“It’s time for a crusading district attorney,” he said in 1978 when, as assistant district attorney, he announced his candidacy.
But his time as a prosecutor is most remembered for two major cases — principally the 1989 shooting death of Stuart, a racially polarizing episode that continues to reverberate in Boston.
“Newman was always on the hot seat, in wanted and unwanted circumstances, and he didn’t shy away from that,” said his successor as Suffolk district attorney, Ralph C. Martin II, who later became general counsel of Northeastern University. “He would face the public if there was a victory or if things didn’t go well. He understood he was a public persona.”
By the time of Carol Stuart’s murder, Mr. Flanagan was already nationally known. In 1975, he persuaded a jury to convict Dr. Kenneth C. Edelin of manslaughter for an abortion he performed on a 17-year-old patient.
The 1973 operation took place just months after the US Supreme Court’s landmark Roe v. Wade decision legalized abortion. During the 1975 trial, Mr. Flanagan argued that the fetus had been viable, and he secured the conviction of Edelin — a prominent Black doctor — by an all-white jury of nine men and three women.
In a unanimous decision the following year, the state Supreme Judicial Court reversed the conviction, saying that Edelin had “committed no wanton or reckless acts in carrying out the medical procedures,” and that “no witness was prepared to state that this fetus had more than the remotest possibility of meaningful survival.”
In the Stuart case, which the Globe revisited in a nine-part investigative series in late 2023, Mr. Flanagan’s office was building a case against a Black suspect that fell apart in early 1990 when Charles Stuart, Carol’s husband, jumped off the Tobin Bridge in an apparent suicide after his brother implicated him in her murder.
The Stuarts had left a hospital birthing class in 1989 and were driving home when Charles called police to say a “skinny Black man in a track suit” had entered their car, robbed, and shot them. Carol, who was eight months pregnant, died hours later after giving birth to a son, Christopher, who only survived for 17 days.
Though two Black men, William Bennett and Alan Swanson, were identified as suspects in the murder, the Globe investigative series found that at least 33 people knew or suspected the truth, which Stuart’s brother Matthew eventually revealed to police: that Charles was the killer.
During an investigation many likened to a siege, police searched Black and brown men in Mission Hill, where Charles Stuart said the shooting occurred. In a city that had yet to heal from racial divisions inflamed by public school desegregation and court-ordered busing, the racially polarizing Stuart case set off turbulent aftershocks that continue to shake Boston more than a third of a century later.
In late December 2023, Boston Mayor Michelle Wu publicly apologized in City Hall to Bennett and Swanson.
“What was done to you was unjust, unfair, racist, and wrong and this apology is long overdue,” Wu said. “To every Black resident — I am sorry not only for the abuse our city enacted, but for the beliefs and the bias that brought them to bear.”
On the day of Charles Stuart’s apparent suicide, Mr. Flanagan said Bennett had been cleared of involvement in the case, and he blamed the media for having published leaked information that identified Bennett as a suspect.
In response to subsequent criticism that his office was reluctant to question Charles Stuart’s account of the shootings and to consider him a suspect, Mr. Flanagan said: “Keep in mind this fellow was critically injured. Of course we believed him.”
Well-known as a charming and affable man, Mr. Flanagan was elected four times to be Suffolk district attorney. A formidable, zealous figure in the district attorney’s Pemberton Square office and in courtrooms across Suffolk County, Mr. Flanagan was an archetypal Boston personality of the old-style politics, making appearances at public gatherings across the area.
Mr. Flanagan pointed out, however, that profiles of him usually mentioned of his presence at “wakes, bingo games, communion breakfasts, and the Knights of Columbus.” He suggested to the Globe that the attention reporters paid to his visits to events in white, Irish-Catholic neighborhoods constituted “a standard religious slur.”
At a time when Boston’s demographics were changing, with new immigrant groups replacing the Irish and Italians as the city’s striving newcomers, Mr. Flanagan “was quite biased and unable to move with the times,” one of his critics, the prominent Boston civil liberties lawyer Harvey Silverglate, said in a 2023 interview for this obituary.
“He had very traditional views about women and fought fiercely against abortion,” Silverglate said. “This is a man who held a position that required changing with the times, but he could never change — or even be flexible.”
Yet Mr. Flanagan had first been elected as an agent of change himself — someone who had worked as an assistant district attorney under Garrett H. Byrne, a longtime district attorney who died in 1989. Mr. Flanagan challenged Byrne, then 79 years old, in 1978 and prevailed in the Democratic primary.
One of five siblings, Newman A. Flanagan was born in Roslindale on March 5, 1930.
He was the youngest of five children of James H. Flanagan, who was a lawyer for the Boston Finance Commission and city treasurer in the mayoral administration of Maurice Tobin, and Rose Freeley Flanagan, who was the office manager of a law firm.
After graduating from Boston College High School and serving in the Navy during the Korean War, Mr. Flanagan graduated from Boston College and from what is today New England Law Boston.
Mr. Flanagan, who formerly lived in West Roxbury for many years, was a former Knights of Columbus state deputy and supreme director. His father, James, and his son, Paul, also were state deputies, becoming the country’s first three-generation skein in that position.
Known for his extraordinarily bright ties, many made by his daughter, Mr. Flanagan was an accomplished master of ceremonies, his fluent speaking style delighting breakfast and banquet dinner guests for years.
“Newman was DA when the city was in a very rough position, and as a result he got caught in a lot of difficult places,” said Lawrence DiCara, a former Boston City Council president who served on the board of Greater Boston Boy Scouts Council with Mr. Flanagan. “He was involved in everything in the city. This was not a guy who was at home watching the Red Sox games. He was out and about a lot, and he wanted people to know he was out and about a lot.”
Mr. Flanagan had been married for 70 years to Eileen Patricia Gushue Flanagan, who died in April. He leaves four sons, John of Andover, James of Mansfield, Paul of Bretton Woods, N.H., and Newman of Arlington; three daughters, Rosemarie Flanagan Beltis and Eileen Kelly, both of Walpole, and Emily of Charlestown; a sister, Rosemarie Cronin; 13 grandchildren; and six great-grandchildren.
Visitation will be held from noon to 5 p.m. Sunday at Chapman Funerals and Cremation in West Falmouth. A funeral Mass will be celebrated at 10 a.m. Monday in St. John the Evangelist Church in Pocasset. A private committal service will be held in Massachusetts National Cemetery in Bourne.
Mr. Flanagan stepped down as district attorney in 1992 to serve as executive director of the National District Attorneys Association. Upon his 2004 retirement, Edward M. Kennedy, then a US senator, called him “a timeless leader of America’s prosecutors for more than three decades. We all owe him our thanks and gratitude for his efforts on our behalf.”
Kennedy, who early in his career was an assistant district attorney alongside Mr. Flanagan, recalled that former state attorney general Scott Harshbarger had called him “Mister District Attorney of the United States.”
During a re-election campaign, Mr. Flanagan once said that “no one should take elected office for granted. I expect the people to judge me fairly, on my record. Do I resent the unjustified criticism? Of course. But I’ll tell you something: I don’t have any trouble sleeping at night.”
And he always insisted that his office’s credibility wasn’t undermined by the Stuart case: “When it’s all over and the question is asked, what did Newman Flanagan do wrong, the answer will be not one blessed thing.”
David Shribman is a nationally syndicated columnist. He can be reached at dshribman@post-gazette.com.
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