Farwell’s arrest requires external investigation

Indeed, one of the state troopers who investigated Birchmore’s death, Lt. John Fanning, a supervisor of Norfolk’s homicide unit, had himself been a Stoughton police officer years before. His tenure did not coincide with Farwell’s, though Fanning had worked with former Deputy Chief Robert Devine, who was also accused of having a sexual relationship with Birchmore.

State police detectives assigned to Norfolk County continued to investigate the case and maintained the suicide conclusion even after determining that Farwell was the last person to see Birchmore alive, and found text messages indicating that he had committed rape on her beginning 10 years earlier, when she was 15 and in a youth police program known as Explorers. He was her 27-year-old instructor.

“He should have been the prime suspect,” said Howard Friedman, a civil rights attorney based in Brookline, who said state police assigned to the Birchmore case “ignored the basics” when they argued that the victim’s death was not the result of foul play. “They deliberately ignored it, there’s no other way to put it.”

In a statement, a spokesperson for the Norfolk County District Attorney’s Office defended its handling of the case. The agency said it devoted considerable time and effort to investigating Birchmore’s death, worked cooperatively with federal investigators once they became interested in the case and “will remain committed to working to bring justice to Sandra Birchmore.”

The U.S. attorney’s office in Boston said it was required to investigate the case after receiving “credible information” that Farwell may have been involved in the girl’s death. And Attorney General Andrea Campbell’s office confirmed that its White Collar and Public Integrity Division is investigating former Stoughton police officers, including Farwell, his twin brother William and Devine, in connection with their relationship with Birchmore. Birchmore’s estate alleges in a wrongful death lawsuit that the three men groomed her for sex when she was a young officer.

“While the district attorney’s office is responsible for prosecuting homicides, my team opened an investigation after I took office into other aspects of the case, recognizing that the gravity and horror of this case is not limited to Sandra’s death,” Campbell said in a statement.

But critics question why outside investigators weren’t brought into the case early on, especially after investigators determined Birchmore was pregnant and claimed Farwell was the father. Academic experts and local advocates argue that prosecutors and police have close professional relationships that can taint the integrity of their investigations.

“The whole infrastructure is built so that prosecutors are able to protect officers, who are their star witnesses,” said Nicole Gonzalez Van Cleve, an associate professor of sociology at Brown University who co-authored a 2020 report on the relationship between police and prosecutors.

In recent years, Massachusetts has seen federal prosecutors or the state attorney general step in and bring charges in other high-profile cases when local district attorneys have not. In the past 18 months, two Fall River police officers have been convicted in federal court of excessive force. In Springfield, the attorney general’s office has charged 14 officers with participating in or covering up a 2015 beating of four black men after a barroom argument, but only two have been convicted.

In response to questions about potential conflicts in an investigation of local police, a Morrissey spokesman cited five examples in which the district attorney’s office has prosecuted local officers, including an indecent assault case against Walpole’s former deputy chief. In another case, a former Dedham police officer was convicted of aiding and abetting kidnapping. The spokesman said those examples were just a sampling of past prosecutions.

Morrissey’s handling of police incidents has come under scrutiny in another recent high-profile case: the murder trial of Karen Read, who was accused of killing her boyfriend, Boston police officer John O’Keefe, by running him over with her car after a night of heavy drinking. Fanning, one of the state police investigators assigned to the Birchmore case, was also part of the Read investigation.

Read claims she dropped O’Keefe off at another Boston police officer’s home in Canton, and that he was beaten to death and left outside to die by the home’s occupants. Her trial, which ended in a mistrial after jurors deadlocked, has been riddled with accusations of police incompetence and misconduct. A retrial is scheduled for January.

Kate Levine, a professor at Yeshiva University’s Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law in New York, argued in a 2016 paper that prosecutors’ reliance on local officers to build cases presents an inherent conflict of interest when the officers, or their uniformed colleagues, are accused of being on the wrong side of the law.

“They are often the only witnesses in cases,” Levin said in an interview. “If a prosecutor wants to win, he needs the police on his side.”

Levine’s report identifies several possible alternatives. The cases could be transferred to other district attorneys, the state attorney general or federal prosecutors. Or, she writes, lawmakers could take a more radical approach: giving civilian review boards the power to investigate allegations of police crimes and appoint special prosecutors.

Campbell’s office said it would be difficult to exercise broad jurisdiction over police killings and other criminal allegations against officers. The attorney general’s office said it was open to those discussions but did not have the capacity or personnel to investigate homicides the way local prosecutors do.

The Massachusetts Police Reform Act of 2020 gave the attorney general’s office the power to conduct broad civil rights investigations of police departments. Campbell’s Police Accountability Unit, which would handle those cases, continues to ramp up operations and is searching for its first director.

In 2015, former state Rep. Evandro Carvalho, who now heads Boston’s Office of Police Accountability and Transparency, the city’s new police watchdog agency, introduced a bill to give the state attorney general authority over police-involved deaths. In an interview, Carvalho said he was motivated by the 2014 killing of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, which in part sparked the national Black Lives Matter movement.

“It seems that the police cannot investigate themselves. And secondly, prosecutors work closely with the police on a daily basis,” Carvalho said. “As a former prosecutor, I understand this point of view.”

The bill went to a public hearing but was opposed by several district attorneys and defeated in committee, Carvalho said. Subsequent events, including the 2020 killing of George Floyd by Minneapolis police, and now Birchmore’s death, have only reinforced the need for independent investigations, he said.

“I still believe in this bill and its purpose,” Carvalho said. A similar proposal to create a statewide special prosecutor’s office to handle criminal allegations of police misconduct was introduced in 2020, but that attempt also failed.

A few states have mandated independent investigations into police-involved deaths. In 2014, Wisconsin became the first state to require external investigations into such cases, though charging decisions are still left to local prosecutors. In New York, the governor’s office issued an executive order in 2015 giving its attorney general authority over killings of unarmed civilians, and that order was codified into state law and expanded in 2021 to include people killed while armed.

That same year, California also passed a law requiring state prosecutors to investigate police killings of unarmed civilians.

But Birchmore said even those laws may not have brought swifter justice because they apply only to deaths that occur in police custody or when authorities believe the actions of an officer were the cause of death. A spokesman for the state medical examiner’s office, which worked with Norfolk detectives and listed suicide on Birchmore’s death certificate, said the agency “remains open to revising its findings as new information emerges.”

The Globe’s Laura Crimaldi and Shelley Murphy contributed to this report.

---

You can contact Dan Glaun at [email protected]. Follow him @dglaun.