The Punch That Took Two Lives
21 years ago, Joe Donovan initiated a tragic chain of events with a brutish act of machismo. But should he be in jail for life?
Five years ago, I worked tirelessly through nights and weekends on a story about Joe Donovan, an East Cambridge native who was wrongfully imprisoned for life back in 1993 after a series of unfortunate events.
At the time of my initial writing, the chance of Joe getting paroled seemed slim despite his good nature and unfair predicament. That’s still the case, as Massachusetts can be more stubborn than Texas when it comes to correcting mistakes. Nevertheless, I was honored recently when Carol Hallisey, a devoted Donovan family friend and advocate for Joe, asked me to pen a letter to the state parole board for his upcoming April 29 hearing.
In light of that, and of the Jobs Not Jails Rally in Boston this Saturday, April 26, I published my letter below, along with the original 7,000-plus word article on Joe. Please read and share it. His story, along with those of others in a similar predicament, needs to be told …
ATTN: Members of the Massachusetts Parole Board
12 Mercer Street, Natick, MA 01760
RE: JOSEPH DONOVAN (W55313)
To Whom It May Concern,
I assume you are familiar with the curious and troubling case of Joe Donovan. Likewise, I presume that you have access to even more revealing documents than even I accumulated over several months of gathering history related to his plight and trial.
Those perquisites considered, I’ll make this brief. When it comes to Joe Donovan, I can only focus for so long before panicking, or crying for his family.
Though Joe is one of thousands of subjects I’ve encountered in my decade a journalist, the time I spent with him five years ago weighs heavily on me. His calm demeanor in the pits of hell is something I admire more than just a little.
Joe’s not the only one related to this case I think about. I’ve never met a family simultaneously full of so much hope and helplessness, emotionally paralyzed over a fate ripped clean from their protection decades ago.
I submit along with this letter my 2009 Boston Phoenix feature, The Punch That Took Two Lives. I do not envy your position, but I hope your decision will be easier to make considering the innumerable revelations herein.
Sincerely,
Chris Faraone
When he was 17 years old, Joseph Donovan made the first of two stupid, and even reckless, mistakes. On the evening of September 18, 1992, in a brutish act of machismo, the East Cambridge native and minor-league delinquent punched out Norwegian MIT student Yngve Raustein. Tragically, seconds after he flattened the unsuspecting Norseman (and unbeknownst to Donovan), Raustein was set upon by a sociopathic acquaintance of Donovan’s, who stabbed him to death.
Though the remorseful Donovan, by his own account then and now, acted like “an idiot” on that warm late-summer evening, and as inhumane as his actions that night were, he is not a murderer. Still, the quandary he found himself in led to his second mistake: Donovan spurned a plea deal with the Middlesex District Attorney and opted to go to trial to clear himself of any connection to the murder. Had he taken the deal, he would have been released last year (about five years after the actual murderer, Shon McHugh, was himself released). Instead, Donovan fought the law and lost. For that mistake, almost 17 years later, under the felony-murder rule — also known as the joint-venture doctrine, which holds all culprits equally guilty if a homicide occurs during the commission of a felony — Donovan is still wearing a gray jump suit at the Old Colony Correctional Center in Bridgewater, serving a life sentence with no possibility of parole.
Donovan, now 34, has several advocates working on his behalf, but, as one family friend puts it, his chances of receiving a new trial are as likely as a quarterback completing a 100-yard Hail Mary pass — even though the judge who handed him his sentence now believes it is unjust. Donovan realizes that, though he was an aggressive thug that afternoon, unless he can get the justice system to look at his case, which it has thus far been unwilling to do beyond the standard appeals process, he will spend the rest of his life in jail for punching someone in the face.
