The makers of the Netflix series made contact with Ellis in mid-2017, two years after he had been released on bail after questions were raised by the Boston Globe about potential corruption in the police force who had helped get Ellis convicted. The title Trial 4 comes from the upcoming fourth trial that Ellis was preparing for when the series started filming him.
However, that trial never came. Suffolk County prosecutors had initially scheduled the retrial for October 2018, then it was rescheduled for September 2019. However, in December 2018, all charges against him were dropped, and the ankle tag he had had to wear since being released from prison was taken off.
Since then, per the website JusticeForSeanEllis.com, Ellis has done his best to regain normality in his life. A well-wisher from his mother’s church gave him housing for three years, and he learned how to drive for the first time.
In terms of employment, he began on a demolition crew before being hired by a company called Community Servings, described as “a Boston non-profit agency that prepares and delivers medically appropriate meals to ill and elderly homebound residents,” on the website.
He has been promoted to a management role in this organization as of summer 2020, and is even planning to marry a co-worker from this job in 2021.
Ellis has also become an activist to help others who have been unjustly convicted. Fall 2019 saw him become a trustee of the New England Innocence Project. The project’s website says of where Ellis is now. “Today, Sean is a fierce advocate for people who have been wrongfully convicted and for reforms to the criminal legal system. He speaks often in the community about his experience,” it reads.
In 2020 he joined the community fellows program at the Institute for Nonprofit Practice at Tufts University, which per its website, “invests in the next generation of nonprofit and community leaders dedicated to social change by advancing their leadership skills, increasing their social capital, and embedding students in a robust professional network to propel their careers.”
Speaking to Complex, Trial 4 director Rémy Burkel said of interviewing Ellis: “When you see him when he was a kid, he was like pencil-thin and suddenly he’s this broad-shouldered guy and he was impressive and very calm, very soft-spoken and very calm. For a man who spent 22 years in prison for a crime he says he didn’t do, that’s pretty amazing.”
Trial 4 is streaming now on Netflix.
