The Boston Globe, March 2025
In 1982, after a deadly fire in Lowell, police told Victor Rosario that a witness placed him at the scene just before the blaze ignited, and he was later convicted of arson and murder. In 2002, State Police told Erasmo Gutierrez that a witness had seen a man who looked like him enter a room shortly before a fire erupted at a Peabody hotel. He was also found guilty. And in 2008, Worcester officers told 16-year-old Nga Truong they had scientific evidence that she had killed her brother and infant son, leading to a confession that was later determined to be coerced.
In all those cases, the interrogators lied, according to defense advocates. And each time, the suspects were pressured into giving confessions that courts later found to be false. Rosario spent 32 years in prison before his exoneration in 2017and Gutierrez was cleared in 2022, two decades after the fire.