NOT JUST ANOTHER WALK IN THE PARK
The morning of Friday, September 18, 1992, started with minor heartbreak for Joe Donovan. His summer sweetheart, Liza, dumped him following an argument at Cambridge Rindge and Latin, where the two were first-semester seniors. The break-up was hurtful, but Donovan was charming enough to easily befriend girls, and rebounded immediately, making plans to meet a girl named Amy after school. Their later rendez-vous at her apartment featured typical teenage behavior; the two watched television, smoked a joint, and fooled around until Donovan walked home for dinner.
Donovan’s family on his mother’s side congregated every Friday evening. His grandmother — who lived above the apartment that he and his mother, Mary, rented — was the house cook, and every week his aunt and uncle joined them for dinner. That autumn evening, they ate spaghetti and meatballs with shrimp sauce. Donovan still remembers it vividly nearly two decades later, because it was the last meal he had with relatives at a proper dining-room table.
After dinner, Donovan laid down for what he intended to be a quick nap. He had promised to call some friends around 7 pm but overslept. When he woke up at 8 pm and couldn’t reach anyone — not Kevin, not Eric, not Robert — he walked into the dusk to find them. He knew that his homeboys were not at a dance happening at Rindge and Latin — that wasn’t their scene — but that was his only lead.
Donovan’s first stop was Costa Lopez Taylor Park, his regular hangout just steps away from his Charles Street home. He had spent most of the recent summer months with his father, Joe Sr., just over I-93 in Charlestown, but Donovan still thought he knew where his friends might be hanging. With no luck at Taylor, he walked one block to Hurley Park, and then another block and a half to Ahearn Field, behind Kennedy Longfellow Elementary School on Spring Street. There, he ran into fellow East Cambridge natives Alfredo Velez and Shon McHugh (who Donovan claims he barely knew) drinking 40-ounce bottles of beer.
Though McHugh was a little more than a year younger than Donovan — and a mere 120 pounds, or 50 pounds lighter than Donovan — he was hardly intimidated by bigger guys. A few months before, the five-foot, two-inch sophomore staved off a group of kids who jumped him at an East Cambridge party, and days later bought a knife at Faneuil Hall for protection. Among friends, McHugh was known as an insecure street punk with a Napoleon complex; he earned that reputation two years earlier by assaulting a man with a metal bicycle seat when the victim had caught him stealing tire-valve caps, an act that landed him on probation. He was also known by some to have an amoral disregard for life; his first victim was a cat that he threw into the air and caught on his pocket blade.
Soon after Donovan spotted McHugh and Velez — the latter an 18-year-old high-school dropout better known as Junior who, at about six feet, 185 pounds, was slightly bigger than Donovan — that Friday, they decided that they needed more alcohol. Though police and prosecutors would later argue that Donovan conspired with McHugh and Velez to commit robbery, Donovan claims he knew the latter only from one occasion that prior summer, when Velez bullied some kids while playing basketball on Hurley Street. Donovan knew McHugh’s older sister, Kerry, relatively well, though, so Donovan joined Velez and McHugh for an underage beer run.
On Donovan’s advice, the three boys walked five minutes to a liquor store across from the Royal Sonesta Hotel in East Cambridge. The owners were immigrants, and, in Donovan’s experience, rarely checked identification. But this night the clerks were extra cautious, and the trio of minors was turned away empty-handed.
From there, the plan switched, and the three boys headed back down Memorial Drive with plans to cross the Harvard Bridge and walk into Kenmore Square, where they figured it would be easier to buy alcohol. It was almost 9 pm, and since Donovan’s mom enforced an 11 pm curfew — and he hadn’t yet had a drink — he wanted to enjoy his next couple of hours.
As they walked down the MIT side of Memorial Drive with the Charles River on their left, a beer-buzzed McHugh playfully pushed Donovan into walkers, joggers, and other passers-by who were enjoying the 75-degree evening weather. Velez — who, according to acquaintances, was “harmless alone, but an instigator when surrounded by friends and fueled with alcohol” — walked off to the side.
The three continued heading west, at one point stopping briefly to swallow their pride and apologize after McHugh hip-checked Donovan into a large man with an athletic build. Although he could have likely walloped the troublemakers on his own, the runner spared them, and even after scolding them engaged in small talk with the teens about the Led Zeppelin tune blaring through his headphones.
