Boston pays $12 million settlement to man freed from prison amid revelations of police misconduct

The city agreed to pay $12 million to settle the case in October 2024, according to a copy of the settlement the Globe obtained through a public records request. The agreement was not publicly announced at the time and has not previously been reported.

“Shaun Jenkins spent nearly two decades imprisoned for a crime he did not commit because of extraordinary misconduct by the BPD,” Nick Brustin and Katie McCarthy, attorneys for Jenkins, said in a statement Thursday. “The City’s settlement demonstrates it knew it faced much greater liability if the case went to trial.”

A spokesperson for the Boston Police Department did not return requests for comment. Mayor Michelle Wu’s office declined to comment.

“It’s a terrible miscarriage of justice, and I hope a settlement like this can feel like some level of fairness or making whole for Mr. Jenkins and his family,” said Joshua Dankoff, a member of the Office of Police Accountability and Transparency’s civilian review board.

Howard Friedman, a Boston attorney who has handled police misconduct cases for decades, said they can sometimes lead to huge payouts, including one he worked on in which the federal government was ordered to pay more than $100 million for the wrongful murder conviction of four men as a result of FBI misconduct.

That potential can often give cities and departments motivation to settle a case before it reaches a judge or jury. Settlements can also offer finality for police misconduct victims, particularly those who have suffered for years behind bars, he said.

“You lose everything, [you] lose contact with your friends and family, you lose the ability to control every aspect of your life,” Friedman said. “Nothing obviously can replace the years that [Jenkins] lost, but now he’ll have enough money to live comfortably.”

A judge’s move to vacate Jenkins’s conviction was part of a wave of overturned verdicts due to misconduct by Boston police detectives. In 2023, the Globe reported that the city two years earlier had quietly reached a $16 million settlement for wrongdoing by the Police Department with Sean Ellis, which at the time was the largest single legal payout the city had made in recent years, according to figures the Globe obtained through a public records request.

Ellis had served 22 years in prison before his murder conviction was eventually overturned in a protracted case that later was the focus of a Netflix docuseries.

The same year the city settled with Ellis, Boston paid another $4 million to James Watson — who spent more than 40 years in prison after being wrongfully convicted in 1984 of killing Boston cab driver Jeffrey S. Boyajian.

Frederick Clay was wrongfully convicted in that same case and spent 38 years behind bars. The city agreed to pay Clay $3.1 million in 2020.

Of the $39 million the city paid in 970 legal settlements from 2020 to 2022, the vast majority — $31 million — involved police, according to a Globe review from 2023.

Jenkins sued the city three years ago, alleging he was falsely arrested and wrongfully convicted.

Jenkins was convicted in 2005 and sentenced to life in prison for the fatal shooting of his cousin, Stephen Jenkins, in Dorchester in 2001. There were no witnesses to the killing, and Shaun Jenkins had maintained his innocence.

No physical evidence tied him to the scene, and no one testified that Shaun Jenkins, who lived in Fall River, was anywhere near Dorchester at the time of the crime, according to his attorney.

Jenkins served almost two decades in prison after losing several appeals. But his attorneys eventually took the case to then-Suffolk District Attorney Rachael Rollins’ Integrity Review Bureau, which investigated claims of wrongful convictions. That’s when his lawyer discovered previously withheld documents in the prosecution’s case file.

One said that a detective paid a reluctant witness $100 a day before the witness was scheduled to provide grand jury testimony.

The records also show that the prosecutor in the 2005 case knew that an alleged drug dealer was a potential suspect in the killing.

Also, according to the federal lawsuit, investigators knew that Stephen Jenkins, the victim, had lost a stash of crack cocaine and owed his drug supplier $3,000. But investigators never seriously investigated the supplier, who later died of an overdose.

Prosecutors in the 2005 case also withheld cellphone records that showed the victim was in repeated contact with the drug supplier on the day of his killing, including a phone call minutes before the shooting. The victim’s body was found in the driver’s seat of a running car, less than two blocks from the supplier’s house in Dorchester.

The revelations and dismantling of the case in 2021 led to Jenkins’s release from prison. Prosecutors later dropped the murder charge against him.

Shea Cronin, a criminal justice professor at Boston University who specializes in police reform and accountability, said there can sometimes be a gray area when it comes to police misconduct, particularly in use of force cases when officers are making split-second decisions. That’s not the case in the Jenkins’s investigation, he said, calling it “outright misconduct.”

The two prosecutors involved in the 2001 case and 2005 trial were referred for discipline in 2024, but the Massachusetts Board of Bar Overseers in January found neither violated any rules and dismissed the push for disciplinary action.

Andrew Ryan and Danny McDonald of the Globe staff contributed to this report.

Niki Griswold can be reached at [email protected]. Follow her @nikigriswold.