When two men were convicted of murdering Jerry Boyajian’s brother Jeffrey in 1981, Jerry said it was like he could put his grief in a box, shove the box deep into a closet, and not think about it.

But decades later, when he found out those men were innocent, “it brought up a lot of sorrow from [Jeffrey’s] death,” Boyajian said.

“Now the box is back on the coffee table,” he said, “open.”

Going through the justice system the first time for the family of murder victims, known as survivors, can be extremely difficult, but to be subject to it twice, “It’s a compounding tragedy,” Northeastern Law Professor Andrew Haile told the Herald.

To try to understand the unique challenges of this group of survivors, Haile and a team of first-year law students worked with the Louis D. Brown Peace Institute, who came up with the research question, and spent an entire school year examining the issue up close.

Their report, “When Justice Fails Twice,” is based on interviews with survivors and offers recommendations about how the system could work better.

Communication

Amy Banks, whose father Dr. Ronald Banks was murdered in New Orleans in 1979, didn’t find out that the person she believed killed her dad had been released from prison until years later, when her brother-in-law googled the wrongfully convicted man’s name.

Her father had been a professor of history in Maine, a man she described as humble with a dry humor who, “never missed a game.”

“The only thing worse than having a parent murdered is having a parent murdered and finding out it’s a wrongful conviction,” she told the Herald.

Not only had no one told the Banks family about the release, Banks said prosecutors there had also decline to prosecute the case again.

“The flagrant disregard for my family was in retrospect another wound,” Banks said.

Jerry Boyajian and his wife Katrina said that the communication about their case had also come “out of the blue.”

Katrina described it as a double edged sword. They wished they known Jeffrey’s case was being investigated, although she wondered maybe it was easier to find out later in the process.

Both the Boyajians and Dr. Banks spoke with the Northeastern Law students for the report, which recommended several ways that communication with survivors could be improved.

The report recommended survivors be able to choose the level of communication they wanted to receive and the Attorney General create an “Innocence Inquiry Department,” a body that would investigate convictions and also help improve communication with victim’s families.

Apologies

Both Banks and the Boyajians said they have never received formal apologies from investigators on their families’ cases.

“That would make a lot of difference,” Banks said.

There are a lot of reasons why apologies rarely really happened, Haile said. It can be a liability issue, but it doesn’t mean they shouldn’t happen.

“To facilitate these apologies, we additionally recommend passing legislation – with support of district attorneys’ offices – that indemnifies police officers and prosecutors,” the report says, “allowing them to apologize but not granting them blanket immunity from future lawsuits stemming from a wrongful conviction.”

It also suggests giving families the chance to sit with prosecutors to talk about the case when its been overturned.

That should be the “minimum,” Banks said.

Closure?

For cases in Massachusetts, the report also recommended a change to the law that would automatically review cases after a conviction is vacated.

But both Banks and the Boyajians said, due to time and tampered evidence, it’s extremely unlikely they will see the people who actually killed their family members prosecuted.

Despite that lack of closure, the Boyajians said they they gotten known Frederick Clay and James J. Watson, the two men wrongfully convicted of Jeffrey’s murder. Banks wrote a book with Isaac Knapper, the man wrongfully convicted for her father’s murder, calling him a dear friend.

Jerry marveled at the grace and kindness Clay and Watson have shown him in the spite of the challenges they faced. When they first met Clay, Katrina said while they felt so much guilty over his incarceration, but he kept apologizing to them for Jeffrey’s death.

Thinking of his brother all these years later, Jerry, a self-described nerd, talked about his athletic, Golden-Gloves boxer of a brother, and admitted that they didn’t always see eye to eye.

“He was my older brother, and I did love him,” Jerry said, explaining that “part of the anguish of his murder” is not being able completely reconcile that.

“When something like this happens,” Jerry said, “there’s no justice for anybody.”