Mass law enforcement misconduct news, July 6-12
Worcester settles class-action police brutality lawsuit, state corrections officers indicted for assault, and more
Hey folks, by the time you read this on Monday morning, I’ll be on vacation. I put this newsletter together on Saturday and may not have had time to update it on Sunday if any new stories were reported. If I missed anything, I’ll be sure to include it in the next one.
If you haven’t read it yet, check out my latest story about the Brian Peixoto case from July 8:
A Massachusetts man whose nearly 30-year-old murder conviction was thrown out in May is asking a justice of the state’s highest court to release him from jail after a lower-court judge ordered him held without bail—a decision his attorneys say could keep him behind bars for years while he continues fighting to clear his name.
Andrew Quemere
Police misconduct news
Here are the media reports of alleged law enforcement misconduct in Massachusetts that I’ve tracked during the last week.
State and local
- “Worcester city officials have settled a federal lawsuit stemming from a clash between police and a crowd following a peaceful George Floyd protest in 2020. The city and 11 individuals who were arrested during the clash agreed to a settlement, resulting in the termination of the case, according to a court filing. … In their lawsuit, the plaintiffs argued that the Worcester Police Department’s actions caused ‘gratuitous violence, false arrest and malicious prosecution on baseless criminal charges, theft or damage of cell phones, and in some cases racist slurs – all from officers under a duty to keep the peace.’” (MassLive) You can read more details about the lawsuit in Bill Shaner’s June 2023 story about it at Worcester Sucks.
- “The Karen Read murder case revealed that former Massachusetts State Police trooper Michael Proctor sent misogynistic text messages, but the full scope of bigotry remained in the shadows. That’s changing now, as more of his communications are appearing in recent legal filings in other cases. The ripple effects could be widespread. The newly released messages contain a host of racist slurs, hateful language, and abhorrent jokes that together raise significant questions about the integrity of Proctor’s criminal investigations, especially in cases involving people of color and other minorities. ” (Boston Globe; paywalled)
“‘You don’t just leave your racism at the courthouse doors,’ [Myles] King’s attorney Rosemary Scapicchio said in a phone interview. ‘This is an ingrained hatred of an entire race. … How in the world do you say it’s a valid investigation?’”
— Andrew Quemere (@andrewqmr.bsky.social) July 11, 2026 at 5:30 PM
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- “Attorneys for the Plymouth County Sheriff’s Office and the American Civil Liberties Union of Massachusetts sparred in court [on July 7] over whether the sheriff must release healthcare records related to immigrant detainees in his custody. … The Plymouth County Correctional Facility is the only longer-term immigrant detention facility in Massachusetts. … The sheriff’s denial [pf the records] relied on arguments about state privacy laws and questions around federal preemption of state law.” (New Bedford Light) It sounds like the sheriff’s office is making an argument quite similar to one that was already rejected by the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court in 2020. State agencies can’t withhold records just because they got them from the feds. I wrote about that ruling at the time here.
- “Many have wondered if the [unnamed Massachusetts state] trooper who was seen pummeling a fellow statie in a viral video at a bar would ever face any charges. … Now, the Herald has learned that Quincy Police are seeking charges. … Those who are accused of committing a crime and aren’t arrested [in Massachusetts] will be generally entitled to a show cause hearing. … The hearing is generally not open to the public.” (Boston Herald)
- “The New England Innocence Project on July 6 filed a lawsuit asking a judge to unseal records related to a drug case the Massachusetts Appeals Court recently overturned after the lead investigator, a Brockton police detective who was later promoted to lieutenant, made “materially false” statements when applying for a search warrant a decade ago.” (Mass Dump)
Andrew Quemere
- “Citizens for Juvenile Justice — and the rest of us — should soon learn more about the degree to which local sheriff’s departments have been cooperating with Immigration and Customs Enforcement, now that a Superior Court judge has granted CfJJ a preliminary injunction to remedy alleged violations of the state’s public records law.” (Mass Lawyers Weekly)
- “[Massachusetts State Police] Trooper Michael Gagnon, who has been held since April 10, was freed after a judge [on July 10] determined that the 90-day window for holding a defendant without trial had expired. Gagnon, who remains suspended from the State Police without pay, is facing a series of criminal charges that have unfolded over the past several months. His legal troubles began in November when he was arrested and charged with punching a 7-year-old child in the face.” (Boston 25 News)
- “Attorney General Andrea Campbell has indicted multiple [state] correction officers for allegedly beating two shackled murder convicts who had stabbed officers with homemade knives in 2024 at Souza-Baranowski Correctional Center in Lancaster.” (Telegram & Gazette)
- “As the clocks tick down to an early October trial date for the ex-Stoughton cop accused of grooming and murdering Sandra Birchmore, the lawyers are still arguing over the contours of the crime. Defense attorneys for Matthew Farwell said that despite heaps of discovery in the case, the government has filed to actually prove there is a crime that falls under federal — as opposed to a state —jurisdiction. They demand a ‘bill of particulars’ from government prosecutors to spell that out.” (Boston Herald)
I haven’t found any news reports about this story:
- The Massachusetts Peace Officer Standards and Training (POST) Commission on July 9 suspended the law-enforcement certification for former Springfield police officer Christian Vizcaya “in light of evidence that the [he] engaged or may have engaged in criminal conduct,” according to the suspension order. The document does not specify the nature of the alleged criminal conduct. The POST Commission’s online disciplinary database, which was last updated on July 2, does not list any sustained findings of misconduct against Vizcaya.
