THE PROSECUTION charged that three men present in the Buzz Club in Boston on the night of September 25, 2000, attacked and stabbed — attempted to murder — the talented basketball player Paul Pierce in a melee that grew out of Pierce's comments to a couple of women. The men — Hurston, Ragland, and Watson — were arrested on the sometimes vague and startlingly conflicting testimony of witnesses who were present at what all sides readily admit was a scene of mass chaos and confusion. There was no DNA evidence to link any of the three men to the knife attack, in part because, as Boston Police detective Paul Barnicle claimed, Pierce's clothing had been "compromised" when teammate Tony Battie and Battie's brother, Derrick, gathered up the clothes and threw them into their car. Whether this was merely an excuse for a faulty police search for reliable forensic evidence was never made quite clear. What is known is that Michael Gorn of the Boston Police Crime Laboratory Unit admitted to defense attorney John Swomley, representing Hurston (who was accused of smashing Pierce's head with a glass bottle), that Barnicle never suggested DNA testing of, for example, glass fragments found on pieces of leather from Pierce's torn jacket. Swomley therefore accused the police of simply refusing to conduct any further investigation once they nabbed the three suspects; instead of investigating, charged Swomley and defense counsel for the other two defendants, the cops simply went about the task of pressing witnesses to identify the three men already in hand.

The clamor to convict was deafening. It was assumed that the police nabbed the right guys, and that any trial testimony that differed from prior statements obtained by the police during early questioning and by the DA when he presented the witnesses to the grand jury must be false, the result of threats from the defense camp. The Boston Herald's Peter Gelzinis, frequently an astute observer of the criminal-justice system and life in general, lost all sense of objectivity and led the attack in a September 26 piece headlined INTIMIDATION HAS TURNED WITNESS INTO TRUE VICTIM. His depiction of the sensational trial appearance of prosecution witness Krystal Bostick, for example, was inexcusably partisan. Bostick, a 20-year-old criminal-justice major at Johnson & Wales University, had identified Ragland and Watson as the assailants two years earlier. Suddenly, at trial, after refusing to testify and then changing her mind when Judge Spurlock threatened to jail her for contempt, she dramatically changed her account, claiming that her grand-jury testimony — that she saw Ragland and Watson attack and stab Pierce — was false. She had gotten caught up in the drama and made up a story that she told at school, she said, and when one of her associates reported her story to the police, she felt obliged to stick with her tale rather than admit she'd been spinning a yarn.

Months later, Bostick went to the office of Martin Leppo, lawyer for Watson, and admitted that her earlier testimony had been a lie. In the statement she signed under oath at Leppo's office, she did not deny seeing anything whatsoever; in fact, she admitted seeing Ragland and Pierce "exchange punches." She also admitted seeing someone holding a knife, but "I didn't really get a good look as it was dark and crowded in there." Hence, she did not pretend to be blind, but admitted she did not see who stabbed Pierce. But Gelzinis left no room for even the possibility that it was her later testimony, not her earlier version, that was true. Her trial testimony was "a pathetic charade," he wrote. She feared "retribution for telling the truth" at trial.

Buzz Club security guard Michael Nunes also changed his testimony at trial. In the fall of 2000, according to the prosecution, he'd identified a photo of Ragland, from a photo array, claiming that he had punched Pierce. At trial, he said that the photo was only "possibly" of the man who committed the attack. Indeed, Nunes hurt the prosecution's case further when he told the jury that he heard Pierce, the victim, shout that he was going to his car to get a gun and that he threatened, "I'm coming back and shooting all of y'all."

Another important prosecution witnesses, Regina Henderson, likewise moved away from her earlier grand-jury testimony. She had earlier picked Hurston's picture out of a photo array, and identified both Hurston and Ragland as among the attackers. At trial, although she identified Ragland, she backed away from her earlier identification of Hurston, testifying, under Swomley's cross-examination, that she was afraid not of Hurston, but of Suffolk County assistant district attorney John Pappas. Her earlier photo identification of Hurston, she told the jury, resulted from a not-very-subtle threat made by Pappas to reopen an old criminal case against her unless she cooperated against Hurston. Under cross-examination by Pappas, when he confronted her with the photo of Hurston that she had supposedly identified earlier, she said, "I didn't identify him. You did."

This startling accusation lodged against the prosecutor was duly reported by Boston Globe reporter Kathleen Burge on September 24, but it was missing entirely from the Herald's story by Jessica Heslam. Making matters worse, Gelzinis's column accusing the defendants of threatening witnesses ran on the Herald's cover on the same day. Two days later, on September 26, the Herald's Laurel J. Sweet reported that Hurston's lawyer, Swomley, "accused police and prosecutors of strong-arming witness Regina Henderson into picking Hurston out of a photo lineup by threatening to chase a May 2, 2000, assault and battery charge pending against her," without mentioning that on September 23 Henderson herself had testified to being threatened by the prosecutor. Instead, Sweet referred to Henderson as a "reluctant witness" and quoted Pappas as saying: "You don't need a road map to figure out what's going on here."

