Prosecutor Surged On, Victim Says ‘No’

A barrage of media coverage and scrutiny descended upon Harvard’s former football captain this summer, fueling a domestic assault case where the victim urged prosecutors to drop charges, and friends, teammates—and the victim herself—rejected police’s version of the events.

Yet, the prosecution charged ahead.

Last Wednesday, just two days before the case was scheduled for trial, Cambridge District Court Judge George R. Sprague ’60 dismissed it, against the objections of the prosecutor. After months of speculation and rumor, it was finally over.

On the cusp of graduation, the class of 2006 revelled in their last night together at the Senior Soiree. On that warm June evening, the class danced and slipped into a collective alcohol-induced haze. Matthew C. Thomas ’06-’07 ended up in handcuffs, charged with the assault of his ex-girlfriend in her Currier House dorm room.

The All Ivy-League linebacker was subsequently stripped of his football captaincy and barred from playing on the football team. He will have to perform 50 hours of community service, complete an anger-management program and his current alcohol-treatment plan, and stay out of trouble until June of next year.

But the blot will remain on his record, and supporters wonder how a case with an uncooperative victim could have carried on.

AGAINST HER WISHES

Jury selection was just days away. But the judge called the parties into a pretrial conference two days earlier in an unpredictable move and effectively dismissed the charges.

And in cases where the victim did not press charges—and was fervently against them—it is typical to halt the criminal trial, according to Wallace W. Sherwood, associate professor of criminal justice at the Northeastern University in Boston.

“I would say in this case, nothing irregular has occurred at all,” he said. “It’s extremely difficult to prosecute a case if the victim doesn’t want to press charges.”

But Assistant District Attorney Sean J. Casey knew the victim was unwilling a full two months before the case’s dismissal.

The 22-year-old victim, who was an undergraduate at the time, told The Crimson she never pressed any charges against Thomas and asked Sprague to dismiss the case.

Initial reports stated that an inebriated Thomas strangled her with one hand, and then “suddenly lifted her and drove his knee into her chest.” She was brought to Mount Auburn Hospital, where she was treated for injuries including “a large welt across [the victim’s] lower back.”

But the victim met with the district attorney July 26 and gave a different story, saying that “she wished this whole case was dropped,” according to court documents.

“He started to flail his arms and may have hit her and this may have caused her to fall back on her futon hitting her back on the bar,” according to court documents. The victim also told the district attorney that she and Thomas were still close—and that after he apologized to her and her parents, she forgave him.

Sherwood said that when the victim has a relationship with the perpetrator, as in this case, it ought to be settled outside the courtroom.

“I see that as the system working, and it’s a good thing in terms of clearing out cases that don’t need to be in the system,” he said. “The criminal process should be the last way to resolve a dispute.”

The man who negotiated this out-of-court settlement finds himself often presiding over the cases of Harvard students. The district attorney’s office would not comment on the rationale behind Sprague’s decision, but the judge’s undergraduate experience at the College might shed light on his views.

A BLUE-BLOOD CRIMSONITE

Ted McKinney ’60, who lived a floor above the judge during their freshman year, said Sprague was a focused student with conservative tendencies.

Fellow classmate Foley Vaughn ’60 wrote in an e-mail that Sprague was “very Brahmin,...not a man of the people.”

McKinney recalled Sprague and his roommates’ consternation over an impromptu hockey match held in McKinney’s Mower Hall suite, where a crushed beer can served as the puck and the fireplace as the goal.

“They ascended to the third floor as a group to protest the noise,” McKinney wrote in an e-mail.

As an upperclassman, Sprague found solace in the company of other young Republicans, McKinney said.

“He flaunted the Republican lifestyle and even went so far as to work openly for Republican causes,” McKinney wrote. “He was steadfast and unflappable in his ideology.”

That Sprague was an alumnus himself probably would not influence his leniency on a fellow Crimsonite.

“I don’t think it would change his judgment because, with my experience of Harvard...some people come out being very anti-Harvard,” he said.

NO MORE GAMEPLAY

Thomas, a 6’3”, 245-pound Marylandian, was known to be aggressive on the field but not off of it, according to friends and teammates.

“I was so devastated when I found out,” said Eric A. Schultz ’09, a linebacker on the football team. “All the younger players admired him a great deal—I admired him more than anyone on the team. From what it sounds like the whole incident was just blown out of proportion and it came out very harshly in the media.”

Football coach Tim Murphy said in June that if the allegations against Thomas proved true, he would dismiss him from the team. And although last week’s dismissal might, to some, clear Thomas’ name, Murphy told The Crimson that Thomas will not be allowed back on the team, despite his one remaining semester of eligibility.

“Even if he’s proven innocent prior to the season, it would be terribly difficult for him to function as a Harvard football player in this environment, in this fishbowl environment,” Murphy said over the summer. “If he was proven innocent, if the charges were dropped, all those things, most people wouldn’t realize it and they would assume the worst. They would assume the worst about Matt, they would assume the worst about the program.”

—Staff writer Anna L. Tong can be reached at tong@fas.harvard.edu.