The Fence - Dick Lehr [88]
But if any prosecutor was up for the challenge, it was Ralph Martin. He was a young, energetic assistant United States attorney in his early forties when first appointed to become the local district attorney by the Republican governor William Weld in 1992. Then, in the 1994 fall elections, he won voters’ support to a four-year term. The outcome surprised many; Martin campaigned as a Republican in a county, comprising the cities of Boston, Chelsea, Revere, and Winthrop, where Democrats outnumbered Republicans six to one. For Martin, the combination of race and justice had long been a powerful source of motivation. Originally from New York City, he was the son of a police officer. His mother was found beaten to death when he was two years old. Martin had gone to college at Brandeis University outside Boston and then moved into the city to study law at Northeastern University. He would always remember how he’d been influenced by a black assistant district attorney from Boston when he was a college senior wondering what to do with himself. The man urged a career in criminal justice because “it’s important to have black folks who are principled in law enforcement.”
Martin, in his brief professional life, had already displayed a willingness to go after cops suspected of wrongdoing—even if the efforts blew up in his face. Before becoming the district attorney, Martin was the federal prosecutor assigned to investigate the Boston police mishandling of the most notorious murder case in decades—the 1989 killings of pregnant Carol Stuart and her baby, shot at a traffic intersection in Roxbury after leaving birthing class. The stomach-turning case that made national headlines became more grotesque when it turned out Carol’s husband, Charles, was the killer. Boston police, meanwhile, had spent weeks building a misguided case against a black man. When the shocking truth came out, the city, especially the black neighborhoods, was in an uproar, and the U.S. attorney put Martin in charge of looking into claims police framed their suspect and strong-armed blacks to incriminate him. Following his investigation, Martin recommended that “several Boston police officers should be indicted on charges of intimidating witnesses, planting evidence and violating the civil rights” of the suspect. Many officers were incensed. But their anger at Martin turned into triumph when Martin’s boss, judging he could not win convictions before a jury, rejected the recommendation and decided not to prosecute the police.
It was a public rebuke, a setback fueling tension between Martin and Boston police officers that carried over into his tenure as the Suffolk County district attorney. “Conflict with the police has been a major theme in the career of Ralph Martin,” noted a Boston Globe profile. His pro-active role in the Stuart probe “guaranteed he would get a hostile reception from many police officers when he became DA.”
Now in early 1995, while monitoring the Cox beating investigation, Martin became embroiled in another police mess. He had indicted a veteran officer with forcing a prostitute to have sex while working a paid detail in downtown Boston. But the case barely got past “go.” On February 27, a Superior Court judge not only threw out the rape charge, he went after Martin, characterizing the district attorney in his five-page order as an out-of-control cop hunter. The judge said Martin had manipulated the grand jury process to indict the officer, tactics he decried as a “perversion of our entire system of justice.” The accused cop’s attorney also had little good to say about the Suffolk County district attorney. “Martin has treated police officers unfairly,” he said.
Martin considered appealing the judge’s order, but three weeks later, on March 22, he decided “no mas”—he would not do that. He remained unapologetic, however.