Their next encounter wouldn’t end so passively. At about 9:45 pm, right before the boys approached the Harvard Bridge, they ran into two Norwegian MIT students, 21-year-old Yngve Raustein and 22-year-old Arne Fredheim, who were, according to Fredheim’s testimony, also slightly intoxicated, conversing, and paying little attention to sidewalk traffic.
Moving swiftly from the Thirsty Ear Pub on MIT’s West campus to the Muddy Charles Pub on East campus, Raustein and Fredheim passed between the East Cambridge kids, leaving Donovan in the middle to bump shoulders with Raustein. Still insecure about backing down to the jogger minutes earlier, Donovan turned to the students, who had walked on about 20 feet, and demanded an apology. In a weak moment, Donovan was likely attempting to live up to stories he’d heard about his rugged merchant-marine grandfather and his great-grandfather, Johnny Donovan, a New England lightweight boxing champ from South Boston. Before Raustein and Fredheim could make peace, Donovan, who was also aggravated at what he perceived as two college boys laughing at him in a foreign language, stepped to them. Then, without warning, Donovan cocked back his right arm, punched Raustein in the temple, and knocked the Norwegian to the ground, injuring his own outside knuckles in the process.
Although Donovan never yelled for backup, his co-defendants jumped into action, escalating what would have been an assault-and-battery charge into first a robbery and then the unthinkable. As Donovan bent over in pain, squeezing his injured fist between his thighs, he saw Velez instruct Fredheim to surrender his wallet. At the same time, in the darkness and about 15 feet away (and, Donovan claims, unbeknownst to him), McHugh thrust his new seven-and-a-half-inch spring-loaded buck knife through Raustein’s heart, then wiped the blade on his victim’s shirt and stole his wallet.
Immediately after the roughly 30-second fracas, Donovan bolted across Memorial Drive and over the Harvard Bridge into Boston. McHugh and Velez fled the scene as nearby witnesses began shouting, eventually tossing the stolen wallets into the Charles. They soon caught up to Donovan, who stopped running but was walking quickly to escape from what he believed was the scene of an assault and robbery.
Less than 10 minutes later, the three assailants stopped at a Beacon Street Li’l Peach at the intersection of Mass Ave. Donovan was still nervous, but didn’t think Boston cops would bother chasing down teenagers who jumped someone across the river. Plus, they figured they were safe since Velez and McHugh had tossed the stolen wallets in the river.
With McHugh waiting outside, Velez and Donovan entered the convenience store. Donovan had enough marijuana on him for a blunt, so — in addition to a fistful of ice for his swollen hand and a pack of cigarettes — he bought a loose cigar to gut and stuff. Velez didn’t buy anything, but took a handful of napkins off the counter.
Back outside, the three perps, still in search of beer, walked toward Kenmore Square on upper Newbury Street. Three blocks down, Donovan ducked onto Kenmore Street to relieve himself while the other two waited. When he re-emerged, Donovan found McHugh wiping down his bloody knife with napkins that Velez had grabbed at the Li’l Peach.
It was then, Donovan claims, that he first realized they could all be in serious trouble. Donovan asked McHugh if he had stabbed someone while he was urinating. At that moment, McHugh told the others that he chased Donovan’s sucker punch with a lethal shanking, and that he’d done it “just to see what it was like to watch somebody die.”
Looking back, says Donovan, “At this point I’m thinking he’s sick in the head, and I told him to give me the knife. It was a crazy knife, like something you would see on a crazy redneck hunting show. Right then, I realized that he stabbed someone, and right after that the cops started coming, but I still didn’t think that I was in much trouble for anything besides punching someone.”
