A man who lost his college scholarship and his job when he was convicted of assaulting a police officer during an anti-war demonstration has cleared his name with a 20-year-old photograph.
The photo, taken by a newspaper photographer but not published until this week, shows Malcolm Emory with an armload of books at about the time police said that he had thrown a rock.Emory, now 39, maintained he was wrongly convicted of the assault, which allegedly occurred during a protest at Northeastern University in 1970. He never served time for the offense, but the conviction cost him his scholarship, his job doing research for the Navy and a promising future as a physicist.
But this year, using a news photo taken at the protest, Emory got his conviction set aside and won a new trial. Wednesday, the Suffolk County district attorney's office said it would drop the case rather than retry it. And on Thursday, Northeastern University awarded Emory, who has spent most of the last 20 years as a welder, a full scholarship to complete the physics studies he began there in 1969.
"It's a great relief," Emory said.