#557 Jason Flom with Dennis Maher
Wrongful Conviction
Lava for Good Podcasts
4.4 • 5.8K Ratings
🗓️ 15 January 2026
⏱️ 55 minutes
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Summary
On November 16, 1983, a 28-year-old woman was attacked and sexually assaulted by an unknown male as she was walking home from work in Lowell, MA. The following evening, a 23-year-old woman was attacked less than one hundred yards away from the site of the first assault. Even though no biological evidence could link him to any of the crimes, Dennis Maher, who was a sergeant in the United States Army at the time, was arrested and charged with both attacks, as well as an unsolved rape from the previous summer. He was convicted based on eyewitness misidentifications made by the victims, all of whom identified him in photographic lineups. Dennis Maher is joined by attorney Alex Spiro and New England Innocence Project Director of Communications Hannah Riley.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | With the police banging on the door, open up. |
| 0:10.2 | The choice to be in that lineup was the last choice I made as a free man. |
| 0:14.6 | A year later, I ended up right in the system. |
| 0:18.0 | I'm going to be one of those people who everyone in the world is going to think is a monster |
| 0:21.8 | or suspect as a monster for the rest of my life, and I'm just going to have to come to peace with that. |
| 0:27.3 | Somebody was able to look at my picture in a database and say that I was somewhere where I definitely wasn't. |
| 0:34.4 | I overheard three of the jailers discussing what part they might have to play in my hanging. |
| 0:39.1 | They had been told that two prison officers would have to participate in my execution. |
| 0:45.1 | I walked back inside that prison for the last time, man. |
| 0:48.4 | All hell broke loose, man. Welcome back to Wrongful Conviction with Jason Flom. |
| 1:07.4 | Today we have a very special episode, not only because of our amazing guest, Dennis |
| 1:12.6 | Mayor. First of all, Dennis, welcome to the shell. Thank you for having me. Dennis, we'll get into his |
| 1:17.6 | story in a minute, but let's suffice it to say that he was a sergeant in the United States Army |
| 1:22.2 | when he was wrongfully convicted of three rapes and served almost 20 years in prison. I also want to introduce Hannah Riley, |
| 1:30.3 | who's the director of communications for the New England Innocence Project, and she's the first |
| 1:34.8 | time on the show, hopefully not the last. And then we have a very close friend of mine, Alex Spiro. |
| 1:41.7 | He is a former criminal prosecutor in New York and currently a defense attorney. He's also a professor at Harvard Law School. |
| 1:50.3 | Alex, it's great to have you on the show as well. Thanks. |
| 1:53.4 | So, Dennis, let's start with you. Your case is of great interest, I think, to anyone who's interested in this genre because it touches on a number of really important and tragically common problems in the wrongful conviction world. |
| 2:09.6 | The mistaken eyewitness identification is unique in your case because of the fact that there were three different women who identified you under dubious circumstances, |
| 2:17.8 | but nonetheless they identified you. It touches on the storage of evidence, because in your case, |
| 2:22.0 | the evidence had been supposedly lost, but actually it wasn't. And that's something that is really |
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