Looking back, through a grimy haze, at Charles Stuart case

Nancy Gertner: I represented Matthew Stuart. New details add up only to innuendo.

The Globe’s multipart front-page series “Nightmare in Mission Hill” is an important account of racism and police overreaching in 1989 Boston, but I felt it did some overreaching of its own when it speculated, in Chapter 8, about Matthew Stuart’s role in the shootings of Charles Stuart and his pregnant wife, Carol. The maker of the HBO documentary “Murder in Boston: Roots, Rampage & Reckoning” didn’t go there. The grand jury in the case didn’t indict Matthew. I know. I represented him as his criminal defense attorney.

After Charles’s suicide, the district attorney went after Matthew aggressively. Prosecutors asked leading questions, pressing witnesses repeatedly about whether they saw a white man with bushy hair running; subpoenaed witnesses favorable to Matthew multiple times to get them to change their story; even harangued Matthew’s elderly mother. As the saying goes, a grand jury would indict a ham sandwich. This one refused.

The Globe claims to have found “detailed” and “strong” evidence imputing guilt to Matthew. However, it highlights witnesses whose descriptions resembled Matthew — if barely — but not others whose accounts did not. Perhaps the reason these details had “never been reported before,” as the article notes, is that they didn’t amount to much.

The fact that Matthew confessed immediately to friends, family, and neighbors about the insurance scam, long before anyone suspected the Stuarts of anything, is trivialized. Prior consistent statements are the hallmark of truth telling in court; to the Globe, it meant Matthew “stuck to [his] story.”

As for the notion that Charles could not have shot himself, the Globe, recounting the suspicions of Charles’s treating doctors, guesses at “clues … found in ballistics reports.” Yet the independent forensic expert they consulted concluded that there was not enough evidence one way or another.

The Globe did interview me for the series and included my view that Matthew was innocent, but I found the overall tone of the reporting in its entirety did in 2023 what was done in 1989: It elevated innuendos as fact.

NANCY GERTNER

Brookline

The writer is a retired US district judge and a senior lecturer at Harvard Law School.