In 1995, Sean Ellis was sentenced in life in prison for the murder of a Boston police detective. Two decades later, he was freed when all the charges against him were dropped amid revelations of police corruption in his case. Through Ellis’s decades of legal battles and eventual release, Netflix’s new true crime docuseries Trial 4 touches on themes of systemic racism, police corruption, and wrongful incarceration in the American justice system. Around 3 a.m. on September 26, 1993, Boston detective John Mulligan was shot five times in the face while asleep in his patrol car in a Walgreens parking lot. Mulligan was well known in the department and the city at large to be a tough cop, and the documentary notes his non-stop work ethic and incredibly high arrest records. When he was found dead, his gun was missing and the driver’s side door of the car was unlocked. One witness asserted that she saw a white woman in the passenger seat of Mulligan’s car just before 3 a.m. that night; another said she saw a Black man crouched next to the vehicle when she entered the store. Police initially had no suspects for the crime. Three days after Mulligan’s murder, on Septembe… Click below to read the full story from Esquire
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