By Ed Oliver and Attorney J. Edward Pawlick
September 12, 2000

The unconstitutional persecution of Ken Newell and his family continued yesterday in the Quincy District Court as he, his lawyers and his witnesses were forced to wait for the entire day -- for the eighth time -- before being told that the trial was postponed 

No drug dealer would ever be forced to come to court eight times to answer false charges against him because it is clearly against any semblance of due process under the U. S. and state Constitutions. But the protections of the Constitution clearly do not apply to fathers and their children in the courts of Massachusetts.

The father of two was forced to wait from 9 a.m. until 4:40 p.m. in the hallways of Quincy District Court with his witnesses and attorneys, before Judge Mark Coven set a new date for October 19th.

Judge Coven had a few cross words to say to one of Newell’s witnesses, a retired police officer, after he heard the witness grumbling about how much it had personally cost him to waste another day sitting in a courtroom. The police office has been to court eight times without a single opportunity to testify. Although he has testified in hundreds of criminal trials in his career, he says he has never seen anything like what is happening to Newell.

Many people are wondering if the judge and district attorney are hoping that they will trap Newell into a hearing when the legendary attorney Chester Darling is unable to appear. He was waiting in the wings yesterday to assist Newell’s regular attorney, Michael Furey. 

Assistant DA Roberta Kerty, who got a backache and went home to rest last month when she heard Darling was in the courtroom, immediately agreed with the judge to dismiss two of the four remaining cases against Newell. One was a charge that Newell kicked in his ex-wife’s door and threatened to kill her – a charge she made hours after Newell served her with papers from Probate Court. The second charge was that Newell allegedly shined a flashlight in her window from his car and followed her earlier in the day. 

Newell’s ex-wife accuser, who is shown in internal evaluations made by the court to have serious mental problems, lodged 26 frivolous charges of harassment and violence against him over the past two years. According to Newell’s account published in a previous issue, she used those charges to avoid psychiatric treatment, label him a batterer, gain custody of the children and receive government support and free legal services for her divorce.

Although Newell was well prepared yesterday to fight the final cases against him, Kerty did not drop the final two and decided to go to trial. “This is pure unadulterated harassment,” Attorney Darling was heard to say outside the courtroom before being forced to wait eight hours on a wooden bench with Newell.

Twenty-three of the frivolous charges against Newell have been dropped. He was forced to plead to “Admission to Sufficient Fact” on one charge in August when his witness failed to show and Judge Coven refused to continue that trial. An appeal of that case has been filed. 

Newell has witnesses and a solid alibi for the remaining two charges, which allege he made threatening phone calls and followed his wife while she had a restraining order against him. Newell has a bank manager and a retired police officer that can account for his whereabouts at the time he was accused of committing the acts.
 

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