and shootings—nothing much had changed about the police force. His colleagues still had the tendency to mess around with the truth regarding an arrest: Too many cops add things to their reports to make their case seem stronger—the very problem people like Bill Bratton called testilying.
“You can’t add things,” Kenny said one day over coffee. He’d been through a lot because of other cops’ lies and truth tailoring. “You either have it or you don’t.”
“My name is Michael Cox, and I work for the Boston Police Department.” Mike spoke those words on December 9, 2000, two years to the day since he’d testified in Cox et al. v. City of Boston et al.
But instead of U.S. District Court in Boston, Mike was bearing witness at Harvard Law School. He was one of six panelists addressing the “Impact of Brutality on Victims and Family,” part of a daylong symposium entitled “Race, Police and Community.” Mike sat in front of the crowded hall dressed in a navy blue blazer, a dark blue shirt, and matching blue tie—a getup that looked like a civilian version of police blue.
He was an oddity—the only cop on the panel; a cop who, strangely enough, was also a victim of police brutality. The other panelists—a Latino woman whose son was killed by police, an activist attorney who’d been