BOSTON, March 29, 2016—A Brighton man found guilty of stealing a laptop has been indicted for allegedly returning to the downtown courthouse where he was convicted and tampering with the jury verdict slip maintained by the clerk’s office, Suffolk County District Attorney Daniel F. Conley said.
DAVID SCHER (D.O.B. 11/22/82) was indicted March 9 on charges of perjury, tampering with a document for use in an official proceeding, forgery, and two counts of uttering a false document. He is expected to be arraigned tomorrow in Suffolk Superior Court.
A Boston Municipal Court jury on March 13, 2014, found Scher guilty of larceny from a building for stealing a laptop computer from Suffolk University Law School, where he had been a student. At some point after that date and before Oct. 28 of the same year, prosecutors say, Scher returned to the BMC clerk’s office, made a copy of the jury’s verdict slip, and altered it to reflect a “not guilty” verdict. He then allegedly replaced the original verdict slip in the clerk’s file with the copy.
After making the switch, prosecutors say, the doctored verdict slip began to appear in a variety of matters. It was mentioned in Scher’s appeal of his larceny conviction; it was presented as authentic in a probation violation hearing following his arrest in an unrelated case; it was provided to Suffolk University Law School as part of Scher’s effort to obtain the diploma that had been denied him in light of his conviction; and it accompanied a complaint Scher filed with the state’s Department of Criminal Justice Information Services, which oversees arrest and conviction records. This latter complaint, in which Scher allegedly claimed that he was acquitted at trial, was signed under the pains and penalties of perjury.
Scher received a 90-day suspended sentence on the underlying larceny conviction. If convicted of perjury in the new case, he could face up to 20 years in state prison.
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All defendants are presumed innocent until and unless proven guilty beyond a reasonable doubt.
