Berkshire County District Attorney Paul Caccaviello has already lost one election in which he claimed to be the candidate of unsurpassed competence and integrity.
He’s now mounting a longshot write-in campaign touting the same virtues.
Meanwhile, a judge presiding in Caccaviello’s home court has recently gone on the record about mistrusting the DA’s representations in a troubled murder prosecution.
“Frankly, it is hard for me to accept the genuineness of the Commonwealth’s assertion that there is no backroom deal based on a ‘wink and a nod,’ Superior Court Associate Justice John Agostini wrote in a Sept. 4 ruling.
“Commonwealth” here is Caccaviello’s office. On the day of his Democratic primary loss Caccaviello also learned he’d lost the trust of the judge presiding over many of the county’s biggest criminal cases.
Agostini’s reference to a “backroom deal” is not about Caccaviello’s surprise elevation to the DA’s post in March, arranged by a predecessor who quietly lobbied the governor on Caccaviello’s behalf before retiring abruptly.
Rather, it concerns his prosecutors’ refusal to admit that they promised anything at all to secure unprecedented cooperation from a murder suspect against his alleged accomplice.
Peter J. Campbell, then 18, was arrested on Nov. 19, 2014 in connection with the prior night’s shooting of Anthony Gamache in the parking lot of the Big Y supermarket in Pittsfield. Hours after Campbell incriminated himself to the police that day Gamache collapsed in his home and died. The state’s chief medical examiner determined the cause of death to be a blood clot resulting from the shooting.
Campbell spent three years and seven months in pretrial detention, repeatedly denied bail before it was finally granted this past June. “How does that happen,” asked Judge Mark Mason during the hearing, before setting the bond at $25,000 cash or $250,000 surety.
For the first 15 months of his confinement, Campbell stuck to the story that he was the accidental shooter, amid a struggle with Gamache during a cannabis-deal-turned-robbery. He went with that even as Gamache’s death left him facing a second-degree murder charge punishable by life imprisonment with no possibility of parole for 15 to 25 years.
Then Campbell talked to an old associate who joined him behind bars, and everything changed. His accomplice, Campbell now told authorities, was not a certain and nowhere to be found David, but rather Laquan Johnson of Pittsfield. And it was Johnson, not Campbell, who came up with the idea to rob Gamache, insisted on bringing the gun and used it to shoot Gamache, Campbell volunteered in February 2016.
Johnson was soon arrested and only did two years of pretrial detention before making bail, on the strength of a public defender appeal charging that prior denials of bail violated established legal precedents.
Johnson’s lawyer has also charged that Caccaviello’s prosecutors have withheld exculpatory evidence from the defense and the grand jury, while allowing the destruction of cell phone data that might have exonerated his client.
And, for some reason, public defender Calvin Carr and Judge Agostini were both skeptical that Campbell’s belated co-operation with prosecution, including grand jury testimony and a willingness to testify at Johnson’s trial, were not in return for any promised consideration, for a defendant still facing a murder charge in the same case. Promised consideration would have to be disclosed to a jury hearing Campbell’s testimony against Johnson, and the testimony could be impeached on that basis.
If consideration were provided but not disclosed, that fact could be used to overturn Johnson’s conviction even if it were secured, Judge Agostini worried aloud at an Aug. 30 hearing. The defendant is “entitled to a fair trial not a perfect one,” Assistant District Attorney Joseph Coliflores responded, according to The Berkshire Eagle.
Coliflores graduated from Northeastern Law School in 2014. Judge Agostini, who was appointed to the bench in 2002, appeared unimpressed by this display of competence and integrity.
He initially wanted to force Campbell and his attorney to testify about any undisclosed dealings with the prosecution at an evidentiary hearing. Eventually, Agostini overruled himself and ordered that Campbell be tried first instead of Johnson, to force any undisclosed deals into the open.
But when Campbell enters Berkshire Superior Court on Nov. 8 it will be for a change of plea hearing, according to Agostini’s handwritten notation on a court document. If there’s no change of plea, a jury would be impaneled the following weak. One way or another we’ll soon know what, if anything, Campbell’s cooperation has earned him.
As for Johnson, his trial has been pushed back to January, when with any luck it will no longer be Caccaviello’s problem, changed stories, destroyed or misplaced evidence and all. Johnson, by the way, has five named alibi witnesses willing to testify that he was with them at a city apartment while Gamache was getting shot in the Big Y parking lot.
It’s not clear what Caccaviello’s alibi might be for this botched prosecution and a public show of no confidence from a Superior Court judge. But voters have already rendered their verdict once, and will again on Tuesday.
