Massachusetts State Police Major Wants State To Pay For Defending Her In ‘Troopergate’ Scandal

A Massachusetts State Police major involved in removing embarrassing details from a police report pertaining to a judge’s daughter several years ago is asking a court to order the state to pay for defending her in a State Ethics Commission complaint..Major Susan Anderson was just following an order from the then-head of the State Police, Colonel Richard McKeon, when she met with a state trooper under her command “for the purpose of redacting the inappropriate comments in his arrest report,” a brief filed by Anderson’s lawyer states.“By complying with Colonel McKeon’s order, Major Anderson was, at all times, acting within the scope of her employment and consistent with the paramilitary structure of the Massachusetts State Police,” the brief states.The incident occurred in October 2017, after State Trooper Ryan Sceviour arrested Alli Bibaud, then 30 -- the daughter of a Dudley District Court judge, Timothy Bibaud -- after an accident for operating under the influence of drugs and possession of drugs, as New Boston Post reported when the incident became public later that year.Alli Bibaud told the trooper she was the daughter of a judge, “made multiple inappropriate statements suggesting that she would offer sexual favors in return for leniency,” and said she “had performed sexual acts in order to pay for” the heroin that troopers found in her car, according to a subsequent federal lawsuit Sceviour filed against McKeon, Anderson, and the Massachusetts State Police.Major Anderson, acting on orders from Colonel McKeon, ordered a lieutenant to order Sceviour to remove the embarrassing details from his written report and issue reprimands to Sceviour for including them in the report and to a sergeant for approving the report, according to court papers.McKeon later retired under pressure from then-Governor Charlie Baker.The Massachusetts Attorney General’s office investigated the incident and found that no crimes had been committed, according to court papers. But the Attorney General’s office referred the matter to the State Ethics Commission, which investigated but found no ethics law violations, according to the State Police brief in the appeal.The state paid to defend Major Anderson in Sceviour’s federal lawsuit and in a related federal lawsuit. Both were later dismissed.But the State Police denied Anderson’s requests to pay for her defense before the State Ethics Commission. She subsequently sued in state court.How much her legal defense has cost did not come up in oral arguments on Tuesday and does not appear in legal briefs filed with the Massachusetts Appeals Court.A state Superior Court judge turned her down in October 2024, but her lawyer appeared before a three-judge panel of the Massachusetts Appeals Court earlier this week asking judges there to overturn the lower-court decision.“This is a person who is acting within scope of employment. This is somebody who was acting in accordance with what her instructions were from her supervisor. She doesn't have any ability to do anything other than what she's ordered to do,” said Anderson’s lawyer, Timothy Burke, during oral arguments Tuesday, April 1. “And she is entitled to be defended from the beginning, from this case, and if there's a dispute over that it had to have gone to a court for determination as opposed to the department making the independent assessment as to what their obligation was.”The dispute is over a state statute (Massachusetts General Laws, Chapter 258, Section 9A) that requires the state to “provide for the legal representation” of up to $1 million for state troopers who are sued over incidents “arising out of any claim, action, award, compromise, settlement, or judgment resulting from any alleged intentional tort or by reason of an alleged act or failure to act which constitutes a violation of the civil rights of any person under federal or state law,” if a trooper asks for it.Justice Sookyoung Shin and Chief Justice Amy Lyn Blake questioned whether what Anderson is seeking goes beyond what the state statute requires.Burke argued that previous court interpretations of the statute make it clear that the state is on the hook for defending her not only in the federal civil rights lawsuits against her but also in the State Ethics Commission case.“It clearly arose from and was factually predicated upon the same facts that gave rise to the claims for those two civil rights cases that were ultimately dismissed,” Burke said.Daniel Brunelli, a lawyer representing the State Police, disagreed, arguing that Anderson’s lawyer is calling for “an expansion of the state statute” beyond what the law actually says, and that if adopted that principle would require the state to defend State Police employees not only in civil rights civil lawsuits but also in criminal cases that arise from civil rights civil lawsuits.Justice Maureen Walsh seemed troubled by the idea that state troopers could face possibly unfounded State Ethics Commission complaints arising from their work and have to pay for their own lawyer, and suggested such an outcome is at odds with the state statute.“So the purpose of this was, ‘Hey we don't want to discourage people, good people, from a profession because there's going to be kind of, by putting the uniform on, a risk that you're going to have to face claims,’ ” Walsh said. “And in this instance, the claim was a civil rights violation. And it seems like it was shopped around to a whole bunch of different venues. And yet protection for some and not for others? Doesn't that kind of conflict with the purpose of protection under 9A?”The State Police’s lawyer said certain distinctions in Major Anderson’s case are important.“I would respectfully disagree that the claim was a civil rights,” Brunelli said. “There's an incident which an individual, based on that incident, elects to file a civil rights violation. Then three years later, the State Ethics Commission conducts their own investigation and decides to go to show cause for violation of state ethics law. The fact that it stemmed from the same incident –"“Arising from the civil rights, you would agree?” Walsh interjected.“Arising from, I would respectfully say, arising from the same incident,” Brunelli said.“My reading of 268, the State Ethics Commission,” he continued, “is that you don't have to -- there's no violation of an intentional tort or civil rights violation for there to be a state ethics violation. The predicate requirements for the two are very different.”A decision from the Appeals Court is expected within about four months. The case could eventually make it to the state’s highest court, the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court.Troopergate, as the police-report-scrubbing incident became known, is one of several scandals that have hit the Massachusetts State Police in recent years.Others include widespread overtime fraud revealed in 2018; the dismissal of a state trooper in 2018 who before joining the force had been involved in drug dealing; and the firing last month of a state trooper who sent demeaning text messages about a suspect during a murder trial.

Massachusetts State Police Major Wants State To Pay For Defending Her In ‘Troopergate’ Scandal

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