At about 1:40 p.m. on July 7, 1997, 27-year-old Domingo Mejia, the driver of a “jitney” cab, was fatally shot in his cab, which crashed into a fence on Hewes Street near Wakullah Street in the Roxbury neighborhood of Boston, Massachusetts.

One witness told police he saw two dark-skinned Black men, about 20 years old, run from the scene.

Mejia had been shot once in the right side of his neck. The bullet, a .25-caliber, exited on the left side and lodged in the speedometer of his red two-door 1989 Cavalier.

Police interviewed men who also drove similar unlicensed jitney cabs, and one said that two men had come to a group of the drivers near a market in Dorchester. Mejia had said he would take them where they wanted to go. One of the drivers, Antonio DeJesus, said one of the men was less than 20 years old, about 5 feet 4 inches tall and 145 pounds. DeJesus said that man got into the back seat, positioning himself in the middle. The other man, who DeJesus said also was younger than 20 years old, 5 feet 9 inches tall and about 160 pounds, got into the front passenger seat.

The crime went unsolved for more than three years. In December 1999, police arrested Madhi Sharpless, who was then 26 years old, on outstanding warrants for receiving a stolen motor vehicle and unarmed burglary. While in custody, Sharpless said he had information about the killing of Mejia. He said he had been present when a man he knew as “Flaco,” which means skinny in Spanish, had shot Mejia. He said the gunman worked at a McDonald’s restaurant in Central Square.

The burglary charge was amended to trespassing, Sharpless pled guilty and was sentenced to one day. He was released that day.

For the next several months, Boston police detectives attempted to locate Sharpless to follow up on his statement about the shooting. On August 17, 2000, with the help of Sharpless’s father, Sharpless was brought to the homicide unit. After about 90 minutes of being interviewed, detectives turned on a tape recorder.

Responding to questions, many of them leading or suggestive, Sharpless said he met up with Flaco, whom he had known for some time, and they decided to get a ride from Mejia to a location in Roxbury where Sharpless could buy marijuana. He said that Flaco got into the back seat and he got into the front passenger seat.

After purchasing marijuana, they stopped so Sharpless could talk to his father. They then directed Mejia to the corner of Hewes and Wakullah, where Sharpless said a friend he knew as “Pete” lived. Sharpless said they stopped and he called out, but Pete was not there. As he started to return to the car, he said, he saw Flaco and Mejia in a physical altercation. As he got close to the rear of the car, there was a flash of gunfire and the front windshield broke out, Sharpless said.

The car lurched forward and crashed into a fence. Sharpless said that as Flaco got out of the passenger side, Mejia was clinging to his pant leg. Flaco wrested free and Mejia fell into the street.

Flaco and Sharpless walked to a nearby McDonald’s where Flaco used the bathroom to wash off blood. After getting food, they got a ride from Sharpless’s father to a West Indian store where Flaco bought a Bob Marley shirt that he put on over his blood-stained shirt, Sharpless said. Sharpless claimed that Flaco carried a two-shot revolver.

After visiting the McDonald’s in Central Square in Cambridge, the police determined that Flaco was Daniel Pina, who was then 25 years old and a native of Cape Verde, Africa. He was 6 feet 3 inches tall and, at 170 pounds, deserving of a nickname that means skinny in Spanish.

On Sunday, August 20, police came to the home where Pina lived with his parents and asked him to come to the station, telling him that someone had his wallet and had been using his identification cards to commit fraud. Although he had his wallet, Pina went with the police to the station.

Pina was one of seven children. In 1977, when he was two years old, his parents emigrated from Brava Island, Cape Verde, bringing only their youngest, a three-month baby. The other siblings remained in their aunt’s home, which had no indoor plumbing. Pina was noticeably mentally handicapped at an early age. His siblings remembered him playing with his feces.

Pina and the rest of the family arrived in the U.S. just before Pina’s fifth birthday. He struggled with English and in school, and he was often the butt of bullying and ridicule because he was in special education classes and spent most of his time with two of his sisters. He did so because his mother had asked him to be their protector.

Eventually, after failing all his classes and repeating 10th grade three times, Pina dropped out of school. He was 20 years old, and he wanted to find work so he could buy his own clothes. He had found work at McDonalds, though he was confined to cleanup duties because he could not read.

After two-and-a-half hours of interrogation, during which the detectives showed Pina autopsy photographs of Mejia, Pina gave a tape-recorded statement saying that he shot Mejia. Years later, an analysis of the recording showed that about two-thirds of the questions detectives asked were suggestive or leading.

Pina would later say he falsely confessed because, after seeing the photographs of Mejia, he felt sorry for his family and felt someone had to take responsibility. At the time, Pina told police that the morning of the shooting, he had drunk 12 to 13 beers and five shots of cognac. He said that he left the bar at about 1 a.m., and met a man he knew as “M,” who asked him if he wanted to do a stick-up.

