(Unbelievable) Worcester is suing atty. Ed Ryan Jr. who represented then 16 yr. old Nga Truong.
Worcester, MA - It's hard to come up with a truly novel defense for having coerced a confession and put an innocent 16-year-old in jail for three years, but Worcester managed to pull it off.
The lawyer for a woman suing the city alleging a host of civil rights violations has, in an unusual legal turn of events, himself become a defendant in the civil case he filed.
In answering the lawsuit brought late last year by Nga Truong, who was charged by Worcester Police with killing her infant son four years ago based on what was later ruled to be a coerced confession, city lawyers have hit back with a third-party complaint against her lawyer, Edward P. Ryan Jr.
Her lawyer? Yes, her lawyer.
The city's complaint in federal court claims that if Ms. Truong is entitled to damages for the nearly three years she spent in jail awaiting trial, then Mr. Ryan is as much to blame as the city because he took too long to get the coerced confession tossed out of court by the judge.
“Ryan's breach of his duty was a direct and proximate cause of plaintiff's alleged injuries and damages,” according to the city's claim.
It was all the lawyer's fault for not beating the coerced confession quicker. Because everybody knows that coerced confessions are what cops do, so that certainly couldn't have been the cause of the three years Ms. Truong lost. If her lawyer had just beat the confession sooner, should could have been out in minutes. Hours at the longest. Darn lawyer.
It appears that the defense motion to suppress the coerced confession wasn't filed until almost two years after the arrest. While taking two years to file papers is, in a vacuum, a very long time, it fails to address why it took that long. Certainly the argument isn't that the lawyer should have done shoddy work to get it in quickly. Given the merit of the argument (based upon the fact that the motion was granted), no doubt Ryan put in the time and work to do it properly. Still, two years?
Nonetheless, the time it took to undo the damage of a coerced confession in no way alters the cause of the defendant's detention, and to suggest otherwise is utterly absurd.
“Her lawyer allowed almost two years to pass before he made a motion to get her released by suppressing her confession. While there are numerous defenses in this case, our position on this point is that, if the city is somehow found liable for the excessive incarceration, then the lawyer who represented her also bears liability for her time in jail,” [City Solicitor David M.] Moore said.
Legal observer David E. Frank, a lawyer and managing editor of Massachusetts Lawyers Weekly, called the city's effort to include the lawyer who got her released from prison in any damages resulting from her confinement an unusual one.
http://blog.simplejustice.us/2013/02/28/when-cops-do-wrong-blame-the-lawyer.aspx
http://www.telegram.com/article/20130227/NEWS/102279884/1003/NEWS03
For more about this case read:
Anatomy of a bad confession, Part 1:
http://www.wbur.org/2011/12/07/worcester-coerced-confession-i
Anatomy of a bad confession, Part 2:
http://www.wbur.org/2011/12/08/worcester-coerced-confession-ii
Frontline also did a series on confessions:
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/the-confessions/