Freedom Fighters 

WHEN FIREFIGHTERS ARRIVED at 102 Belair Street in Brockton, Massachusetts, in the predawn hours of April 17, 2003, they observed two teenagers poking their heads out of second-floor windows. One of the teens was 17-year-old Frances Choy, who, awakened by her mother’s scream of “Frances, there’s a fire!” had called 911 on her cell phone. The other was Kenneth Choy, Frances’s 16-year-old nephew. Inside the house, a fire was burning with such intensity that it had melted wall fixtures, and thick smoke had trapped Frances, Kenneth, and Frances’s parents—Jimmy and Anne Choy—in their bedrooms.

Anne Choy would be pronounced dead later that morning at Good Samaritan Hospital, but as a headline in the next day’s Boston Globe made clear, things could have been much worse: “Police Say Teen’s Call about Fire Saved Three Lives.” (Jimmy Choy would eventually also die as a result of the fire.) On the day after that, however, a different narrative began to emerge. The Plymouth County District Attorney’s Office alleged that Frances and Kenneth had actually been the ones who started the fire, conspiring to murder the elder Choys by burning down the house.

Kenneth Choy had come from Hong Kong to live with the Choys when he was 13, following the suicide of his father, who was Jimmy’s son. After the fire, investigators searched his bedroom and found instructions he’d written about how to burn down the house, including dousing areas of it with gasoline. But he told police that it was Frances who was behind the fire, because she “wanted better parents.” He claimed that his aunt had grown exasperated with his refusals to set the blaze, so had done it herself. Both teenagers were ultimately charged with two counts of first-degree murder.

Frances, a quiet and gentle rule-follower who’d never been in trouble and was working her way toward college, was a most unlikely suspect. Yet prosecutors built their case around the idea that she was actually a cold and manipulative mastermind who’d orchestrated the plot to kill her parents. At two different trials, the prosecution was unable to convince deadlocked juries of Frances’s guilt, but the third time was the charm. In 2011, eight years after the fire, a jury found her guilty. She was given a mandatory life sentence without the possibility of parole. But here’s the thing: She was innocent.

In Massachusetts, a first-degree murder conviction triggers an automatic appeal to the Supreme Judicial Court. Any appeal is an uphill climb, a long and complicated process with a narrow chance of success. An appeal of a murder conviction is an uphill climb into hurricane headwinds. This is true regardless of whether the defendant happens to have been wrongfully convicted. In Frances’s case, there were transcripts from her three trials to pore over, police and fire investigation reports, state police crime lab reports, photographs, and witness interviews. The task of gathering and sifting through all of this for Frances’s appeal fell to the Boston attorney John J. Barter, a solo practitioner working out of a four-story brick-and-stone building in the North End, whom the court appointed to the case. As Barter continued to examine the files, it became clear to him that Frances had been scapegoated. That she was, in fact, not guilty. To help prove that in a court of law, Barter eventually sought the help of the Boston College Innocence Program.

SINCE 1989, MORE THAN 2,700 PEOPLE in the country have been exonerated after being wrongfully convicted of felony crimes—an average of nearly 90 a year. Collectively, they served more than 24,600 years in prison. These are just the cases that we know about, the ones that garnered headlines and TV news coverage of exonerees who, after spending decades behind bars, walked through prison gates and collapsed into the arms of loved ones.

IN THE HOURS AFTER THE FIRE, investigators questioned both Frances and Kenneth at the Brockton hospital where they were treated for smoke inhalation. That evening, police then questioned the two surviving Choys yet again, this time at police headquarters. No audio or video recordings were made of the interrogations. This, a Brockton police detective would later testify, was because the station wasn’t equipped to record interviews. Officers would also testify that they’d destroyed their notes after preparing their typed reports.

SHARON BECKMAN GREW UP IN ILLINOIS, the daughter of a plumber and a stay-at-home mom, and her childhood was the kind that politicians evoke when they want to harken back to simpler times. Beckman’s passion was competitive swimming (she would one day swim nonstop across the English Channel), and as a young girl she believed that being a swim coach was her calling. But after reading To Kill a Mockingbird—the American classic of a small-town attorney in Alabama who represents a Black man wrongly accused of rape—her life was on a different trajectory. She would be a criminal defense attorney. The book was a “complete moral awakening for me of the realities of life in America,” Beckman said. “The idea that an innocent person could be wrongly convicted and sentenced to death because of the color of his skin literally shocked me to my core. It was not a thing I had ever thought about before. That was my white privilege.”

AFTER FRANCES CHOY WAS CONVICTED in 2011, the court appointed her case to John Barter for appeal. For help, he turned to a friend and colleague, Sharon Beckman. “I’m representing a client who’s innocent,” he told her. Beckman and Whitmore reviewed the case and promptly agreed to join as co-counsel in 2017. (The BCIP is very selective about the cases it accepts. Whitmore estimated that it declines more than 90 percent of the time.)

In trying to prove a client’s innocence, it’s not necessary to identify someone else as the actual perpetrator. But it helps. In the case of Frances Choy, the defense team was able to track down a new witness who’d been overlooked by the trial attorney. And this person made an earth-shaking claim—that Kenneth Choy had admitted to the witness that he was the one who’d set the fire that killed Jimmy and Anne Choy. According to the witness, Kenneth said that he and his mother (who lived in Hong Kong) were “mad at the Choys because they kept asking for more money.”

The investigation by Barter and the BCIP turned up more. One of the key arguments Plymouth County prosecutors had made to implicate Frances was that gasoline had been found on her sweatpants. But Frances’s team found an expert who said that the state’s lab tests had actually not shown evidence of gasoline. And the insistence by police officers that their interrogation rooms were not set up to record interviews? The attorneys and law students found a former Brockton police detective who swore otherwise. There was still more. Frances’s team was at last able to get the prosecutors’ entire case file, including material that hadn’t been given to Frances’s original attorney.

Among the bombshell finds in the file was an email that Assistant District Attorney Karen O’Sullivan had sent to a detective the night before he was to testify in Frances’s third trial. In the email, O’Sullivan included a script of what the detective should say on the stand, including testimony he had previously sworn under oath was not correct. Also in the file were handwritten notes from the detective’s interview with Frances—notes that the detective had previously testified were destroyed. Then there were the police reports from before the fire in which Jimmy Choy had gone to the authorities with his suspicions that Kenneth had been dealing drugs, information that might have more firmly established a motive for the boy to have set the fire.

But the most staggering disclosure came not from physical evidence or testimony from new witnesses, but from emails that Barter had fought for five years to get Plymouth County prosecutors to release.The emails, spanning the years 2006 to 2009, were between O’Sullivan and John Bradley, the two Plymouth County assistant district attorneys involved in prosecuting Frances Choy. In a motion filed in January 2020, Barter and the BCIP characterized the communications this way: “These emails included ‘jokes’ about Asian people, photographs depicting Asian people in a demeaning way, and commentary specifically about Frances, alleging that she was engaged in an incestuous relationship with her nephew and mocking her.” In one of the emails, drawing upon the fact that Frances’s extended family, united in their support for her, typically sat in the rear of the courtroom during hearings, the prosecutors sneered that, at an upcoming proceeding, she would be “wearing a cheongsam and will be the one doing origami in the back of the courtroom.” In another, Frances’s face was Photoshopped onto the body of a Girl Scout standing in front of a burning house. “Next time,” read the caption, “buy the [expletive] cookies.” The racial bias explicit in the trial prosecutors’ emails, the defense team argued, amounted to “structural constitutional error” that, by itself, demanded a reversal of the convictions.