for BigTrial.net
The Philadelphia District Attorney's office, attempting to explain away damaging allegations of prosecutorial misconduct made by one of their own, today advanced the novel theory in court that Detective Joe Walsh was a rogue cop.
It happened at a status hearing this morning in front of Judge Ellen Ceisler. The 90-minute hearing was called by the judge to determine whether former schoolteacher Bernard Shero should be granted a new trial. Let's cut to the chase: he should. Because four years ago, Shero was unjustly convicted and sent to jail for the imaginary rape of lying altar boy "Billy Doe," AKA Danny Gallagher, the D.A.'s former star witness who has since been revealed to be a fraud.
If there was any "justice" in the criminal justice system, they'd let Shero out of jail yesterday. But the wheels of the justice system turn slowly. And they were spinning in reverse today when Assistant District Attorney Patrick Blessington asserted that the D.A.'s office would challenge Detective Walsh at a future June 23 hearing, when Walsh is expected to testify on behalf of Shero's bid for a new trial, because Walsh's "credibility is suspect," Blessington said.
The assistant district attorney asserted that back in 2011 and 2012, when Walsh was out interviewing nuns, priests and teachers at St. Jerome's Church, the Northeast Philly parish where Gallagher falsely claimed he was viciously raped three times, "He [Walsh] did that on his own," Blessington said.
Courtroom spectators burst out laughing, but the judge was incredulous.
"He did that on his own," the judge repeated. Mr. Blessington, the judge said, are you telling me that during the district attorney's investigation of the crimes alleged by Danny Gallagher, Detective Walsh was acting on his own?
"I don't understand that," the judge said.
But Blessington didn't back down.
Walsh was acting on his own, Blessington continued to assert, when the detective was out interviewing all those witnesses who contradicted Danny Gallagher's cockamamie stories of abuse.
Those witnesses that Walsh interviewed who contradicted Danny Gallagher included members of Gallagher's own family, such as his mother, older brother, and father.
Next, Blessington brought up former Assistant District Attorney Mariana Sorensen, the lead prosecutor in the case. According to Detective Walsh, he repeatedly told Sorensen that Danny Gallagher wasn't a credible witness, and she replied, "You're killing my case."
Pretty damaging stuff. But in ADA Blessington's version of the story, Walsh was insubordinate to Sorensen.
"She asked him [Walsh] to do things that he didn't do," Blessington claimed.
Blessington did not say what those things might be. He has two weeks to dream something up.
Meanwhile, here's a suggestion for Shero's defense lawyers on how to handle Blessington's tall tale.
From 2002 to 2005, Walsh, a decorated former homicide detective, was assigned to the district attorney's office as the lead investigator when the D.A. was investigating sex abuse in the Archdiocese of Philadelphia.
Walsh became the D.A.'s expert on the archdiocese's so-called secret archive files, 45,000 pages that chronicled decades of sexual misdeeds committed by some 160 priests in the archdiocese against hundreds of innocent children. Then, Walsh retired in 2005.
In October 2011, First Assistant District Attorney Ed McCann called Walsh and asked if he would be interested in coming back to work as a contractor to help prosecute three priests and a schoolteacher accused in the Danny Gallagher case.
At the 2012 trial of Msgr. William J. Lynn, Walsh, as the D.A.'s expert witness, was on the witness stand for 19 straight days, testifying for nearly 100 hours.
If Walsh, the D.A.'s expert witness, suddenly went rogue, he was a contract employee. On any given day that Walsh allegedly interviewed a witness he wasn't supposed to, or he didn't follow an order from ADA Soresnen --- a rookie courtroom warrior who had never previously prosecuted a traffic stop -- the veteran decorated detective could have been fired on the spot.
But he wasn't. So that proves Blessington's rogue cop theory is a bunch of BS.
But that wasn't the only BS flying around the courtroom today.