As Donovan pleaded with McHugh to get rid of the knife (even suggesting that he chuck it onto the shoulder of I-90), he heard Velez shout, “Paddy wagon,” prompting McHugh to stash the weapon behind the wheel of a nearby car. At 10:12 pm, two Boston University police officers approached the three boys, holding their guns with shaky hands. Within minutes of McHugh, Velez, and Donovan being handcuffed and placed in squad cars, Raustein succumbed to his injuries at Massachusetts General Hospital. His last words, spoken at the murder scene, were: “They took my wallet.”
OF TOWNS AND GOWNS
The weekend after Raustein’s murder, doors around Cambridge were being locked and nooses were being measured. Students told reporters they were scared to walk on campus; MIT leaders exacerbated fears by warning people to avoid the area after dark; some activists petitioned administrators to increase lighting along Memorial Drive, while one student wrote a letter to the MIT newspaper, the Tech, asserting that the campus gun ban ought to be lifted. To make matters worse, in an unrelated incident two days after Raustein’s murder, a 30-year-old Roxbury man was arrested for striking an 18-year-old MIT freshman with a radio in an attempt to rob her.
In the week following the Raustein murder, the media focused on three tangential stories that proved especially damning to the suspects. The first suggestively tied the Raustein incident to a string of muggings and murders recently endured by European tourists in Florida. The second regarded a game called “knockout,” which authorities alleged the three were playing on the night of Raustein’s murder. Knockout — according to a September 20, 1992, Globe story — “called for the trio to select a victim at random and hit that person, with the hope of ‘winning’ by sending the victim to the ground with one punch.” The paper attributed the “knockout” tip to “a source close to the murder investigation.”
There was also a third, much larger issue consuming news cycles. After friends of the perpetrators showed little remorse for Raustein, town-versus-gown hostilities reached alarming levels. Among other things, neighborhood youths told reporters that the victim was “just some MIT guy,” and that “[prosecutors] can’t make [McHugh] pay with his whole life.” One Globe writer who mined East Cambridge for sympathy concluded: “When reporters asked questions, neighborhood residents could only think of their own.”
Cambridge Mayor Kenneth Reeves reacted diligently; he met with MIT and Rindge and Latin officials in the wake of Raustein’s murder, and charged Cambridge high schools to put in motion their more than 20 established violence-prevention programs. On September 24 — which was coincidentally McHugh’s 16th birthday — MIT held a vigil for Raustein on campus, where several Rindge and Latin kids joined college students in grieving.
A little more than one week later, on October 3, community relations crumbled right inside Cambridge City Hall.
Reeves invited a mix of 18 MIT and Rindge and Latin students to discuss the underlying tension between high-school and college kids in Cambridge. Townies approached the event defensively; in the press their classmates had been blasted, and some were simply unwilling to smile for the cameras. The Raustein murder was national news at this point, and the New York Times was on hand to report the failed attempt at unity: “Most people I know don’t feel any connection to what your lives are like,” one Rindge and Latin student was quoted telling the nearby crowd of co-eds.
On October 13, Donovan, Velez, and McHugh were indicted by a Middlesex County grand jury, the two former for murder and armed robbery, and the latter for murder only because of his juvenile status.
THE TRIAL
Before he was sentenced at 18 years old, Donovan came of age in the shadow of Middlesex Superior Court. His East Cambridge stomping ground — about one square mile of modest boxy houses that resemble massive Tetris pieces from above — was the type of neighborhood where schoolyard scuffles were regular occurrences. Donovan lived the life of an average semi-troublesome teen; he hung around local parks, played basketball, dated girls, and often drank beers and smoked pot on weekends. But while Donovan acted immature, and even tough at times — he was once arrested for trespassing when he was 15 — it would have been a stretch to imagine him spending his 18th birthday overlooking East Cambridge from a courthouse holding cell, awaiting trial in connection with the senseless slaying of an MIT student.
But from September 1992 to October 1993, Donovan found himself in that position. Through the barred cellblock windows in Middlesex Superior he watched his buddies shooting hoops at Taylor Park. Sometimes his friends waved and shouted at the barred windows. And when his mom and stepfather visited, he could see them walk down Charles Street. While the proximity to life outside the wall made Donovan’s reality significantly darker, in some ways it also assured him that he would eventually return home — if not immediately after his trial, then following a relatively short bid.
