BOSTON, April 3, 2017—Suffolk County District Attorney Daniel F. Conley, who has been recognized nationwide for the successful “Boston Model” of investigating fatal police-involved shootings, is sending his top homicide prosecutor to promote independence, integrity, and transparency at national conference on the subject.
Assistant District Attorney Edmond Zabin, the chief of the Suffolk DA’s Homicide Unit, will detail the benefits of Conley’s policies this week at the Officer-Involved Shootings Symposium held by the National Attorneys General Training & Research Institute in Virginia. A former history teacher and a Suffolk prosecutor for almost 25 years, Zabin is a fellow of the American College of Trial Lawyers, was named the Massachusetts District Attorneys Association’s Prosecutor of the Year in 2013, and received the Suffolk Award for Outstanding Superior Court Prosecutor in 2005. As Conley’s top homicide prosecutor since 2008, he is responsible for overseeing investigations and making charging recommendations in all unnatural deaths in Boston, Chelsea, Revere, and Winthrop, Massachusetts – including those that involve police officers.
“By statute, death investigations in Massachusetts are directed by prosecutors, not police,” Conley said. “We answer to no police chief, union, or municipal government body – only to the people we serve. As a result, we have the authority to lead these investigations independently starting at the scene, rather than review them after the fact as most prosecutors nationwide must do. Moreover, we can share much more information with the public when those investigations are complete. This practice helps people understand what we do and how we do it, and I recommend it to prosecutors and legislators in other states as they consider their own policies moving forward.”
Under Conley’s leadership, fatal police encounters are assigned only to senior, homicide-qualified prosecutors who have no connection to the officers involved. The assigned prosecutor responds to the scene immediately to oversee the investigation and maintains all the high standards he or she would bring to any homicide case. As personal representatives of the District Attorney, they demand multiple canvases for witnesses and video; prompt, recorded interviews with involved officers and percipient witnesses; evidentiary analysis in an ASCLD-LAB accredited crime laboratory; and exhaustive documentation of each investigative step. As a result of those high standards, the investigative file in a fatal Suffolk County police shooting often runs to more than 1,000 pages of reports and includes hours of audio and video recordings, recorded and/or transcribed statements of all involved officers and percipient witnesses, and detailed maps and diagrams.
For more than a decade, Conley has released that entire investigative file – every piece of video evidence, every dispatch recording, every interview, every report, every forensic test result, and every map, chart, and diagram – in every police-involved fatality to the family of the deceased and the media for their independent review. He has advocated for this model in presentations to the National District Attorneys Association, the Major Cities Prosecutors Council, the National Association of Attorneys General, and the select panel of state and federal prosecutors who comprised the US Attorney General’s Executive Working Group on Prosecutorial Relations under President Barack Obama.
“Replicating these practices nationwide could enhance confidence in these investigations at a time when they’re under unprecedented scrutiny,” Conley said.
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