Stephan cowans innocence project jobs
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Exoneree Stephan Cowans found dead in his home
Stephan Cowans, who served more than five years in prison for an armed assault he didn’t commit, was found dead this morning in his Randolph, Massachusetts, home. He was apparently shot by someone he let into his house, according to a media report.
The New England Innocence Project represented Cowans during the appeals that led to his exoneration, with the assistance of the Innocence Project. Cowans had been convicted in of the May shooting of a Boston police officer. A Boston Police Department crime lab fingerprint analyst testified that Cowans’ fingerprint was found at the crime scene. Once DNA testing proved Cowans did not commit the crime, the fingerprint was re-analyzed – and it was not Cowans’. As a result of Cowans’ exoneration, the fingerprint unit of the crime lab was closed and analysts were investigated.
Read more about his case here.
We are deeply saddened by the loss of Stephan Cowans, who had been free just three y
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Stephan Cowans
The Crime
On May 30, , an officer of the Boston Police Department was shot twice with his own service weapon in the backyard of a house in Jamaica Plain following a short struggle with an unknown assailant. The assailant fired an additional shot at an individual who was standing in the window of a second-floor bedroom. The assailant ran from the scene, leaving the baseball hat he was wearing. He forcibly entered a nearby home, where he stopped to drink from a glass of water. The assailant then fled, leaving both the gun and the sweatshirt he had been wearing.
The Investigation
Approximately two weeks later, the injured police officer identified Stephan Cowans from a photo array composed of eight photographs. On July 2, , the officer attended a lineup and once again singled out Cowans as the man who had shot him. On that same day, the individual who had been watching from his second-floor bedroom window also identified Mr. Cowans as the assailant.
The family w
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| Stephan Cowans walked out of Suffolk Superior Court with his cousins Melinda (front) and Rakisha Mitchell in (WENDY MAEDA/GLOBE STAFF/File) |
David Abel | GLOBE STAFF | March 3,
Before the joy turned into rage, before the drugs and souped-up cars, the former prisoner had modest ambitions. He talked about opening a hair salon, maybe an auto shop.
A father of two, Stephan Cowans told friends and family he would make up for the lost years, that he would earn their pride, and he hatched plans about moving with his relatives out West or down South.
Then the money came, a sum he could hardly imagine in his days as a petty tjuv in Roxbury, and the euphoria subsided into paranoia, the excitement of being back on the streets was lost to bouts of nedstämdhet and an unpredictable fury, which surfaced whenever relatives suggested he get help.
Four years ago, Cowans walked out of state prison in Shirley a free man, klar