On a November evening in 2021, Anthony Harden, a 30-year-old Black man, was shot to death in his bedroom by one of two Fall River police officers called in to investigate a domestic dispute that had occurred two days earlier.
Those are among the few facts not in dispute.
A month later Bristol County District Attorney Thomas M. Quinn III issued a report concluding that, “The fatal shooting of Mr. Harden by a Fall River police officer was justified and was the result of Mr. Harden’s violent and armed assault on the male police officer. There is no basis to conclude that either Fall River police officer committed a crime.” Harden’s brother Eric B. Mack, an attorney, isn’t so sure about that and has been fighting for the past two years to get photographs, videos, and other evidence collected by State Police attached to Quinn’s office during the course of their investigation. Even the names of the two officers, including the female officer identified as the shooter, were redacted in Quinn’s final report — although they are identified by name in Mack’s court filing.
A superior court judge has already ruled that nearly all of the materials Mack is looking for are matters of public information to which he is entitled.
Quinn, however, is not only fighting to keep those records from the public but has now invoked the state’s landmark 2020 Police Reform Act to help do so. His interpretation of the very law legislators passed to bring transparency to allegations of police misconduct would instead allow it to be used as a shield by every police department in the Commonwealth to protect their own investigations of potential wrongdoing from public scrutiny.
The state’s Supreme Judicial Court, which heard the case Wednesday, is being asked to decide, in part, whether in fact lawmakers meant what they said when they passed a law aimed at achieving “justice, equity, and accountability in law enforcement in the Commonwealth
In other news, much to everyone's surprise, water is indeed wet.