What few people understood at the time was that Middlesex County District Attorney Tom Reilly and his assistant prosecutors planned to hold Donovan jointly accountable for the stabbing to which McHugh alone had already confessed. Raustein, an aeronautics and astronautics major, had been slain near the Hayden Library on Memorial Drive, and the outrage surrounding the case was such that sentencing one underage culprit alone — to the maximum of 20 years — would not have been politically prudent.
McHugh, after all, was only 15. So, despite hard and public attempts by Middlesex prosecutors to try him as an adult, a juvenile-court judge ruled in June 1993 that he should be tried as a juvenile. On October 7, 1993, McHugh was sentenced to the maximum of 20 years in prison.
At 18 years old, Velez was well into legal adulthood when his makeshift entourage jumped Raustein. He later agreed to testify against his friends in exchange for a manslaughter plea.
Whereas Velez and McHugh fit neatly into age categories, Donovan was harder to classify, legally — and therefore he caught the short end of the lucky stick. He had turned 17 three weeks prior to the Raustein murder; in the eyes of Middlesex Superior, he was grown enough to face a life term.
Even worse, during his trial — which commenced on October 26, 1993, and concluded two days later — his attorney was decidedly outperformed by prosecuting Assistant District Attorney John McEvoy, who convinced the jury that all three defendants had engaged in a conspiracy to assault and rob Fredheim and Raustein (and that Donovan knew that McHugh was armed). The joint-venture/felony-murder theory was central to his case, backed by critical testimony from Velez.
In order to invoke the felony-murder rule in Massachusetts, prosecutors must prove that the slaying in question occurred in the commission or attempted commission of a crime. If successfully prosecuted, the judge would then mete out a sentence punishable with death or imprisonment for life. Furthermore, a guilty verdict must conclude that the death resulted from the natural and probable consequence of the underlying felony. In other words: McEvoy had to prove that Velez, McHugh, and Donovan set out that Friday night to commit armed robbery, and that — as a result of a felonious chain of events set in motion by Donovan’s punch— Raustein wound up on the lethal end of McHugh’s buck knife.
Forty-six states currently have felony-murder-type doctrines on the books and, though the statutes are regularly challenged by human-rights groups and legal activists, they are used to try hundreds of defendants each year. Equal Justice Initiative founder and director Bryan Stevenson says: “The tolerance has become so low [with felony murder] that everyone is reluctant to show mercy.” Stevenson also says that, while it can be relatively easy to reverse wrongful convictions using DNA evidence, it is much more difficult to exonerate inmates who were “over-sentenced” via joint venture.
Judge Robert A. Barton, who gave Donovan his life sentence 16 years ago as Donovan’s Rindge and Latin peers watched from the gallery, reflects similar sentiments. “If somebody didn’t hold the weapon, then he shouldn’t have to rot in prison for the rest of his life,” says Barton, who, in retrospect, believes that Donovan’s sentence was harsh and should be commuted so long as he is rehabilitated.
Barton, however, admittedly felt differently in 1993. A Marine veteran who colleagues call “Old School,” the judge was known for requiring his male jurors to wear neckties. Barton was himself a former Middlesex district attorney, and showed little mercy under the circumstances. To the overruled objection of Donovan’s defense, Barton allowed the prosecution to utilize such physical evidence as the T-shirt Donovan wore on the night of Raustein’s murder. McEvoy had no incriminating forensic use for the garment, but instead used the shirt’s Black Death Vodka logo to attack Donovan’s character. Barton also denied a request from Donovan’s defense attorney, James O’Donovan, for the trial to be moved. “The [Raustein] incident was the subject of massive pre-trial publicity by the news media,” O’Donovan wrote in a motion for continuance. “The trial of this defendant of these particular charges at this time under present circumstances would deny him a fair and impartial trial.”
