Former Boston cop seeks last-minute reprieve

By Jim Smith

BOSTON — In a last-ditch effort to keep their client out of federal prison, lawyers for former Boston cop Ken Conley filed petitions last week for a rehearing and a stay of his 34-month sentence, which a federal appeals court upheld earlier this month.

As reported in the Echo last week, Conley’s motion for a new trial on a perjury conviction was allowed last June by U.S. District Court Judge Robert Keeton, who had found numerous "conflicts and contradictions" in the record, along with "newly discovered evidence that could exonerate Conley. Federal prosecutors appealed Keeton’s ruling last July, and a three-member appeals court ruled two weeks ago that Keeton applied an incorrect legal standard in granting the motion for a new trial. It ordered that the sentence be executed.

Conley was convicted of perjury in 1998 after he testified that he had not seen Michael Cox, a black police officer in plain clothes, moments before Cox was brutally beaten by other officers who mistook him for a fleeing murder suspect. In a civil trial later in 1998, Conley was exonerated of having participated in the beating. Three officers were found liable by that civil jury of either beating or abandoning Cox at the scene, but none of them was ever criminally charged.

Conley’s supporters believe that the Irish-American cop from South Boston is a scapegoat who was targeted by federal prosecutors frustrated with the blue wall of silence that surrounded the case for more than two years.

In his petition for a rehearing filed last week, Conley’s chief counsel, Willie Davis, argues that Judge Keeton determined that Conley’s guilty verdict "was not worthy of confidence" because of "his review of documents withheld from the defendant." Keeton had concluded that a new trial was warranted "in the interest of justice."

Besides seeking a rehearing, Conley is seeking a stay of the execution of the prison sentence while his lawyers prepare a petition to the U.S. Supreme Court.