NLG Sustainer Profile – Patty Garin

Patty Garin is a partner at Stern, Shapiro, Weissberg & Garin (one of our original sustainers), and she has distinguished herself as one of Massachusetts’ most respected, tireless and effective advocates for those who would otherwise remain voiceless.  Her most recent success came in the case Commonwealth v. Leonard Lacy.

Leonard Lacy was convicted of first-degree murder in December, 1974.  For over 36 years, he steadfastly maintained his innocence, but made no progress in the court system.  Lacy was, in 1973, one of several persons in the Boston area gaining access to the homes of elderly persons to commit swindles.  In that month, a black man (Lacy is black), posing as a senior citizen worker, gained entrance to the Roxbury apartment of Lillian Fitzgerald, struck her and fled.  The elderly Mrs. Fitzgerald died eight days later in the hospital from pneumonia and congestive heart failure.

On December 24, 1973, Leonard Lacy was arrested.  The police, with no suspects in the long succession of crimes – now including a murder – were anxious to make an arrest and, the record showed, put enormous pressure on three elderly white residents of Mrs. Fitzgerald’s apartment building to give descriptions that could fit Lacy.  In fact, not one of the three “eyewitnesses” could give a detailed description of the “unknown colored male” before or during trial.   Lacy’s indictment was the result of a suggestive photo array, and he was convicted.

Patty recognized in Lacy’s case that there was an enormous question of his guilt.  Hopelessly tainted eyewitness testimony, suggestive police methods, very poor viewing conditions at the scene, and racial bias, all contributed to the conviction.  But perhaps the result was not altogether surprising.  Mr. Lacy was a young black man tried for the murder of an elderly white woman in 1974, when Boston was steeped in racial turmoil and animosity, even hatred, with tensions at all levels of life, from housing to employment to politics.

Patty Garin and Rebecca Rose worked on this case for five years, and with their formidable papers for a new trial pending, the Commonwealth finally made a deal that made Lacy a free man, after 36 years of wrongful incarceration.  He walked out of the courtroom and out of prison, finally, on February 7, 2010.

Patty deserves our thanks and appreciation for doing what lawyers should do, and doing it so well.

-   David Kelston  -