Only the Globe's Kathleen Burge seemed intent on presenting an accurate picture of the jurors' dilemma. To almost everyone else, there was no dilemma at all, no evidence to sift and evaluate. Even veteran libertarian talk-show host David Brudnoy, usually a lone voice of reason and sanity in Boston talk radio on questions of rights and liberties, railed against the defendants' perceived obstruction of justice and called for their conviction. If even Brudnoy could get the impression that it was clear who was doing all the threatening, then it's pretty obvious that much of the reporting on the trial was inadequate, one-sided, and often downright inaccurate.

The tilted news coverage was made worse by an explanatory story published mid-trial by the Globe's Shelley Murphy, ordinarily a tough and probing crime reporter. Citing the views of "seasoned prosecutors and defense lawyers," she wrote that "it's not unusual for witnesses to feel intimidated when forced to confront defendants and their supporters." Plymouth district attorney Paul Cruz was quoted as saying that "you can't allow people to flip on the [witness] stand." The assumption, of course, was that when a witness has "flipped," or changed his or her testimony at the trial, it was the version given to the trial jury that was false, rather than the earlier testimony obtained by police or prosecutors. Only one lawyer quoted by Murphy, defense attorney Robert L. Sheketoff, posed what should have been the obvious and central question: "How do you know which one is true?" Another defense lawyer interviewed by Murphy — former federal prosecutor Paul V. Kelly — was quoted as saying, "It's a very frightening experience for people" to testify in cases like this because the state cannot offer the same level of protection for witnesses that federal prosecutors can.

When, at trial, Pierce recanted his photo-array identification of Hurston as the one who started the fight and told the jury that he was no longer certain that his earlier identification was correct, the Globe's Burge reported the testimony with appropriate subtlety. Indeed, Pierce's earlier identification of Hurston had been called into substantial question in legal papers filed in the pretrial proceedings, in which it had been revealed that Pierce actually had failed to pick out Hurston's photograph from a photo array on the evening after the September 25 attack, but identified Hurston when shown a different photo array considerably later, on October 7, after Hurston had been arrested and his photograph publicized in the news media. At trial, under cross-examination by Swomley, Pierce suggested yet another reason why his earlier photo identification of Hurston, seemingly certain at the time, now prompted considerable doubt. The Tony Hurston he was looking at live in the courtroom, testified Pierce, was much larger than the person he saw attack him on the evening in question. In other words, while the face seemed familiar, the body did not. (This matter of Hurston's unusually large size came to figure rather prominently in the trial, casting real doubt on earlier facial identifications made of him by eyewitnesses.)

But Pierce's testimony, rather than inspiring serious re-evaluation of the indictment — at least of Hurston — resulted in a second column from the Herald's Gelzinis (on October 3), headlined SILENCE DEAFENS IN THUGS' TRIAL, in which he quoted a nameless prosecutor as saying that when the witnesses won't step up to the plate, "all you can hope for ... is that a jury will step up and find the courage to do what a witness couldn't or wouldn't." Will that happen, asked Gelzinis, "[o]r will justice be trumped by fear?" Neither Gelzinis nor the Herald courtroom reporter pointed out that there was a very good explanation for why Pierce changed his mind from the near-certainty of his photo ID when confronted with Hurston's hard-to-miss physical size.

The next day, Herald sports columnist Gerry Callahan penned a vicious attack on all the defendants and even the defense lawyers, singling out Swomley for the harshest treatment. He mentioned in a degrading context that Swomley's client, Hurston, weighed in at 341 pounds, but he never mentioned the real significance of Hurston's weight — witnesses who earlier identified him as one of the attackers described, in fact, a person of considerably less girth. (There was, in the club that night, an individual who looked very much like Hurston but was considerably lighter — I personally viewed photos of both men and was startled by the similar facial characteristics, with body size, not evident from the face-shot, being what most strikingly distinguished the two.) Callahan nonetheless called the trial "a disturbing story of intimidation and fear and bad guys," never even mentioning any of the trial testimony suggesting that pressure tactics had been employed by police and prosecutors and that the changed trial testimony just might possibly have been the accurate version. Callahan's attack on the defense lawyers was vicious and unstinting: they "checked their souls at the door," he charged. Swomley, in particular, was dubbed "a well-paid thugged-up defense attorney" who "can top the best street mime or juggler that Faneuil Hall has to offer." He concluded the column by calling Swomley a "legal bottom feeder."

Nonetheless, the jurors, in acquitting Hurston, made clear that they believed Pierce's trial testimony rather than his earlier version given to the DA and the grand jury. Similarly, they appeared to credit Regina Henderson's trial testimony withdrawing her earlier identification of Hurston's photograph; she had told the jury, one recalls, that her earlier identification of Hurston's photograph was the DA's selection, not hers, and that if she had any fear it was directed at the DA and not Hurston and his friends.

In contrast, the jurors believed Krystal Bostick's earlier grand-jury testimony and did not credit her recantation at trial. That earlier testimony had fingered Ragland and Watson, whom the jurors convicted, but not Hurston, whom they acquitted. The jurors were remarkably discerning as they sought to determine which witnesses feared the defendants and which feared the police and prosecutors, and how such fears might have influenced their testimony.