Tears filled Angela Cavanaugh’s eyes as she walked out of Courtroom 17 of Worcester Superior Court on Thursday, the weight of a two-year legal battle having finally come to an end.
Cavanaugh held a tissue to her face and hugged loved ones outside the courtroom Thursday. For the Worcester-area defense lawyer, the moment was one of positivity and catharsis, as Superior Court Judge Jeffrey Locke minutes earlier found her and former Worcester district attorney candidate Blake Rubin not guilty of conspiring with a Kilby Street gang member to keep the key witness in a human trafficking trial away from court in the summer of 2018.
The thoughts on Cavanaugh’s mind outside the courtroom in the wake of the conclusion of the four-day, jury-waived trial were twofold: She thought of Massachusetts defense attorneys like her and also of being able to return home to her daughter for the first time while not under indictment since 2019.
“This was a trial against defense attorneys everywhere. I want defense attorneys to continue to zealously advocate for their clients, to not let this outrageous behavior from the government stop us,” Cavanaugh told MassLive while working through tears. “We’re all our clients have. Keep fighting for them. Don’t let this stop you from that.”
Still a practicing attorney, Cavanaugh’s career plans haven’t changed since being indicted and later being found innocent. The lawyer intends to continues to defend clients who need her representation the most.
“I’m going to go home and be with my daughter and hug her, which some of our clients don’t have the opportunity to do, and then I hope we can work together, all of us, to make the system better for all of us,” Cavanaugh said.
The verdicts handed down by Locke on Thursday marked the closure of the controversial criminal charges lodged against Cavanaugh and Rubin in 2018 that their lawyers fought passionately to put to rest. The judge’s ruling also brought an end to a witness intimidation case that many defense attorneys in the Bay State thought should have never been brought forth by prosecutors to begin with.
Two years ago, a statewide Suffolk County grand jury chose to indict Cavanaugh with conspiracy and both Rubin and gang member Fabian Beltran with the dual charges of conspiracy and witness intimidation.
Although the judge ruled that the evidence the prosecution presented only implicated Beltran and his associates in the scheme to prevent the witness from testifying in his human trafficking case, the gang member was still granted immunity earlier this week for serving as a witness against Cavanaugh and Rubin.
Beltran is currently serving two concurrent sentences of 6 to 8 years on a human trafficking charge and 4 to 5 years on a charge of deriving support from a prostitute for his role in profiting off the prostitution of a woman, whose heroin addiction he fueled. She was the key witness in the case against him.
The prosecution’s argument, laid out by Plymouth Assistant District Attorney Amanda Fowle during the trial this week, was that Rubin, who represented Beltran in his 2018 human trafficking case, and Cavanaugh, who represented the witness in question, conspired to bail the witness out of jail in May 2018 and send her to Maine so she wouldn’t be able to testify in the gang member’s trial.
Fowle asserted Cavanaugh provided the bail information of her client to an associate of Beltran, while Rubin came up with the idea to bail the witness out and directed the gang member to do so.
Meanwhile, Rubin’s defense team, attorney Peter L. Ettenberg and co-counsel Jackie Greenhalgh, argued the evidence against their client was thin while the evidence against Beltran was extensive — assertions made by Locke in his ruling Thursday and in a 25-page opinion that moved the witness intimidation case to trial earlier this year.
Cavanaugh’s defense team, Michael Wilcox and Louis Aloise, also made the case that the evidence against their client was lacking. They claimed that if the attorney gave out the bail information of the witness to Beltran’s associate, she did so unknowingly and certainly not with a plot in mind to keep the woman, a victim of human trafficking, from testifying in the gang member’s trial in June 2018.
Thursday afternoon, following days of testimony from the witness herself, Beltran, the gang member’s ex-girlfriend, his former driver and the wife of his former co-defendant in the human trafficking case, Locke made his decision in the witness intimidation trial.
