BOSTON, Oct. 28, 2016—The Massachusetts Appeals Court yesterday reversed a lower court’s order allowing a man to withdraw his guilty plea for stashing more than a dozen bags of crack cocaine in the shoes of a child who then wore them to school, Suffolk County District Attorney Daniel F. Conley said.

DEMARE GARY (D.O.B. 12/10/90) pleaded guilty in December 2010 to possession of a Class B substance with intent to distribute, possession of a Class B substance with intent to distribute in a school zone, and reckless endangerment of a child for the incident, admitting that he placed 17 individually-packaged rocks of what he knew to be crack cocaine in the 3-year-old girl’s shoes. When the girl complained at her early education program that her foot hurt, a teacher checked her shoes and found the drugs. A supervisor notified the Department of Children and Families, which in turn notified police.

In 2011, two months after Gary pleaded guilty, the drug evidence was analyzed at a Department of Public Health facility and tested positive for cocaine. Former DPH employee Annie Dookhan, later convicted of mishandling drug evidence, served as a confirmatory chemist in that testing. In 2013, after Dookhan’s misconduct came to light, Gary moved to withdraw his guilty plea on the grounds that he would not have tendered it had he known that Dookhan would later play a role in the testing. A Roxbury Municipal Court judge granted the motion, and Suffolk prosecutors appealed it.

Earlier this year, while that appeal was pending, the Supreme Judicial Court ruled that a drug defendant who admitted his guilt before Dookhan played any part in testing the evidence was not entitled to withdraw his guilty plea because there was “no basis to find that any governmental misconduct occurred in his case prior to the acceptance of his pleas, or that any governmental misconduct rendered the defendant’s guilty pleas unintelligent or involuntary.”

In a two-page decision authored by Justices Joseph Trainor, Ariane Vuono, and Diana Maldonado, the Appeals Court quoted that SJC decision and noted that it “involved circumstances almost identical” to Gary’s. Consistent with the higher court’s ruling, the Appeals Court reversed the order allowing him to vacate his guilty plea.

Assistant District Vincent Demore argued the case before the Appeals Court. Gary was represented by attorney James Haynes.

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All defendants are presumed innocent until and unless proven guilty beyond a reasonable doubt.