Other elements of the trial proved Kafka-esque to Donovan. Though forensic evidence proved Donovan did not personally grab Raustein’s wallet, for example, that was of no consequence, because, according to a later appellate court-case review, under the Massachusetts joint-venture theory, “the jury did not need to find that the defendant took the wallet himself, if he was willing and able to help the one who did take it.” Experts testified that McHugh’s were the only fingerprints found on the blade, and yet McEvoy was able to persuade jurors that Donovan had prior knowledge of — and even handled — the murder weapon.
The prosecution also succeeded in spite of Velez’s witness-stand admission that there was no prior discussion between the three teenagers about ambushing Raustein and Fredheim. The jury’s unanimous verdict was likely the result of other crucial parts of Velez’s testimony — namely his unsubstantiated claim that all three boys had tried to rob the liquor store across from the Royal Sonesta Hotel, and that Donovan was aware McHugh had a knife.
Department of State Police spokespeople did not produce by deadline Velez’s original six-page statement from the night of his arrest, for which months ago the Phoenix filed a formal request. But court documents confirm that his story changed between his Miranda-waived interview at the Lower Basin State Police bunker and his testifying at Donovan’s October 1993 trial. (After four months of detailed inquiries, McEvoy decided he was ultimately unwilling to discuss the Donovan case with the Phoenix all these years later. Then–district attorney Reilly — who 16 years ago said the “only injustice” in the case was that McHugh was tried as a juvenile — also declined to be interviewed.)
O’Donovan tried discrediting Velez on the strength of a tip that his client received from a fellow Middlesex inmate named William Kenney, who allegedly overheard Velez confess to a third party: “Please tell Joe I’m sorry I have to lie. I don’t want to spend the rest of my life in jail.” At trial, however, all three convicts were viewed skeptically. Kenney was persistent, even in the face of McEvoy’s harsh cross-examination, but O’Donovan was outmatched and nervous, fumbling procedure and apologizing. On his turn, Bruce Perry, the inmate who supposedly spoke directly with Velez, compromised his own credibility by admitting to having a half-dozen aliases.
But other than Donovan’s hapless witnesses, and his own refusal to accept a second-degree murder plea that could have allowed his parole after 15 years, it was an apparent lack of juror diligence that most damaged Donovan’s case. The day after the trial ended, one juror told the Cambridge Chronicle: “When we realized what the outcome was, we realized what an injustice this was. I don’t feel like he should be in [prison] for first-degree murder, I don’t believe that at all.”
Another anonymous juror told reporters that she and others were pressured by male jurors to
reach a fast decision, and that one juror was anxious to return home to her newborn child. Furthermore, though McHugh was sentenced three weeks earlier, none of the jurors knew that the minor who stabbed Raustein would serve just two decades.
WHERE ARE THEY NOW?
More than 20 years have passed since Raustein was murdered on Memorial Drive, but he has not been forgotten. In 1993, a NASA shuttle carried a Norwegian flag in honor of his dreams to pursue space technology. The next year, Mayor Reeves recognized the courage of Raustein’s parents, Elmer and Inghild, at a Martin Luther King Jr. Day celebration in Cambridge. And to this day, MIT gives an annual award in his name recognizing outstanding students for scholarship, teamwork, and community building. Raustein’s friend, Fredheim, is a respected aquatic researcher in Norway.
McHugh’s age, which prevented him from receiving a life sentence, helped him again further down the line. Since he waived a jury in his first trial, he was entitled to an automatic subsequent trial by jury under the “trial de novo” system, which Massachusetts abolished in 1993. McHugh lost his appeal in January 1994 — at which time Judge Roanne Sragow commented that McHugh had “no respect for human life” — but, due to a now-closed loophole that allowed juvenile murderers to earn early release with good behavior, was freed in April 2003 after serving slightly more than 10 years. In 1999, McHugh informed his public defender that he wished to sign an affidavit “swearing to the actual events of the night of September 18, 1992.” But though Donovan’s then-counsel petitioned the Office of the Attorney General, the gesture never materialized.
