Man who served time for crime he was ultimately acquitted of sues state

A man whose conviction for lying to police about a 2011 murder in the parking lot of a Jamaica Plain convenience store was overturned by the Supreme Judicial Court today sued the state for what he says his trial, conviction and time in a Suffolk County jail has done to him.

On Oct. 16, 2011, Christopher Rivera, an O'Bryant School graduate just months from graduating with a degree in social work from Bridgewater State University, was out with a friend when they stopped at the 7-Eleven at South Huntington Avenue and Centre Street. An argument between the friend and somebody in the car next to them turned into a fight in which Rivera's friend, Hector Soto, fatally stabbed the other man.

Later, when police interviewed Rivera, he told them he was at a party in Hyde Park, rather than at the 7-Eleven at the time of the stabbing, after which they charged him as an accessory after the fact. In 2013, he was jointly tried with Soto - who was charged with second-degree murder - and convicted, after which a judge sentenced him to 2 1/2 years in jail, with a year to actually serve. Soto was also convicted and sentenced to life. The jury acquitted Rivera of a separate assault-and-battery charge related to the fight.

In 2019, however, the Supreme Judicial Court overturned Rivera's conviction - after he had already served his time - concluding that state law required prosecutors to show Rivera's statements somehow changed the course of the police investigation, which they hadn't, since police quickly targeted Soto as the killer and nothing Rivera said made them or tried to make them think differently. The court then sent his case back to Suffolk Superior Court with an order to formally acquit Rivera, which a judge did.

In his complaint, filed today in Suffolk Superior Court under the state's wrongful-conviction law, Rivera said he never should have been tried, let alone convicted and put in jail, and that he is owed damages for those acts and for the harm all that caused him.

Rivera says that his goal had to become a social worker - at Bridgewater State he worked with programs for troubled youth - but he no longer could, first because Bridgewater State expelled him, despite the fact he had yet to even go to trial. Then, he was released from his sentence, nobody would touch him for a social-work field - even after the school relented and mailed him a diploma in 2012, because he had completed all his coursework on his own with the help of his professors before his trial.

Finally, almost ten years after he was arrested, his complaint continues, Rivera was able to get a job as a social worker associate with "a major Boston-based organization."

Put differently, the wrongful conviction and incarceration have significantly damaged Mr. Rivera by, not least of which, delaying his social-work career for nearly a decade.

Rivera is seeking damages equal to the roughly ten years of earnings he might have otherwise made as a social worker, plus damages for having to go to trial to begin with and for spending time behind bars for a crime the state's highest court said he did not commit.