Why a Mass. man is still in prison after his murder conviction was overturned
Despite evidence that was hidden by prosecutors for decades and new DNA tests that point to Wright's innocence, the 63-year-old man is not yet free, and the Hampden County District Attorney's Office is still fighting to keep him behind bars.
'He's just the most incredible human being,' Wright's wife of 15 years, Mimi Olivier, said outside the John J. Moakley Courthouse in Boston on Thursday.
'I'm anxious and scared, but I have a lot of faith in the Innocence Project and in Eddie,' Olivier said.
The first thing her husband wants to do when he's released is go fishing — and the second is eat a 'big, juicy hamburger.'
Olivier, 59, stood in the spring morning air next to members of the New England Innocence Project, Wright's legal team and some inmates exonerated with the help of the Innocence Project as they discussed the next steps in Wright's case.
A blown-up picture of Wright was in Olivier's hands. Words at the top read, 'The fight continues.'
Wright was convicted at the age of 22 on April 11, 1985 for the stabbing death of his friend Penny Anderson in her Springfield apartment the year before.
Until Hampden Superior Court Judge Jeremy Bucci finally overturned Wright's conviction on April 11, district and federal courts had denied all five of his previous motions — filed between 1986 and 2012 — that showed evidence of his innocence.
That included a 2008 ruling where a Boston federal judge found Wright to have 'actual innocence' after hearing testimony that Allen Smalls, the victim's former boyfriend who died in 2021, had confessed to her killing twice.
Nigel Tamton, a member of Wright's legal team, told reporters on Thursday the denials were because a key piece of evidence about the case was hidden from Wright and his legal team for nearly four decades: a Springfield Police Department report.
'Before all the evidence was collected from the crime scene and while Mr. Wright was in police custody, somebody broke in to Miss Anderson's apartment,' Tamton said.
'The police wrote a report about the break-in and put that report in the police file connected with the murder investigation. But then, they stopped,' he said.
'They never investigated the break-in further, and even though this break-in contaminated the crime scene, the prosecution did not give the report that proved the break-in happened to Mr. Wright until 2021 — 36 years later, even though he was entitled to it, asked for it decades earlier, before his trial," Tamton.
Wright's legal team contended the perpetrator of the break-in was Smalls, whom they also said threatened Anderson the night she was murdered and sold a knife the day after her death. They also pointed out all three Black men in the jury pool were excluded, leaving only one Black woman on the otherwise all-white jury.
Although the judge overturned his murder conviction on Friday, Wright is not yet exonerated. Instead, his court case is essentially reset, and he still faces his original charges, with more legal proceedings to come.
Hampden County District Attorney Anthony D. Gulluni issued a statement pushing back against the ruling.
'We strongly disagree with this decision and we have filed a notice of appeal and intend to argue this matter, once again, to defend the integrity of the conviction,' Gulluni said.
He called the killing of Anderson a 'senseless and tragic act of violence,' and said Wright had received a 'fair trial.'
'We stand by the integrity of the original prosecution and the many judicial reviews that this case has already received over the past four decades,' Gulluni said.
Wright's legal team has requested a hearing to seek Wright's release from prison, but did not have a date scheduled as of Thursday morning, said Radha Natarajan, executive director of the New England Innocence Project.
The team will also monitor the district attorney's appeal, Natarajan said. If the courts agree to hear the appeal, it could take up to another two years for litigation to finish — but if not, it would be the prosecution's decision whether it would retry the case against Wright.
'In a recent hearing, the prosecutor said that Mr. Wright's case is not re-triable. We agree that it is not re-triable, but more importantly, we believe it should not be retried, because Mr. Wright is innocent,' Natarajan said.
'Enough is enough, and it is time to end this injustice,' Natarajan said.
Several of the exonerated men who stood with the New England Innocence Project members on Thursday knew Wright in prison — including Jabir Pope, a 72-year-old man exonerated in 2021.
At the end of the conference, Pope posed for pictures with his fellow former inmates and asked Olivier to send them to him. He still communicates often with Wright through Olivier, he said, though he hasn't seen Wright since his own release.
Pope and Wright would often have conversations about fighting their wrongful convictions, Pope said. During his time in prison, Wright has helped many other inmates in their legal proceedings as he dealt with his own.
It was a way for them to cope and 'lean on one another,' Pope said, as the lifetimes of their families and loved ones' passed both men by.
'We would have those kind of conversations, because the only alternative were to lay out and die,' Pope said.
'It's one of the things that kept us alive.'
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