In 2020, the Boston College Innocence Program (BCIP) helped achieve the release from prison of a client who had served 34 years for a crime he did not commit. In 2023 the Superior Court vacated his convictions, but left open the possibility that he would face a new trial for the 1985 kidnapping and murder of a Boston woman. Thomas Rosa Jr. had already endured three trials before being found guilty, despite his consistent claims of innocence.
On March 11, some six years after Rosa exited prison, the overhanging burden of another trial was lifted when the Suffolk County District Attorney’s Office dropped the charges. As the Boston Globe reported, prosecutors had determined that the passage of time and various factors had eroded the case and called into question “the Commonwealth’s ability to prove the charges.”
BC Law became involved in the case in 2017 when BCIP Senior Staff Attorney Charlotte Whitmore, assisted by the program’s director Sharon Beckman and students, joined New England Innocence Project Executive Director Radha Natarajan as co-counsel for Rosa.
The students’ efforts included the work of Kayleigh McGlynn ’19, who majored in biology as a BC undergraduate. She discovered a discrepancy in prior DNA testing results that led to new scientific evidence undermining eyewitness identification testimony at Rosa’s trial. That, in turn, led to Supreme Judicial Court Justice Frank Gaziano’s motion to release Rosa in 2020 pending further litigation of his motion for postconviction relief.
In 2023, Whitmore’s accomplishments in the case earned her a Lawyer of the Year award from Massachusetts Lawyers Weekly. “I am thrilled for Mr. Rosa and his family that he is finally exonerated after decades of injustice,” she said, “and I am honored that BCIP was a part of his long-awaited victory.”
Read additional BC Law Magazine stories on the case’s history here and here.