The Execution Squad Fraud Bum Beefed - Stephen Doherty

THE EXECUTION SQUAD FRAUD bum beefed

In 1976, I was doing time in Walpole State Prison, in Massachusetts, for a bank robbery and was about to be placed in a work release program. This is the last step before actually being released back to the street.
Walpole reportedly had the highest murder rate of any prison in the country, and the lowest conviction rate - none. The Norfolk County D.A.'s office was being pilloried by the press for their inability to get a conviction. Their latest gaffe had been trying the wrong men (twice!) for the murder of Albert DiSalvo, (a.k.a. the Boston Strangler).
So, when a particularly atrocious murder occurred on Thanksgiving Day, 1976 and an inmate named Thomas Carden came forward offering to testify that he’d seen who’d done it, District Attorney William Delahunt, who’s now a United States Congressman, jumped at the offer.
Inmate Robert Perrotta had been found dead in his cell. His penis had been torn off and stuffed in his mouth, while he was still alive!
The Boston Globe, quoting Delahunt’s lead investigator, State Police Lt. William Bergin, published a scandalous story that was filled with lies, under a totally fictitious front page headline:
"Police discover inmate execution squad at Walpole state prison"
The Globe claimed that Perrotta was killed because he was suspected of being an informant who was talking to the police about a series of bank robberies. They also said that he had given the Warden a letter outlining the scheme to kill him, in which he named his potential killers and that the inmates who Perrotta named in his letter were the prime suspects in his murder.
Delahunt quickly charged three ‘likely suspects’, myself, John Campbell & Arthur Keigney, who just happened to be bank robbers from Boston’s most notorious Irish neighborhood, Charlestown, which was so widely known for taking a dim view of informants that it was nick-named the 'Code of Silence'.
When my lawyer, Alan Caplan, demanded that the alleged letter naming the suspects be made public, it suddenly didn’t exist. They claimed there was no letter. The Globe didn't print that, just another front page lie.
It did come out, years later, that Perrotta had named his potential killers - not us, other inmates. Carden had admitted that to Lt. Bergin, before trial, but the trial judge, Judge Keating, let the D.A., John Prescott redact it (amongst many other things) before giving us the transcript of the interview.
This case is a textbook example of how the system can be manipulated and abused through the combined efforts of an ambitious prosecutor/politician, unethical or overzealous police work, a judge who not only let them get away with it, but also pitched in and contributed to the aforementioned collaborators underhanded tactics, and certain elements of the media who find it to their advantage to parrot what the prosecutors, or the cops, tell them and report it as fact. Of course, the suppliers of the information are usually identified as “informed sources” and the “facts” are always prefaced with “allegedly”
It took me 20 years to prove that I was framed and to overturn my conviction because every time that I discovered new evidence, the Department of Correction shipped me out of state to a series of federal penitentiaries, e.g., Marion, Leavenworth and Lewisburg. And, every time the courts ordered me back to Massachusetts, the DOC kept me locked in the hole, without even charging me with any disciplinary violations. I did about ten years in the feds and ten years in the hole, coincidentally, the two most challenging places to be housed, when you’re trying to discover more evidence that they were hiding, or to be able to do legal work from, and overturn a wrongful conviction.

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