BOSTON (AP) – A key government witness in the high-profile prosecution of a Boston police officer accused of lying about whether he saw fellow officers beat an undercover cop now says the once-accused officer was innocent.
Robert Brown said in a jailhouse interview with the Boston Sunday Globe that Kenneth Conley was not the “tall, white cop” he saw observing other officers beat undercover officer Michael Cox in January 1995.
Conley, 37, was never accused of taking part in the beating during the confusion of an early morning chase of murder suspects. But Conley was the only one tried in the case, as several police officers refused to cooperate with the probe.
Conley was convicted of perjury and obstruction of justice in 1999, but a federal judge overturned the conviction in 2004 and a panel on the 1st U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals upheld the decision last year. Charges were then dropped.
Brown told the Globe in two recent taped interviews from a prison in Maine, where he is awaiting sentencing on a drug charge, that Conley wasn’t the officer he saw watching the beating.
He said he tried unsuccessfully to alert federal authorities during the trial that they had the wrong man.
“When I seen him sitting at the defense table I didn’t have no clue, like, why they were using me for that – because I didn’t recognize him,” said Brown, who was fleeing police and was arrested by Conley that night.
Minutes before testifying, Brown said he spotted in the courthouse the officer he had seen standing near the scene of the beating, and pointed him out to FBI agent Kimberly McAllister, who was in charge of the probe.
McAllister, through a spokesperson, told the Globe that she does not recall Brown pointing out the officer.
The lead prosecutor in the case, S. Theodore Merritt, said, “That information was never told to me at trial – I can’t comment whether it happened or not.”
Brown never specifically identified Conley when he took the stand. Under questioning by Merritt, Brown confirmed that he looked back and saw the tall, white officer nearby. The prosecution never asked Brown to identify Conley as the officer he saw.
Merritt said there was no need to.
“He (Brown) said, under oath, the tall white officer was the same guy who arrested him, and other evidence showed that it was Ken Conley who arrested him,” Merritt said.
On Jan. 25, 1995, Cox joined a foot chase of shooting suspects in Boston’s Mattapan section. As Cox, dressed in plain clothes, tried to scale a fence, another officer pulled him off and a group of police kicked him in the head, back and face. They fled after one officer yelled, “Stop, he’s a cop!”
Three of the police officers involved were fired in 1999, but no one was charged.
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Information from: The Boston Globe, http://www.boston.com/globe
AP-ES-09-17-06 1829EDT
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