On a hot night in July 1995, Janet Downing, a 42-year-old mother of four, was brutally stabbed 98 times in her home in Somerville, a city two miles northwest of Boston.
Now readers can decide if Politics sent an innocent boy to adult prison for.
The Innocence Program has recently taken on Eddie\'s case.
Now after painstaking research and examination of each step of the investigation, trial transcripts and the forensic evidence, Nash makes the case that Eddie could not have committed the crime and that other viable suspects were never properly considered.
Appointed Eddie\'s guardian ad litem, Nash attended every court session and eventually gained access to all his files.
But did the justice system fail Eddie? That\'s the contention of author-attorney Margo Nash in her explosive expose, THE Politics OF MURDER.
Other states began to follow suit.
Court TV covered the trial in adult court gavel to gavel, calling it "the Altar boy Murder case." His highly publicized case changed the juvenile laws in Massachusetts.
Eddie O\'Brien\'s case garnered both local and national publicity: He was the youthful Irish Catholic "boy next door." His grandfather was the retired chief of the Somerville Police Department.
Both the Massachusetts governor and an elected district attorney who personally litigated this case supported juvenile justice reform, and both aspired to higher offices.
A movement hoping to stop the supposed rise of young "superpredators" was sweeping the nation, and juvenile offenders were the targets.
As laid out in THE Politics OF MURDER, the timing of this case did not bode well for Eddie.
Yet none of that mattered because powers far beyond his Somerville neighborhood decided that Eddie needed to be guilty.
Others had both.
He had neither motive nor opportunity to commit the crime.
He was not mentally ill.
But why Eddie? He had no prior history of criminal behavior.
Within hours, a suspect was identified: 15-year-old Eddie O\'Brien, the best friend of one of Janet\'s sons.
On a hot night in July 1995, Janet Downing, a 42-year-old mother of four, was brutally stabbed 98 times in her home in Somerville, a city two miles northwest of Boston