Federal
- I missed this one last week: “A local Navy veteran says Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers detained his father at gunpoint outside a Walmart in Halifax, Mass — and claims agents didn’t even know who they were when they approached.” (Boston 25 News)
- “Bristol County Sheriff Paul Heroux is accusing ICE Boston of trying to intimidate him through a social media post that criticized his office for not honoring a detainer request [which would violate state law].” (MassLive)
- “An East Boston landscaper who says he was pulled out of a company van and forced to stand for most of two days in an overcrowded room at ICE's Burlington garrison - and then released but without the $600 in cash he had had with him - [on July 8] sued the regime for violations of several of his Constitutional rights, and of ICE's own policies for how to treat people it's grabbed.” (Universal Hub) The details of this story are egregious.
Other news
ICE detaining increasing numbers people in Massachusetts since start of World Cup (GBH)
The past [June] in Massachusetts has been synonymous with World Cup fan festivals, cheering crowds and tourists from Scotland crowning statues with traffic cones. …
And yet beneath the surface, immigration lawyers and advocates say detentions have not only continued across Massachusetts since the World Cup started in early June — they’ve increased in frequency. …
There have been nearly 190 habeas [petition] filings [asking judges to free people from detention] in Massachusetts federal district court since the beginning of the World Cup matches, according to Habeas Dockets, a tracker run by the nonprofit Immigration Justice Transparency Initiative. Cases rose by 21% in June overall from the month before, going from 183 in May to 222.
Sarah Betancourt
Massachusetts to lose many Haitian healthcare workers to Trump admin’s Supreme Court-authorized ethnic cleansing campaign (GBH)
The federal government is giving employers two weeks notice about the termination of temporary protected status for Haitians following a Supreme Court ruling [in June]. …
About 1,500 workers will be impacted in Massachusetts nursing care facilities alone, according to the attorney general’s office.
The AG’s office put out a guidance to employers in late June, urging them not to preemptively lay workers off over their immigration status without further information about how the ruling would be executed. …
Regardless, some home and nursing care employers are doing so anyway.
Mass Supreme Judicial Court allows post-conviction testing of cell phones in man’s murder case (Universal Hub)
Even though it has already upheld Javaine Watson’s first-degree murder conviction for the murder of Romeo McCubbin on Havelock Street in Dorchester in 2013, the Supreme Judicial Court [on July 9] gave him and his lawyer permission to have “forensic testing” done of several phones seized after the murder in an attempt to make his case that he had nothing to do with the murder and that he was framed by one of the other three men who were also convicted - and that guy's allegedly lying girlfriend.
The ruling does not mean a new trial for Watson, but it lets him better build a possible second appeal that would let him argue for one.
ShotSpotter continues to not detect gunshots very well (New Bedford Light)
In the last five years, [ShotSpotter] has sent more than 700 alerts to [New Bedford] police. But officers were only able to confirm about 25% of those as shootings or shots-fired incidents, according to New Bedford’s police chief.
Something to understand about ShotSpotter is that it’s fake. Not the product obviously, but the technology. An AI-powered system that could parse audio to reliably determine when a gunshot had occurred would be great—but this technology does not exist! ShotSpotter is just marketing hype.
Why are ACLU, Common Cause, and Mass Newspaper Publishers Association endorsing bill that would limit auditor’s powers? (CommonWealth Beacon)
A question has been swirling around some corners of the reform-the-Legislature movement this month: Why did a trio of groups supporting greater transparency, some of whom have previously taken Beacon Hill to task for its closed-door ways, support legislation that crusading state Auditor Diana DiZoglio dubbed a “dumpster fire”? …
When House leaders announced plans for a controversial measure that would both curtail DiZoglio’s power to audit the Legislature and also subject lawmakers to public records requirements, they included statements of support from the ACLU of Massachusetts, the good-government group Common Cause, and the Massachusetts Newspaper Publishers Association. Those written comments focused only on the records portion of the bill, not the audit sections. …
Still, even if those groups have no position some of the ingredients that went into the legislative sausage, they did not stand in the way of the final product’s passage in the House, nor are they applying much pressure for something to change. None of the three would directly answer a CommonWealth Beacon question about whether they would prefer that the Senate, which must take up the proposal for it to become law, strip out any audit language and advance only a public records reform.
“‘We are never going to forget that his blood is on Donald Trump’s hands,’ Rep. Christian Menefee said. ‘We are not at war. Lorenzo Salgado Araujo was not a casualty. He was a human being who was murdered by our government.’”
— Andrew Quemere (@andrewqmr.bsky.social) July 11, 2026 at 6:19 PM
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New in PN with @juddlegum.bsky.social: How Kalshi infects the news "Since last December, both CNBC & CNN have promoted Kalshi to viewers extensively, frequently vouching for its accuracy. The existence of financial ties between the networks & Kalshi, however, is disclosed to viewers inconsistently"
— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar.com) July 6, 2026 at 7:59 AM
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Someone please adopt this beautiful baby.
— Andrew Quemere (@andrewqmr.bsky.social) July 11, 2026 at 4:30 PM
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