City of Braintree sues a number of insurance coverage carriers for protection for wrongful conviction declare by man framed by Bulger
On Might 24, 2024, the City of Braintree filed a lawsuit in Suffolk County Superior Courtroom towards fifteen insurers, in addition to insurance coverage firms Does 1 although 50, for refusing to defend and indemnify it in a large wrongful conviction lawsuit.
The City alleges that the insurers have every both refused to acknowledge or outright denied their contractual obligations underneath legal responsibility insurance policies issued to the City over the course of almost 4 a long time for claims that the City is chargeable for the wrongful conviction and 36 yr imprisonment of Frederick Weichel. Weichel has sued the City in federal court docket and has demanded tens of hundreds of thousands of {dollars} in damages.
The criticism summarizes Weichel’s allegations: In 1980, Robert LaMonica was murdered within the City. The City police investigated. A composite sketch from particulars supplied by a witness bore a likeness to a convicted assassin named Rocco Balliro, who had didn’t return from a jail furlough. A police report, the “Leahy report,” containing this data was saved by the city in a “Basement Archive” and was not turned over to the prosecutors, Mr. Weichel, or Mr. Weichel’s protection counsel.
Mr. Weichel was convicted of the homicide in 1981. He alleges that if the Leahy report had been produced he wouldn’t have been convicted. He was sentenced to life with out the potential of parole, and spent over 36 years in jail. In 2017, after he obtained the Leahy Report and moved for a brand new trial, he was launched and all costs towards him had been dropped. In a 2018 lawsuit towards the Commonwealth, a jury discovered that Mr. Weichel had been harmless of the homicide.
Mr. Weichel sued the City, alleging that it had a unbroken obligation to reveal disculpatory proof all through the whole interval between 1980 and 2017, and that it was intentionally detached to, and breached, that obligation all through his incarceration. He alleges that he suffered bodily harm and private harm throughout every year of his incarceration.
Throughout these years the defendant insurers had issued regulation enforcement, normal legal responsibility, and umbrella insurance policies to the City. Many of the insurers have refused to defend and indemnify the City. In line with the criticism, a number of the insurers have asserted that the occasions that led to Mr. Weichel’s harm befell in 1980, and subsequently the one relevant insurance coverage protection can be a 1980 coverage.
The City asserts that the Weichel lawsuit is a “paradigmatic instance of the claims that the City’s legal responsibility insurance policies had been supposed to guard it towards: a swimsuit looking for tens of hundreds of thousands of {dollars} in damages, introduced towards the City by a person who accuses the City, its law enforcement officials, and its different managers and officers, of being answerable for his bodily harm and private harm foreseeably ensuing from him having spent thirty-six years in jail for a criminal offense he didn’t commit.”
It’s attention-grabbing that the criticism (in addition to Weichel’s criticism in federal court docket) doesn’t point out his declare that he was framed by Whitey Bulger.
Nina E. Kallen
Legal professional at Regulation
Nina Kallen has over twenty years of profitable expertise in civil litigation. She represents each plaintiffs and defendants in state and federal courts all through Massachusetts. She has a selected experience in insurance coverage protection points and represents insurers and insureds in protection and dangerous religion disputes. She has an award-winning weblog referred to as Insurance Coverage Law in Massachusetts.
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