Pina said they went to the market where they got into Mejia’s car. Pina said he was in the front seat and M was in the back seat. This was the opposite of what Sharpless claimed.

Pina said that after they stopped to look for M’s friend, M returned to the car and got in the back seat. Pina said that at some point, he pulled out the gun that Sharpless had given him. When asked what Mejia did, Pina replied, “As soon as he told me, he told the gypsy cab to give him the money, to give us, him the money or else, ya know I’m gonna shoot. So that’s, from there, that’s, that’s when I pulled the trigger.”

His statement was confusing and conflicted with Sharpless’s statement. Pina at one point said the windshield of Mejia’s car was already broken when they first got into the vehicle. At another point, he said he had to smash the passenger side window to get out of the car because the door was jammed, although crime scene photos showed the car door was open and the window was intact.

He said the gun was black and he thought it was .38-caliber. The bullet recovered in the autopsy was a 25-caliber.

He was charged with first-degree murder and armed robbery. On September 8, 2000, Sharpless was arrested on similar charges. Both were subsequently indicted on the charges by a Suffolk County grand jury.

Pina’s family hired a private attorney to represent him. By September 2001, a year later, the court had granted continuances 12 times, four of which the attorney had actually attended. Pina was never brought to court. In October 2001, the defense attorney moved to withdraw, citing a lack of financial cooperation from his family. Another attorney, Robert George, was appointed by the Committee for Public Counsel Services.

The case was continued from time to time with another lawyer standing in for George, who filed boilerplate motions for discovery that the prosecution had already provided. In October 2002, a year later, George made his first appearance in court. The case was continued variously for months. Over the course of almost two years of representation, George had filed no substantive motions.

Eventually, on October 2, 2003, more than three years after his arrest, Pina was brought to court for trial. It was his first appearance in court since his arraignment on September 27, 2000. Prior to the case being called that morning, George filed a motion to suppress Pina’s statement.

George told the judge that Pina’s family had tried to hire new counsel the previous day and that Pina wanted a continuance to have more time to decide whether he was going to plead guilty or go to trial. The prosecution had offered to allow Pina to plead to second-degree murder.

Questioned by the judge, Pina said he did not feel that George was “on my side.” He said he wanted to get a lawyer “that I know is going to…defend me and be on my side that can know what to do for me.”

George told the judge a guilty plea was a good result, that he had “fully researched the issue” for the motion to suppress and believed that Pina’s waiver of his Miranda rights was intelligent and voluntary. The judge denied Pina’s request for a continuance. The motion to suppress was never litigated.

The plea went forward. Pina was convicted of second-degree murder. The armed robbery charge was placed on file, meaning no sentence was imposed. Pina was sentenced to life in prison with the possibility of parole after 15 years.

In November 2003, Sharpless went to trial in Suffolk County Superior Court, after he rejected an offer from the prosecution to plead guilty to manslaughter. Two days into the trial, he said he would plead guilty to manslaughter, but then changed his mind and rejected the offer.

Prior to closing arguments on November 18, 2003, Sharpless said he would plead guilty to second-degree murder. However, during the plea hearing, he changed his mind again. Later that day, the jury acquitted him. A week later, one of the jurors wrote to the prosecutor saying that some of the jurors felt “railroaded” by the jury foreman into reaching the verdict.

In 2004, an immigration judge ordered Pina removed to Cape Verde should he be released. During his incarceration, he completed more than 70 programs. He tried to obtain a GED three times, but failed. In 2015, at the age of 40, Pina’s reading and language skills were at the second-grade level.

He had his first parole hearing in October 2015, represented by a student attorney from the Prisoners’ Rights Clinic. The approach was for him to take responsibility for the crime as other inmates had told Pina that this was something he had to do, even if it was not true, and that he had to tell the Parole Board what they wanted to hear, even if he had to make something up. Despite hours of drilling and study, Pina insisted the crime occurred at 1 a.m., not 1 p.m. And although he took responsibility, the board denied his parole, saying he was “not yet rehabilitated.”

Prior to his second parole hearing in 2020, his student attorneys helped him review the facts of the case and noted for the Parole Board that he had “undiagnosed cognitive limitations,” and requested that he be paroled into Immigrations and Customs Enforcement (ICE) custody for removal to Cape Verde. Pina apologized to Mejia’s family, took responsibility, and continued to give answers that contradicted the known facts of the crime. The Parole Board had noted these discrepancies in its decision in 2015.

On March 26, 2020, in response to the COVID-19 pandemic, the parole board concluded Pina was rehabilitated. He was released on May 1, 2020, directly into ICE custody where he remained until he was removed to Cape Verde on December 2, 2020, although none of his family remained there.