Both the judge and ADA Blessington asserted that before the trial of Father Engelhardt and Bernard Shero, Walsh that rogue cop was allegedly "feeding" information to Mike McGovern, the lawyer who represented Father Engelhardt.
I happen to know from a variety of sources that this isn't true. Walsh never spoke to McGovern until after the Engelhardt-Shero trial was over, and both defendants had been unjustly convicted. Walsh called McGovern to ask what the hell happened.
If Walsh was feeding McGovern, McGovern would have continued to cross-examine Danny Gallagher about many factual discrepancies in his stories -- discrepancies laid out in Walsh's recent 12-page affidavit -- until the cows came home.
If Walsh was feeding McGovern, Engelhardt and Shero would have been acquitted.
At today's hearing, there was much arguing over precisely what Judge Gwendolyn Bright had found to be prosecutorial misconduct when she presided over the retrial of the Msgr. Lynn case, where her pretrial rulings are now being appealed by both sides.
Judge Ceisler tried to clarify things by telling both sets of lawyers that she had called Judge Bright for clarification. And that Judge Bright had said that the prosecutorial misconduct she found was Detective Walsh's continued interrogation of Danny Gallagher, which supposedly went on for three hours. That involved Walsh questioning Gallagher about nine different factual contradictions in his crazy stories, and Gallagher responding by either saying nothing, claiming he was high on drugs, or telling a new story.
According to Judge Ceisler, the prosecutorial misconduct Judge Bright found did not include ADA Sorensen telling Walsh, "You're killing my case."
On his end, ADA Blessington argued that what Walsh was doing when he was grilling Danny Gallagher amounted to "trial prep."
"If there's a violation," Blessington said about the allegations of prosecutorial misconduct made by Walsh, "he's the violator," Blessington said about Detective Walsh.
George Bochetto, representing Shero, told the judge that in the Lynn retrial, Judge Bright was dealing with "the same exact detective, the same exact accuser, the same body of facts."
If Judge Bright found prosecutorial misconduct in the Lynn case serious enough to warrant a new trial, shouldn't Judge Ceisler in the Shero case also grant a new trial?
In the criminal justice system, Bochetto argued, defendants facing the same accuser, and the same set of facts deserve "equal justice."
If Detective Walsh was a bad actor, Bochetto pointed out, he's still a member of the prosecution team. And if there is any misconduct, the prosecution is stuck with it.
"How do any of us participate in that," Bochetto said from the defense table, about the misconduct in the case.
Bochetto also asserted that the grilling that Detective Walsh gave Danny Gallagher for three hours "was not trial prep." It was an attempt to "assemble evidence" and "build the prosecution case," Bochetto said.
But the prosecution "improperly withheld a lot of that evidence," Bochetto said. "This is wrong."
"This is their investigator," Bochetto said about Walsh. And so when it comes to the "type of shenanigans" that went on in this case, that's on them, Bochetto said of the prosecution.
On her part, Judge Ceisler conceded that Danny Gallagher's stories of abuse were "wildly inconsistent," and that she thought the prosecution had a difficult case.
Ceisler then bore in on Blessington regarding several factual discrepancies in Gallagher's stories that were detailed in Walsh's 12-page affidavit filed last month in court.
Danny Gallagher had claimed that he was raped by Father Engelhardt at an early morning 6:15 a.m. Mass at St. Jerome's in December, 1998. Was it true, the judge repeatedly demanded of ADA Blessington, that Gallagher's mother kept meticulous monthly calendars, and those calendars never mentioned a 6:15 a.m. Mass?
If it was true, Judge Ceisler told Blessington, then the Commonwealth's case was over right there.
Here, Blessington did some tap-dancing, claiming that Danny Gallagher's mother wrote some kind of a note on one of the calendars, saying that a 6:15 Mass where Danny's older brother James was scheduled to serve at, must have been served by little Danny.
But here we come to a dirty little secret of the Engelhardt-Shero trial.
