Brockton Sued By Man Wrongfully Imprisoned For 32 Years

BROCKTON, MA — A man who spent 32 years in prison for a 1985 murder he did not commit is suing the city of Brockton, its police department and nearly 20 former police officers.

Darrell Jones filed his civil lawsuit in federal court in December. In a 2019 retrial, a jury found Jones not guilty after just two hours of deliberation. The new trial was ordered after a judge ruled a key piece of evidence in the original trial had been doctored.

"Defendants, in falsely arresting and initiating the prosecution of Jones without probable cause and with malice, engaged in a continuous pattern of extreme and outrageous conduct directed at Jones from the time of Jones’ false arrest on November 17, 1985 until at least his acquittal after the Commonwealth retried him in June 2019," Jones's complaint said.

Jones was with friends and eating a sandwich in Pete & Mary's around 10:30 on Nov. 11, 1985 when Guillermo Rodrigues was shot in the parking lot of a D'Angelo's sandwich shop across the street. Rodrigues died from his injuries on Nov. 14. Jones, who was 18 at the time, was arrested a week after the shooting.

The two Brockton police officers who initially responded to the call interviewed witnesses but did not talk with Jones, who did not fit the description of the shooter given at the scene. Jones was only arrested after a confidential informant who was not at the scene of the shooting told police that Rodrigues had been shot by a man named "Diamond," a street name police said Jones had used.

"Within the first 24 hours of the investigation,[two witnesses] spoke to Jones, saw him in a show-up procedure, and saw his picture in a photographic array, but neither identified him as the shooter," the complaint said. "Nevertheless, the BPD forged ahead, continuing to treat Jones as the prime suspect."

The complaint also accuses former Brockton police detective Joseph Smith of falsely saying "several persons observed the defendant exit the bar with the deceased" in his application for complaint, even though none of the witnesses he interviewed could positively identify Jones. The complaint also accuses Smith of threatening a witness with outstanding warrants to get her to implicate Jones and erasing portions of her videotaped interview on purpose.

"The identification procedure captured in the video is a farce," the complaint says of the interview with Terri Starks. "Not only did the police tell Starks the night before the interview that they had already arrested Jones for the shooting, but before Detective Smith ever turned on the VHS recorder, he and Detective LaGarde presented the array to Starks to be sure that she would pick out Jones’ picture."

The complaint claims the outstanding warrants against Starks were cleared "after she provided police with the evidence they needed to press ahead with their misguided case against Jones." At the 1986 trial, none of the witnesses, including Starks, were able to positively identify Jones.

"I can't be 100 percent positive," Starks testified. Another witness testified Smith had forced her to pick Jones's picture out of a photo array of suspects.

"Without eyewitness testimony, physical evidence, or a motive, the Commonwealth’s case came to rely heavily—if not entirely—on the testimony of the BPD officers involved in the reckless and biased “investigation” that led to Jones’ wrongful arrest and prosecution," the lawsuit says. "Rather than testify truthfully about that investigation, however, [the investigators] provided false testimony to conceal evidence of the BPD’s wrongdoing and to carry out its goal of implicating Jones in the shooting."

The defendants have until March 18 to file their response to the complaint.

Dave Copeland writes for Patch. He can be reached at 617-433-7851 or dave.copeland@patch.com.