Wrongful Conviction Vacated After 40 Years

Quinn Emanuel represented Edward Wright in a case involving a wrongful murder conviction and obtained a vacated conviction after 40 years of imprisonment.

Mr. Wright was wrongfully convicted of the 1984 murder of his friend, Penny Anderson, in Springfield, Massachusetts. Mr. Wright had no motive to commit this crime, and the evidence against him was entirely circumstantial—consisting of recanted statements from biased witnesses and debunked forensic evidence.

Over the last 40 years, Mr. Wright has maintained his innocence and has never stopped fighting to overturn his wrongful conviction. Through five previous new trial motions, Mr. Wright presented evidence showing that the victim's ex-boyfriend committed this murder, including evidence that he threatened the victim the night she was murdered, lied about his alibi, attempted to sell a hunting knife the day after the victim's stabbing, and then confessed twice to having committed the murder. Nevertheless, justice eluded Mr. Wright as courts repeatedly denied his motions.

The firm took over Mr. Wright’s case five years ago. Together with co-counsel at the New England Innocence Project and Skadden Arps, we led a new investigation, uncovered new evidence, and developed new arguments. The years-long process culminated in a hundred-page new trial motion and a multi-day evidentiary hearing where we flipped the Commonwealth's two key witnesses.

Through the motion and hearing, we showed that:

1. the Commonwealth had withheld exculpatory evidence from Mr. Wright for 36 years, including a police report demonstrating that the victim's ex-boyfriend broke into her apartment the day after her murder and contaminated key evidence while it was an active crime scene;
2. a police officer and key witness for the Commonwealth knowingly and deliberately gave false testimony at Mr. Wright’s trial;
3. new DNA testing excluded Eddie from key evidence connected to the murder;
4. forensic experts confirmed the unreliability of evidence presented against Mr. Wright at his trial; and
5. every Black male juror was excluded from sitting on the jury and the prosecution repeatedly played up racial stereotypes at trial, factors known to increase the risk of wrongful conviction.

In overturning Mr. Wright’s conviction, Hampden County Superior Court Judge Jeremy Bucci emphasized that the Commonwealth's key witness—a police officer who was flipped at the evidentiary hearing—gave "blatantly false testimony on [a] key aspect of the prosecution's case" that "was intentional and was reasonably likely to have affected the jury's judgment."