The judge ruled that Fowle wasn’t able to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that Cavanaugh and Rubin were involved in the witness intimidation conspiracy. The testimonies against the two lawyers from Beltran and his associates were unreliable, and phone calls the prosecutor claimed proved the attorneys were communicating with either the gang member or those close to him didn’t support the charges against them.
“I find the evidence falls short,” Locke said while going through the reasons for his ruling.
On Tuesday, Beltran took the stand to serve as a witness against Rubin. However, his testimony was stilted throughout the line of questioning from the defense as well as the prosecution. He refused to answer some of their inquiries at times, despite the fact that under his grant of immunity, he had his Fifth Amendment privileges waived and was required to answer all questions in the trial truthfully or face a perjury charge.
Still, the gang member admitted that he went with his driver, Felix Linares, to Chicopee on May 26, 2018, to pick up the witness who was planning to testify against him. He paid $450 to get her bailed out of the Western Massachusetts Regional Women’s Correctional Center in the city, and in the days that followed, she fled to Maine before eventually being arrested.
While Beltran claimed it was Rubin who was the one to come up with the idea to bail the woman out and have her flee to Maine, one of the prosecution’s own witness, Nashalee Jennings, pushed back on that argument, asserting the lawyer didn’t tell the gang member to drive to Chicopee to bail the witness out.
Both Linares, Beltran’s driver, and Jennings, the wife of his former co-defendant, were granted immunity in the case, which Ettenberg argued was the biggest tragedy of the witness intimidation trial.
“The commonwealth had no choice but to give all these witnesses immunity. They were in fact the ones who committed this crime, and they all walk away free and clear,” the defense lawyer said.
Outside of Worcester Superior Court on Thursday, Rubin said he was “very fortunate” to have an experienced judge on the case.
“Judge Locke has been doing this a long time, and he’s probably one of the best judicial minds on the benches,” Rubin said. “I knew from the very beginning that we had an intelligent, experienced jurist handling this matter, who would render the only decision that could possibly be rendered in this case: that neither myself nor Angela had anything to do with the horrific acts that Mr. Beltran admitted he did.”
The claim that Cavanaugh was guilty of conspiring to intimidate the witness was also refuted by the judge, who noted that when the lawyer found out her client had gone to Maine, she called the woman to say that her chances of getting into a rehabilitation program were now tarnished.
Once the woman returned to Massachusetts, Cavanaugh continued to try to get her client into a rehab program in Westborough, where she had a pending criminal court case.
“It was Ms. Cavanaugh that worked tirelessly to get you into that program? Was it not?” Wilcox, Cavanaugh’s attorney, asked the witness when she was testifying on the witness stand.
“Yes,” she answered.
The “only just result” that could’ve happened, happened, Rubin said. The lawyer added that it has been a difficult past year and a half for him given the “awful, awful allegation hanging over” him.
“I wouldn’t want to do one minute in state prison. I mean, I wouldn’t want anyone to do one second in state prison,” Rubin said. “The potential penalty for me as a lawyer, as a practicing lawyer since 1995, would have been a loss of my career, an inability to support my family, an inability to support myself.”
“These charges that they brought against Angela and myself were designed or could of had the implication of destroying two lawyers, two careers and honestly a chilling effect on the defense bar in general,” he added.
Rubin’s opinion was shared by Anthony Benedetti, chief counsel for the Committee for Public Counsel Services in Massachusetts, who argued that the indictments against the two lawyers should never have been brought forward in the first place.
The charges against Cavanaugh and Rubin, Benedetti told MassLive sent a message: “Be careful about how you represent your clients, because it could come back to bite you.”
“The message to defense attorneys is that they shouldn’t be as zealous or they’ll face repercussions,” he added.
Benedetti further asserted that Rubin and Cavanaugh were targeted for doing their job of advising and representing their client.
“When prosecutors seek criminal convictions against defense lawyers based on a web of nefarious inferences and the testimony of immunized witnesses, they send an intimidating message to all defense lawyers that your freedom and livelihood are at risk if you do your job and represent clients zealously,” he said. “That kind of message, especially coming from prosecutors, is extremely dangerous and obstructs our system of justice.”
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