Kidnap charges dropped from ’73 case
Suffolk County prosecutors on Wednesday formally dropped robbery and kidnapping charges against a man who spent nearly half a century in prison for a rape he says he didn’t commit, ending the decades long legal saga.
District Attorney Kevin R. Hayden’s office, in a Suffolk Superior Court filing known as a nolle prosequi, said the government was dropping the robbery and kidnapping counts in the case against Tyrone G. Clark, who previously had his rape conviction in the case dropped after a judge granted his motion for a new trial in November 2021, resulting in Clark’s release from prison.
In August, Clark’s motion for a new trial on the robbery and kidnapping charges had also been granted, prompting prosecutors to ultimately drop the case Wednesday, records show.
“Crucial forensic evidence from the June 1973 incident was destroyed without being fully examined or tested,” Hayden’s office wrote. “More recently, the victim has expressed doubts about her prior identification of the defendant and supported his release . ... Based on the reasons above and the passage of 50 years since the crimes, most of which the defendant spent in prison, the interests of justice do not support further prosecution of this case.”
A lawyer for Clark didn’t immediately return an email seeking comment Wednesday.
When Judge Christine Roach initially vacated the rape conviction in November 2021, she wrote that the case was among “the rare ... and exceptional situations” where “justice may not have been done and finality must yield.”
Clark was 18 when a 23-yearold woman identified him from a police photo array as the man who forced his way into her Back Bay apartment on an afternoon in June 1973 and raped her at knifepoint. He was convicted of rape, robbery, and kidnapping and sentenced to life in prison.
But in a 2019 letter to the state Parole Board, the woman wrote that “I am no longer absolutely sure that my identification was correct.”
Roach said the victim’s uncertainty was not the main reason she decided to grant Clark’s third motion for a new trial. In fact, Roach said she credited the victim’s original identification of Clark more than her recent uncertainty.
“The essential injustice argued here is that no forensic evidence (other than a knife handle) has ever been preserved from which Clark could have attempted to prove his innocence,” she wrote. The Boston Police Department was unable to find the case file or any evidence.
“It is regrettable that this analysis was not fully developed and presented to a trial court sooner,” Roach wrote.
Clark was in prison from his arrest in 1973 until he was paroled in 2005. Fourteen months later, his parole was revoked for stealing $400 worth of clothing, and he went back to prison, Harris said earlier this year.
In 2020, he filed a motion seeking a new trial, citing evidence that DNA testing on a knife used by the rapist indicated that person’s genetic profile didn’t match Clark’s. Prosecutors challenged the reliability of that evidence, and other forensic evidence including semen collected from the victim was no longer available.
The victim was raped in her apartment, beaten, and then taken to Roxbury by her attacker, according to parole board records. She fled to a fire station, where a number of firefighters briefly glimpsed the suspect. Four of them identified Clark from a photo array.
The victim told GBH News she was concerned that she may have misidentified Clark. The victim is white and Clark is Black. She said she knew few Black people at the time of her attack.