Elvio J. “Raphie” Marrero walked out of Franklin County Superior Court with his name cleared on June 17, when a jury found him not guilty of the 1994 murder for which he had spent 28 years in prison. The verdict, coming more than two years after the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court vacated his conviction, represents the culmination of a decade-long effort by the Boston College Innocence Program (BCIP), its students, and Professor Steven VanDyke ’08.
Marrero, 65, was convicted in 1996 for the stabbing death of Pernell Kimplin, a Greenfield resident. He had always maintained his innocence, arguing that travel records showed he had boarded a flight to the Dominican Republic the morning of the crime. But it was not until BCIP, under the leadership of director and professor Sharon Beckman, and the Committee for Public Counsel Services Innocence Program (CPCS), under director of forensic services Ira Grant, launched a joint investigation in 2015 that the evidentiary foundation for overturning his conviction began to take shape.
The revelations helped lead to Marrero’s conviction being vacated in 2024 by the state Supreme Judicial Court, leading to his release on bail while awaiting a retrial.
Beckman led the clinic’s representation of Marrero alongside staff attorneys Lauren Jacobs ’19 and Charlotte Whitmore. Jacobs, who first began working on the case as a BC Law student during her post-graduate fellowship at CPCS, has now represented him for the better part of a decade.
The path was long and difficult. DNA testing obtained by BCIP and CPCS in 2018 excluded the victim’s DNA from bloodstains on Marrero’s jacket, the key physical evidence the prosecution used to connect him to the crime. Post-conviction discovery later revealed that police had withheld notes corroborating Marrero’s alibi. Even so, a Franklin County Superior Court judge denied relief in 2022, sending the case to the Supreme Judicial Court, which in January 2024 vacated the conviction and ordered a new trial. As Marrero exited the courthouse that year, he was accompanied by family members and surrounded by many of the BC Law Defender students who had helped win his release.
At the retrial, Van Dyke, who was one of Marrero’s defense attorneys, told jurors: “People lie, but, fortunately, travel records don’t.” The jury agreed.
Credit: PAUL FRANZ / Greenfield Recorder
“I am so heartened to see that it is never too late … for the right thing to happen,” said Van Dyke, speaking outside the Franklin County Justice Center after the verdict was read.
For Jacobs, the verdict closes a chapter that has defined much of her legal career. “I was honored to have represented Mr. Marrero,” she said at the time of the SJC ruling, “and hopeful that he will soon regain his freedom after decades of wrongful incarceration.”
Beckman, commenting on the case and the successful outcome after over a decade of work on it, marveled at the job Van Dyke did as a professor who was also trying a first-degree murder case, calling him the “most client-centered advocate I have ever known,” and summed up by saying what a privilege it is that such a “positive, energetic, generous, kind, and immensely talented individual is our colleague.”
Speaking through an interpreter after the verdict, Marrero expressed gratitude to those who had fought for him and observed that many others remain unjustly imprisoned.
This acquittal is the BCIP’s ninth exoneration since 2019.
Read more about the BCIP’s work to vacate Marrero’s conviction in our January 2024 story.