Fred Weichel and his legal team after the $33 million verdict (from left to right: Carmen Guhn-Knight, Monica Fuentes, Quinn Rallins, Fred Weichel, Mark Loevy-Reyes, and Howard Friedman)
Yesterday, jurors in the Suffolk Superior Court awarded our client, Fred Weichel, $33 million as compensation for the nearly 36 years he spent in prison as an innocent man. Fred will only receive $1 million because Massachusetts’s erroneous conviction statute has a cap. Still, the jurors’ verdict sends a message that Fred has waited over four decades to hear: We believe Fred Weichel is innocent.
Fred was wrongfully convicted of the murder of Robert Lamonica in Braintree in 1981. Over the course of his 2.5 week trial, Fred and his legal team showed the jury evidence of Fred’s innocence. We presented multiple alibi witnesses placing Fred miles away, in Boston, at the time of the murder. We presented evidence that the lead police investigator had tunnel vision and decided Fred was his suspect without doing a proper investigation. This police investigator then lied to the grand jury, claiming that four witnesses identified Fred as the man they saw running from the murder scene. In fact, only one witness identified Fred, but that witness was an intoxicated teenager who saw a man running fast, in the dark, for about 1-2 seconds, from 175 feet away. At trial, we demonstrated that it would have been impossible for the witness to identify the running man from that distance.
The Attorney General’s office, which represented the Commonwealth of Massachusetts in this lawsuit, tried to convince the jury that Fred was the murderer. They also argued that even if he wasn’t the murderer, he still didn’t deserve compensation because he couldn’t prove that he didn’t help the real murderer or commit some other related felony. As Fred said, “The jury didn’t buy it. I was just framed. It’s that simple.”
To learn more, check out Channel 5’s interview of Fred after his victory: https://www.wcvb.com/article/boston-fred-weichel-wrongful-conviction-lawsuit-jury-verdict-oct-18-2022/41694322