Barrage of gunfire leaves Dorchester girl shot in leg

Every homicide in the City of Boston is announced at http://www.bpdnews.com/. Every arrest is announced there, at http://www.mass.gov/da/suffolk/press_releases.html, or both. Every conviction, every acquittal, and every hung jury in a homicide case is announced, as well.

Did you mean to say that no one's affirmed your grudge against the Homicide Unit since then?

Sure thing, Anon. It's just that you used the present tense and this seems to be a four-year-old article citing cases from four years before that.

With regard to those cases mentioned on page two, Cordell Jones admitted his own guilt in Sydney Pope's homicide rather than face a second trial. A jury found Demond Chatman guilty of murder, apparently believing the evidence that the author says was not enough to convict him. (And why does he say it wasn’t enough? Well, he suggests that investigators’ theory of the case was out of whack because of a witness who claimed to have spoken to the victim after prosecutors said she had to have been dead. What he doesn’t say is that the witness claimed to have spoken to the victim’s “spirit.”)

Another case on page two, that of Giress Dianswecki, is described as being “without any direct evidence, witnesses, or motive,” when in fact there were all three – a percipient witness, Dianswecki’s own dying declaration identifying the defendant as his killer, and a prior dispute between the defendant and the victim. The case may not have ended with the verdict we sought, but it’s simply untrue to state that it had no evidentiary foundation.

Cases such as Donnell Johnson's 14 years ago are the reason that Suffolk prosecutors and Boston Police have adopted policies that lead the nation in averting potential wrongful convictions – policies lauded by no less an authority than the Innocence Project’s Barry Scheck. It's the reason we pushed for -- and ultimately were forced to fund on our own -- a second grand jury, unprecedented in Massachusetts, to check and corroborate the evidence as extensively as possible prior to trial (and many times prior to arrest) in homicide cases without paralyzing the other 40,000+ criminal cases that are investigated in Suffolk County each year.

No one at the district attorney's office will forget Donnell Johnson’s case, and I doubt anyone at BPD will, either. I think you -- and the author -- do his ordeal a grave disservice when you equate his case with those of James Bush, Marquis Nelson, and Kyle Bryant, however.

With regard to Ivan Hodge and the Tacary Jones case, I think the author's wording here gives his whole biased gig away when he says "the Commonwealth has charged another young man with the shooting, and reduced the charges against Hodge." The author states categorically that “Hodge did not do it” and credits a witness who came forward to Hodge’s defense attorney and not police.

Without double-checking, what do you think that means? Presumably, that Hodge was charged with gun possession or something and "another young man" was charged with Jones' murder, right? Because, without explicitly saying it, that's clearly the author's implication.

That implication is incorrect. Both Hodge and his co-defendant, O'Neil Francis, were indicted for first-degree murder and both were convicted of second-degree murder for Jones' fatal shooting.

This whole article is full of similar half-truths and just-barely-not-lies. When he isn't taking investigators to task for moving too slowly on a case, the author accuses them of moving too quickly. Each acquittal is held up as an example of a defendant’s innocence, and each conviction is implied to be wrongful. He undertakes some unusual statistical acrobatics, as well, reaching back for four-year averages so that he can paint an unflattering picture when more recent stats would give an entirely different one -- by the end of the year that article was written, for instance, the Suffolk homicide conviction rate was higher than 90%.

Using national or general-urban statistics for comparison purposes is equally disingenuous. Any major city is going to have a higher crime rate when compared with the average of all cities, all suburbs, and all rural areas. Boston’s homicide rate compared to that of a similarly-sized city such as Baltimore, however, reveals a much lower one – 2.8 per 100,000 residents as opposed to 13.4. The author of the article knows this, of course, and I trust that you do, too, because he linked to it (http://www.fbi.gov/ucr/ucr.htm).

He also knows that the UCR counts solved murders from previous years against a city’s annual clearance rate, though he chooses to use the unorthodox one-year-only method when he computes his own numbers, allowing 364 days to clear a murder on Jan. 1 and only hours to clear a murder on Dec. 31.

For the most recent years in which final statistics are available, the same tables show an almost imperceptible decline in the homicide rate for nationwide cities in the same population group (the Group I subset) as Boston. During the same period, Boston experienced a drop of 11% -- an absolutely huge rate compared to the national numbers.

The author suggests that a low homicide arrest rate leads to a higher homicide rate. This year alone, we’ve made 14 arrests in 2009 cases – plus an additional 10 arrests in cases dating back to 1984 – and we’ve obtained convictions for an additional 21 homicides dating back to 1979 (I say “we” here because there’s a strong partnership among the police and prosecutors assigned to the DA’s and BPD’s homicide units). Each year that passes is a year in which multiple homicides from prior years are solved.
Wouldn’t the reciprocal corollary also be true, then, and suggest that our efforts thus far are at least having some effect on street violence along with the EMTs you credit?