A federal judge in Boston has ordered the government to pay the legal fees of four men wrongly convicted of a 1965 mob murder, Tickle the Wire reported.
U.S. District Judge Nancy Gertner ordered the government to cover the $700,000 legal expenses of Peter Limone, Enrico Tamelo, Louis Greco and Joseph Salvati, denouncing the government as having acted in “bad faith” and describing the conviction as a result of “secrecy gone awry.” The ruling follows a 2007 lawsuit that resulted in the government paying $101 million to the four men and their families.
The men were initially exonerated 30 years after their convictions, when a Justice Department investigation in Boston unearthed documents that proved that the FBI had framed the men. Included in the evidence was a report that revealed an FBI informant at the center of the prosecution’s case had named others allegedly responsible for the killing of Edward “Teddy” Deegan.
In 2001, the murder sentences of all four men were vacated. By then, Tamelo and Greco had already died in prison, and Limone was released after spending 33 years behind bars. Salvati had been paroled after serving a 30 year sentence. He was the only one not initially sentenced to die by electrocution before Massachusetts banned capital punishment.
In issuing her ruling ordering the government to cover the legal fees of the men, Judge Gertner blasted the FBI.
“The record revealed FBI agents ‘hiding the ball,’ not disclosing critical exculpatory information in the Deegan murder case for nearly forty years, information that would have exonerated the plaintiffs,” she remarked.