Six months earlier, the Prison Rights’ Clinic requested the Massachusetts Committee for Public Counsel Services appoint an attorney to take up a post-conviction investigation of Pina’s case. Attorney Barbara Munro was appointed and subsequently obtained forensic evaluations of Pina from Dr. Joseph Toomey, a forensic and clinical psychologist.

In a July 2021 report, based on testing done by his colleague, Dr. Rebecca Dautoff, Dr. Toomey said that Pina was intellectually disabled as his IQ was 59, placing him “at a level of intelligence below 99.8% of peers his age.” He said it was “very unlikely” that Pina’s IQ was any higher at the time of his interrogation.

Dr. Toomey said Pina’s ability to understand and appreciate his Miranda warnings at the time of his interrogation was “impaired.”

Munro also retained Dr. Tina Zottoli, also a clinical and forensic psychologist to evaluate Pina’s confession and the validity of his guilty plea. Dr. Zottoli concluded it was “clearly evident” that Pina was “highly suggestible.” Dr. Zottoli reported that Pina pled guilty “with insufficient knowledge of his legal options, likelihood of acquittal or collateral consequences of his conviction.” She also said that Pina’s interrogation was “replete with text-book flaws in interviewing techniques,” which was particularly problematic because of his intellectual disabilities.

“To be frank, this is among the worst recorded statements I have read in a non-publicized case,” Dr. Zottoli declared. Nearly half of his statements were “simply affirmative responses” to specific police questions and some of his statements directly contradicted the evidence.

The questioning was “leading and suggestive, and the “narrative statement taken by the police is, at least in part, demonstrably false,” she said.

Munro retained Lewis Gordon, a crime scene expert to review the evidence. Pina, during his interrogation, had re-enacted the shooting by putting his finger on the back of the head of one of the detectives as if he were sitting next to Mejia. In fact, Mejia had not been shot in the back of the head, but on the right side of his neck.

Lewis noted that there was no stippling or gunshot residue at the entrance wound, which contradicted Pina’s statement that he held the gun to Mejia’s head and pulled the trigger.

Moreover, Munro obtained an opinion from Dr. Christopher Rosenbaum, a toxicologist, who opined that the amount of alcohol that Pina said he had consumed before the shooting would have had a significant effect on his insight and judgment, which would have had an impact on Pina’s “ability to form the specific intent necessary for first-degree murder.”

On October 3, 2023, Munro filed a motion to vacate Pina’s guilty plea. Among other things, the motion cited the reports of the experts to argue that Pina’s defense attorney had failed to provide an adequate legal defense and in fact, provided no assistance at all.

An evidentiary hearing was held in October and November 2024. Witnesses included Dr. Dautoff, Dr. Toomey, Dr. Zottoli, Pina’s defense attorney George, and two of Pina’s siblings.

On March 25, 3025, Superior Court Justice Michael Doolin granted the motion and vacated Pina’s conviction.

The judge concluded that Pina’s waiver of his Miranda rights was not intelligent and voluntary, and that as a consequence a motion to suppress his confession had “more than a minimal chance of success and plea counsel was ineffective for failing to file and litigate such a motion.”

The judge noted that defense attorney George did little to no investigation of the case, further evidence that he provided ineffective assistance. Although he had testified that he “had a sense” that Pina could not read or write, George had not requested Pina’s school records or retained an expert to examine him. George admitted during the hearing that he did so in “most cases with clients who had cognitive deficits.”

George admitted he did not hire a crime scene expert because he did not want to ask the court for funds. Not every judge would agree to such funding and, George said, it could have tipped off the prosecution about his defense strategy. Justice Doolin found this reasoning was “insufficient.” The judge noted that the prosecution had intended to argue that the shooter held the gun in his left hand, an assertion that crime expert Gordon said was “without basis.” An expert’s testimony would have rebutted the Commonwealth’s expert, and thus George’s failure to consult or hire an expert was ineffective assistance, Judge Doolin ruled.

Justice Doolin also said Pina was entitled to a new trial based on the conclusion of the toxicology expert that he was impaired by alcohol and George’s failure to consult such an expert deprived him of a substantial defense.

Ultimately, Justice Doolin noted that George did not visit Pina until almost 18 months after being appointed to represent him, did not file a motion to suppress until the day of trial, and then failed to litigate it. Judge Doolin said George “entirely failed to subject the prosecution’s case to meaningful adversarial testing.”

Justice Doolin concluded that George’s “deficient representation” of Pina “constructively denied him the right to counsel.

On October 22, 2025, the prosecution dismissed the case.

Pina remained in Cape Verde. He was a lawful permanent resident at the time of his conviction. At the time of his release from prison, Pina was ordered removed by an immigration judge based on the conviction. After the conviction was vacated, a motion to reopen his immigration case to vacate the removal order was denied even though the basis for the removal no longer existed.

– Maurice Possley

Posting Date: 10-28-2025

Last Update Date: 10-28-2025