Less than five years after his early release, McHugh was arrested in Virginia on interstate-drug-trafficking charges in January 2008. Now 32, McHugh was allegedly transporting five kilos of crack cocaine with his old East Cambridge pal Alfred Baldasaro, who, outside McHugh’s arraignment in 1992, told reporters that he did not believe what the newspapers were saying about his friend. McHugh is still awaiting trial in Greensville County, Virginia, and his state-appointed attorney (who did not respond to several Phoenix interview requests) is reportedly arguing that troopers illegally searched his vehicle.
Velez, the most elusive of the three, has been off the map since his early release in 2004; attorneys and civilian advocates for Donovan have tried numerous attempts to locate him, with no success. In a 1996 motion asking to revise his sentence, Velez wrote: “In the wake of assistance in this matter I now must live within a world of coldness and great hate for anyone who assists the authorities. . . . I ask on behalf of myself, on plea of my family, who now resides in N.J., that it be within this honorable court’s power to ease the constant suffering I now call my life.”
Donovan’s appeal was rejected on March 29, 1996. After more than five months of deliberation, defense claims of inadequate counsel and insufficient juror instructions were acknowledged, but did not warrant a reversal of Donovan’s conviction. “Assault and battery is a lesser included offense of murder in the second degree and the jury should have been so instructed,” wrote Assistant District Attorney for the Commonwealth Rosemary Daly Mellor. “The judge’s failure to do so, however, did not result in a substantial likelihood of a miscarriage of justice.”
Though the Cambridge Chronicle reporter who exposed juror incompetence filed an affidavit with the Superior Court Department, the written testimony was not considered in the appeal process. The Commonwealth acknowledged that Velez “did not include several damaging facts concerning the defendant in his statements to police until just before trial,” but decided that was also not enough to nullify the guilty verdict.
In 2000, Donovan was sent to the Departmental Disciplinary Unit (DDU) at the MCI-Walpole correctional facility following a physical altercation with another prisoner. He was later found to have acted in self-defense, but, due to mandatory procedure, still spent four years in solitary confinement awaiting his prison hearing. Four months after his 2004 re-admittance to the general population, he returned to DDU again following another scuffle, only to be re-released after it was found that he acted to protect a correctional officer.
In March 2009, Donovan was relocated to the medium-security facility at the Old Colony Correctional Center in Bridgewater. He’s not thrilled about having a prison roommate for the first time, but is now able to have physical contact with relatives and loved ones. His mother, who recently lost her second husband, visits often, as does his father, a Vietnam veteran who is retired from the phone company. Donovan also frequently sees advocates, including his attorney uncle, Jack, and his great aunt, Carol Hallisey, who helped build the Web site supportjoedonovan.org to solicit public sympathy.
Donovan’s spirits are high — he passes time reading science fiction and teaching other inmates how to illustrate — but his chances of seeing sunshine again are slim, as the last Massachusetts governor to grant a pardon or commutation was Jane Swift in 2003. As for receiving a new trial, he has had difficulty securing a pro-bono attorney who has adequate time and resources to move his case forward against less-than-encouraging legal precedents.
Whether he’s behind barbed wires in Bridgewater or back home with his family, though, Donovan has no choice but to regularly revisit the decision that steered him onto his unfortunate life trajectory; his right fist never healed properly and he’s reminded of his fatal punch every time he writes, eats, shaves, and draws. He might not have wielded the knife that killed an MIT student, but Donovan has no doubt that Raustein’s blood is ultimately on his hands. As he recently wrote in his first-ever attempt at correspondence with the Raustein family (Donovan is hopeful for a response, but does not realistically expect one), those thoughts are often with him. Even though he never meant for Raustein to die, his death is a cross that Donovan has long accepted as his to bear.
This feature first appeared in the Boston Phoenix
