Victor Rosario was 24 years old when he was convicted of arson and multiple counts of murder for a 1982 fire in Lowell, Massachusetts. But after spending 35 years behind bars, he has reached a settlement for crimes he didn’t commit.
The Lowell City Council voted yesterday (May 2) to settle a $13 million civil rights lawsuit he brought against the New England city where he was arrested. In a news conference today (May 3), he admitted that he had to forgive those who locked him up in order for him to move on. “One of the things for me to be able to continue moving forward is basically to learn how to forgive,” he declared, per The Associated Press.
“35 years, more than half of my life, I spent behind the wall of a Massachusetts state prison,” he continued. “Today this chapter is ended and a new chapter begins. Nothing can ever compensate me for those years taken from me.”
Locke Bowman, one of Rosario’s attorneys, gave props to the Lowell City Council for settling the case. “$13 million does not begin to compensate Victor for all that he has lost, but it reflects the acknowledgement of the city of Lowell that what happened wasn’t right,” he said.
A judge vacated Rosario’s convictions in 2014 and set him free pending a new trial. The state’s highest court upheld the ruling in 2017 and local prosecutors said they wouldn’t retry him. In 2019, he filed a federal lawsuit against the city of Lowell and approximately a dozen police officers and firefighters involved in the investigations. The city council announced the settlement just a few weeks before that trial was set to begin.
Since leaving prison, Rosario has dedicated himself to helping other prisoners and has even run marathons. His biggest wish for the future is for authorities to be more thorough with their cases before locking up the wrong person. “I ask the criminal justice system, the universities preparing lawyers, prosecutors, and investigators to do their very best to not let what happened to me be the future of one more wrongfully convicted individual,” he pleaded.