When Sheila Gallagher took the witness stand, the defense attempted to question her about what those calendars said.
Only the prosecution had pulled the old switcheroo. That's right, instead of entering Sheila Gallagher's 1998 calendars as evidence in the case, the prosecutors entered Sheila Gallagher's 1999 calendars. And the note Blessington was referring to was written in a female's handwriting on a July 1999 calendar.
Not the December 1998 calendar.
From the bench, the judge said she was shocked that the defense lawyers didn't ask more questions during the Engelhardt-Shero trial.
About the calendars. About whether Danny Gallagher walked to that 6:15 Mass where he was allegedly raped in the dead of winter, as Danny Gallagher had claimed to Detective Walsh.
Or was Danny Gallagher and his older brother routinely driven to and from Mass by their parents, as Gallagher's older brother told Detective Walsh. Even though the family lived less than a mile from the church.
The other detail the judge was upset about concerned a schedule of Masses at the church. Danny Gallagher had claimed that after he was raped by the two priests, whenever he noticed on the Mass schedule that he was supposed to serve a Mass with either priest, he would switch services with another altar boy.
But the priests at St. Jerome's told Detective Walsh that Danny Gallagher could have never known which priest was serving at what Mass, because there was a weekly schedule kept in the rectory, where Gallagher had no access to.
"That never came out at trial," the judge said about the Mass schedule. "That was shocking to me."
What might also shock the judge was another dirty trick that the prosecution pulled at the Engelhardt-Shero trial.
During his closing statement, Assistant District Attorney Mark Cipolletti devoted more time to attacking the credibility of Louise Hagner, a social worker for the archdiocese, than any other witness.
That's because Hagner was the person who was taking notes when Danny Gallagher first told his fantastic tales of abuse by three alleged assailants.
In his first stories, Gallagher had claimed he was anally raped, beaten into unconsciousness, strangled with a set belt, tied up naked with altar sashes, threatened with death, and forced to suck blood of the penis of one of the priests who raped him.
Then, Gallagher dropped every one of those details when he told a new story of abuse to the police and the grand jury. This time, Gallagher claimed he'd been forced to perform a strip tease and engage in oral sex and mutual masturbation with his three assailants.
But Gallagher claimed he was high on drugs when he told those stories, and ADA Cipolletti claimed that Hagner couldn't be trusted.
"She couldn't keep track of her own lies," Cipolletti said about Hagner, as he argued that she had no credibility.
But Cipoletti knew better.
Before the Engelhardt-Shero trial, Cipolletti and another prosecutor, Evangelia Manos, had interviewed Judy Cruz-Ransom. She was a second archdiocese social worker who was in a car with Hagner the day Danny Gallagher voluntarily got in and told those wild stories of abuse.
Cipolletti and Manos had interviewed Cruz-Ransom before the trial, and knew that she had corroborated every detail of Hagner's story. Including the details that Gallagher had appeared sober and seemed to be fake crying when he told the social workers his violent and crazy stories of abuse.
But the prosecutors never told the defense about their interview with Cruz-Ransom. It was disclosed in a civil case where Danny Gallagher sued the Archdiocese of Philadelphia for damages, and Cruz-Ransom was deposed.
And, as demonstrated by ADA Blessington today, the D.A.'s office under Rufus Seth Williams continues to keep pulling dirty tricks, such as asserting that Detective Walsh was a rogue cop.
While Bernie Shero rots away in prison.
"My guy's still sitting in jail," Bochetto complained during today's hearing. While the lawyers continued to argue the finer points of the law.
Let's have another trial, Bochetto said, but this time, let's make it a fair trial.
Before Shero "dies in jail," Bochetto said.
That was the fate of Shero's co-defendant, Father Charles Engelhardt, who died in prison in 2014.
His dying declaration, as made to a fellow prisoner: "I am an innocent man, who was wrongly convicted."
Let's hope and pray that Bernie Shero is more fortunate.