The Harriet Tubman Project’s Mission: Free Wrongfully Convicted Suspects

SPRINGFIELD — Michelle Allen’s son, Michael Brauner, is facing up to 25 years in prison for murder after she alleges that potentially exonerating evidence was withheld during his trial.

“I absolutely think he should be out because I think it was self-defense,” she said. “I was at the trial and I don’t even understand why he’s in jail right now.”

Allen was one of more than 100 people who gathered in Springfield on Sunday for the first Hampden County “Freedom Trail” workshop, hosted by the Harriet Tubman Project. The project helps inmates and their families fight what they see as wrongful convictions. Families were briefed by representatives from the public defender’s office, the American Civil Liberties Union, the Innocence Project and the Harriet Tubman Project.

Harriet Tubman Project organizer Rickey FuQuan McGee was not present. He remains in prison, where he and other inmates are working to win new legal reviews.

Jacqueline Fonseca, co-director of the project, said the project aims to give prisoners the opportunity to take control of their legal battles and use their own skills to prepare legal assessments of their cases.

“FuQuan started the project in 2021 to educate men about the law at MCI Norfolk. They meet twice a week in a classroom and talk about their cases and structural racism, to be empowered, to become active in their own freedom, and not just rely on their legal team,” Fonseca said. “A lot of us don’t have legal literacy.”

Fonseca said between 40 and 80 inmates at the Norfolk prison are involved, including 20 from Springfield. The project is an inmate-driven effort to educate men serving long sentences.

A January state Supreme Court ruling, Graham v. District Attorney for Hampden District, addressed irregularities in arrests and prosecutions in Springfield. The justices found that the Hampden district attorney’s office failed to inform defendants about irregularities committed by police officers, either during the investigation of their cases or in prior investigations, that could affect how a jury interprets testimony.

Jessica Lewis, a staff attorney for the ACLU, said her group brought Graham’s case in a 2021 lawsuit against the district attorney’s office because it believed the state failed to adequately investigate problems brought to light by the U.S. Justice Department in July 2020. The Justice Department found that the Springfield Police Department’s Narcotics Unit engaged in a pattern of excessive force and violated citizens’ constitutional rights.

“We’ve clearly found that not releasing evidence to suspects is not just an issue here in Springfield,” Lewis said. “It’s become clear that people are not getting evidence in a way that is really damaging to their case.”

The story of one man

Sean Ellis is free after proving his conviction was wrongful, decades after his alleged crime.

Ellis grew up in Dorchester and would have stayed there if he had not been convicted of first-degree murder in the death of a police officer, John Mulligan. “I was 19 years old when I came in and 41 when I came out,” he said at Sunday’s rally. Ellis served 22 years at MCI Norfolk.

Ellis now works with the Tubman Project and is co-founder and director of the Exoneree Network, which supports exonerated prisoners and helps those fighting for release. He is the subject of a Netflix documentary, “Trial 4.”

He said he was extremely lucky to have excellent lawyers who worked hard for him.

“I’ve had three trials. Two of them ended with a jury that didn’t have a jury. I was convicted in the third trial. But they discovered evidence that was tips (withheld) and third-party evidence that pointed to corruption and cover-ups that existed in my case,” he said. “We asked for the evidence that they had back in 1994, but they decided not to turn it over.”

Ellis says he is angry about his incarceration, but he is trying to channel that anger into positive outcomes.

“I have to learn how to reconcile those emotions,” he said. “Anger is a very heavy emotion. I don’t know how to have that emotion, even righteous anger, and defend myself and others.”

Pedro Valentin was released from MCI Norfolk in 2021 during the COVID pandemic. He had served 33 years after being convicted of murder, but not as a perpetrator. The state found him to be a drug dealer and ordered the killing. He said people who could have provided evidence that would have exonerated him refused to cooperate.

“I didn’t commit this crime, so I stood up for myself and believed in the system, I believe in the law,” Valentin said. He refused to plead to a lesser charge and chose to go to trial.

According to defense attorney Luke Ryan, the legal system forces defendants to assess the risk of a lawsuit.

“I think we have a system that is not a trial system, it’s a plea system,” he said. “We have such sentences and draconian sentences that ordinary innocent people choose to plead guilty because they do a risk assessment; they plead guilty for the shorter sentence rather than go to trial and lose for a very long sentence.”

Ryan said making such decisions in an unfair system is discouraging.

“You have a police force that is not playing by the rules, the rules that are there to prevent things like wrongful incarceration,” he said, referring to problems of the kind discovered by the Justice Department in Springfield. “It’s a phenomenon that is not limited to Springfield. It’s part of the criminal justice system that we have and that’s why we have to make sure that everyone’s due process rights are respected.”