COURTESY PHOTO
Angel Echavarria.
BY THOMAS GRILLO
LYNN — A man who spent more than two decades in prison for a murder he denied committing has sued the city of Lynn.
Angel Echavarria, 49, filed suit in U.S. District Court Wednesday seeking unspecified damages. He alleges that the Lynn and State Police officers who investigated the 1994 shooting death of Daniel Rodriguez fabricated and suppressed evidence, and framed Echavarria.
“We think it will be very hard for law enforcement to beat back the allegations,” said Steven Art, the Chicago-based attorney from Loevy & Loevy who is representing Echavarria.
The lawsuit is seeking unspecified damages. Typically, juries compensate an innocent person who has been wrongfully convicted from $1 million a year times the number of years served to $4 million annually. In Massachusetts, anyone whose conviction has been overturned can collect up to $500,000 in state money. A decision has not been made on his state claim.
Echavarria was convicted of the Lynn murder in 1996 and sentenced to life in prison. Last year, Superior Court Judge David Lowy overturned the conviction. In the ruling, the judge noted that the eyewitness evidence against Echavarria was questionable. The commonwealth later dropped all charges.
Echavarria, who now lives in Florida and was unavailable for comment, was freed last year based on the investigative work of the Schuster Institute for Investigative Journalism at Brandeis University.
The lawsuit alleges that former Lynn and Massachusetts State Police officers fabricated false eyewitness identifications and false witness statements used to implicate Echavarria in a crime he did not commit. In addition, these police officers allegedly suppressed evidence that a key eyewitness had unequivocally identified another man as the perpetrator of the crime, a man who the police officers had arrested for a similar shooting weeks earlier. Instead of investigating the actual perpetrators of the murder, the officers named in this lawsuit framed Echavarria for something he had not done, the suit said.
No physical evidence ever connected Echavarria to the crimes, according to the 30-page complaint. Eyewitness descriptions of the perpetrators did not match Echavarria who had a “solid alibi” on the night of the crime, his lawyer said.
Michael Barry, Lynn’s city attorney, did not return a call seeking comment.
Thomas Grillo can be reached at [email protected]
