'Trial 4': Who is Sean Ellis? Netflix docuseries on wrongfully convicted man focuses on police corruption
Netflix's new limited docuseries, 'Trial 4', will tell the story of a man who says he was wrongly convicted of murdering a police officer when he was just 19. The eight-part docuseries will feature Sean Ellis as he faces his fourth trial — 25 years after he was first tried in 1995 — as he may end up going back to prison. Ellis had been previously sentenced to life and was released when new evidence came to light.
The docuseries tells the story of Sean K Ellis, who has spent 22 years in prison after being convicted of the 1993 murder of Boston police detective, John Mulligan. Ellis was put on trial three times within the space of a year, and now faces his fourth trial – which could see him back in prison for life. After his first three trials for armed robbery and first-degree murder, Ellis, aged 19 at the time, was found guilty in 1995 and sentenced to life. His first two trials resulted in a hung jury. In 2015, Ellis was freed from jail on bail, after a judge ordered a new trial saying evidence about how the case had been handled had been withheld from the defense. Ellis, who has always maintained his innocence, is now awaiting trial number four and the prospect of life behind bars again.
The key accused of the murder of Mulligan was Terry Patterson, whose fingerprints were found on the detective's vehicle. While Ellis had insisted from the beginning that he was not involved in Mulligan's murder, the police continued to try and convict Ellis for the same. Prosecutors said Ellis and Patterson hatched a plan to steal Mulligan's gun after they saw him sleeping in his SUV outside a store. They called it a random crime of opportunity. "Mulligan died because he wore a badge, and his gun was stolen because his alleged killers wanted a 'trophy' from their victim...Sean Ellis kept the trophy," chief prosecutor Phyllis Broker said. Her case theory was that after Sean shopped for diapers, he and Patterson drove to an adjacent residential street and parked and, leaving Celine Kirk in the car, walked back through the woods to kill Mulligan.
In fall 2013, Sean Ellis sent letters to the Urban League, NAACP, American Civil Liberties Union and a dozen other social justice and legal organizations, asking their help in "bringing attention and a voice" to rectify his wrongful conviction for the murder of John Mulligan.
On May 5, 2015, Sean Ellis's murder and armed robbery convictions were overturned in Suffolk Superior Court by Judge Carol S Ball, who ruled that "justice was not done" due to violations by Suffolk County prosecutors and the bias of three investigating detectives on the Mulligan homicide task force who were later found (through federal grand jury testimony) to have been partners in crime with Mulligan in an ongoing scheme of falsifying search warrants and robbing drug dealers of drugs and money.
However, Suffolk County prosecutors intended to retry Ellis for the fourth time — it is this trial which is the subject of the Netflix docuseries. 'Trial 4' will be available to stream on Netflix on Wednesday, November 11, at 12 am PST.