After 40 years, Suffolk DA brings sudden end to wrongful conviction case

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In brief

• Suffolk County prosecutors filed a nolle prosequi on March 18, ending the prosecution of Thomas Rosa Jr. for a 1985 kidnapping and murder.
• Rosa spent 34 years in prison before being released in 2020 after post-conviction DNA evidence and legal developments raised doubts about his conviction.
• Key physical evidence in the case — including the alleged murder weapon — was lost despite a court preservation order.
• Changes in Massachusetts law regarding eyewitness identification and police misconduct disclosure complicated plans for a fourth trial.

An ordeal that began 40 years ago for Thomas Rosa Jr. is finally over.

On March 18, the Suffolk County District Attorney’s Office filed a nolle prosequi, abruptly ending preparations for what would have been Rosa’s fourth trial for the Dec. 7, 1985, kidnapping and murder of Gwendolyn Taylor.

Indicted on Feb. 11, 1986, Rosa served 34 years in prison for the crimes, which he steadfastly insisted he did not commit.

Rosa has been out of prison since October 2020, thanks to a ruling from a single justice of the Supreme Judicial Court, Frank M. Gaziano. The ruling had been based in part on DNA evidence obtained post-conviction, along with an evolution in the way the legal system has come to assess the reliability of eyewitness identifications.

But the difference between being out from behind bars and no longer having the prospect of another trial hanging over his head is stark, according to his attorneys.

Since his legal fortunes had taken such a positive turn, Rosa had attended a support group for people who have suffered wrongful conviction and long-term incarceration, says Radha Natarajan, executive director of the New England Innocence Project.

“One of my colleagues told me that they could literally see when he walked in that the weight was lifted off of him,” she says. “They could see a light from him that was different than what we have been seeing” since 2020.

One of Natarajan’s Chicago-based co-counsel, Mark Loevy-Reyes, has another client who had seen Rosa and his family since the nolle prosequi was filed. That client, too, had remarked on “how he looked healthier, how he was walking better, how he was moving better than he ever had before,” he says.

Rosa had a trial date in May, and his attorneys say they had no inkling they would not be making opening statements to a jury.

“We’ve been litigating this case for two and a half years — lots of things happened in the trial court — and one day we got an e-mail with an attachment,” Natarajan says.

That attachment, the nolle prosequi, stated: “After a comprehensive reinvestigation of the case to prepare for the upcoming trial, the Commonwealth has concluded that it can no longer move forward with this prosecution. In the over forty years since the victim was murdered, evidence has been lost, additional forensic testing has been conducted, and case law and jury instructions have substantially changed.”

A spokesperson for the Suffolk DA declined to comment beyond the text of the document.

Even though they were elated by the document’s message, the sentence about what had “changed” was difficult to read, according to Natarajan.

“Everything in that sentence was known in 2020, when Tommy was released from prison,” she says. “It was also known in 2023 when the conviction was overturned, and they decided to move forward.”

The prosecution lost the physical evidence, including the murder weapon — the victim’s sweater, which had been used as a ligature — sometime between 1986 and 1993, despite a court order requiring the evidence be preserved, Natarajan notes.

Had the evidence been available, it might have yielded even more exculpatory DNA testing, she says.

Unlike when Rosa was tried initially, Massachusetts now has model jury instructions on eyewitness identification to give jurors guidance on factors that might make such testimony unreliable, says Loevy-Reyes’ colleague, Meg Gould.

“Looking forward to this trial, that would [have been] a major factor in how that evidence was evaluated,” Gould says.

One of the things Loevy-Reyes found most outrageous was that the defense was having to fight to suppress the identification evidence despite the clear changes in the law, he says.

“The judge wanted to hold [Rosa] to what the 1980s understanding of the law was, based upon a decision in 1986 when you couldn’t even test the boundaries of what the eyewitness identification was,” he says. “In our mind, that would have created a huge injustice.”

Rosa’s defense team had an application for interlocutory review pending with a single justice of the SJC, which Natarajan notes garnered support from an amicus, “which is pretty unusual on Rule 15.”

Another way the legal landscape has shifted is that the SJC in recent years has clarified, in the cases Graham, et al. v. District Attorney for the Hampden District and Commonwealth v. Mcfarlane, that prosecutors have a duty to inquire and disclose evidence related to misconduct of officers involved in the case.

Rosa’s defense team had sought that evidence, a request that the commonwealth unsuccessfully sought to block with a protective order. Despite the ruling, the prosecution had not turned over any of the required discovery before filing the nolle prosequi.

“I don’t know what that would have revealed,” Natarajan says.

This is the first time the New England Innocence Project has represented a client in pretrial proceedings after a wrongful conviction was overturned, and Natarajan says it had been an eye-opening experience in terms of how unfair the pretrial process can be for people in Rosa’s position.

“[Prosecutors] use all these procedural barriers, like law of the case, to say, ‘OK, he had a motion to suppress in 1986, which means he shouldn’t be able to get a motion to suppress again,’ even though if he were indicted today on the same evidence, he would be entitled to something so different and even though everybody — including apparently now the commonwealth — acknowledges that things have changed,” she says.

Though it is no solace, the delays in the resolution of Rosa’s case allowed him to claim the distinction of being Massachusetts’ 100th exoneree since the National Registry of Exonerations began collecting such data in 1989. The NEIP planned to celebrate with Rosa’s family over a lunch of Rosa’s favorite cuisine — Italian — on April 6.

While complete freedom may have arrived later than his defense team might have hoped, it is much better than facing a fourth trial, his defense team notes.

“He clearly had no reason to trust that justice would be done in this trial because it wasn’t done previously,” Natarajan says. “The weight of that was so significant. We’re thrilled. We’re relieved. It was the right decision.”