Blue Mass Group

Reality-based commentary on politics.

Someone Wants Patrick’s Mother’s Death Certificate

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The Quincy Patriot Ledger today quoted long time Milton Town Clerk James Mullen, a staunch local Republican. 

The clerk’s office in Patrick’s hometown of Milton has regularly received public records requests involving Patrick – including a recent request for the death certificate of Patrick’s mother, Emily.

‘‘Even though it’s public record, that’s going too far,’’ said Milton town clerk Jim Mullen, a registered Republican.

Who do you think was looking for that?  Maybe her crime, in the eyes of Healey’s right wing storm troopers, is that she gave birth to Deval Patrick.

This is a sad example of how low these people will stoop to get their empty suit elected Governor.

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    • Gutter politics at its worst! How dare someone violate the sanctity of a family member’s passing. That is personal and private, and should NOT be exploited for political gain. No NOMINALLY good politician or campaign does that! If it was the Healey camp, what would they try to say-that she committed a crime by dying? That she didn’t die the “correct” way? Deval Patrick has acted in the true form of a statesman. If this man is not elected-then I will be absolutely stunned. We have a real chance to change Massachusetts-Lets DO IT!

  2. is that, itself, a public record??

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    Inquiring minds want to know. If so, someone should make a FOIA-style request to the Milton Town Clerk for the request itself. Let’s see who made the request.

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    Somebody’s got some ‘splainin’ to do.

    • There are few reasons why one orders a death certificate of someone who is not a relative. First, estate settlement –such as filing for probate, collecting on a life insurance policy, recording at the Registry of Deeds to establish a property owner has died, etc. Second — a professional conducting geneaological research. Last, epidemological studies (like how many people died from an outbreak of disease).

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      It’s early in the AM, but I cannot think of any other legitimate reasons why someone would wish to order the death certificate of someone who is not a relative.

      • The beauty of public information is that it isn’t up to you — or a town clerk — to decide if the reason for the information is legitimate or not.

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        ALL requests for public information are legitimate precisely because the information is public information.

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        We may agree that what the user does with the information is impolite, dangerous, or otherwise harmful, but that is irrelevant to the request itself.

  3. What’s on it that anybody would need to know?

    Death Certificate

      * First, Middle (sometimes, or initial) and last name  * Place of death including a specific address, whether a residence or other institution.  * The specific town or city of death and residence  * Day, month and year of death  * Age at death  * Birth date and place of birth (not always accurate or known)  * Marital status (single, divorced, widowed) name of spouse  * Name of father (not always filled in)  * Name of mother (not always filled in)  * Birthplace of parents (not always known)  * Cause of death  * Place and date of burial or cremation  * Name of funeral home or director  * Name of physician or medical examiner  * Name of informant (sometimes states relationship to the decedent)  * Researchers should note older records, i.e., pre 1920’s, have limited medical information, i.e. the cause of death, recorded on death certificates and/or registers.

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    Hm, I wonder if they were trying to do geneology of Deval’s family? Deval has often told the story about Ms. Jones and community and how the Boston Globe actually went and found Ms. Jones back in Chicago… maybe they’re trying to do geneology for Deval? I remember somebody did research on John Kerry’s roots and found out that he had Jewish ancestors (grandfather? I can’t recall).

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    Exactly what can they find on a death certificate that would be harmful to the campaign? I dunno, but I’m kinda curious…

  4. Welcome to living in a free society.  It’s information, it’s available to the public, and it’s out there.

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    If Healey (or a Healey supporter) thinks that bringing up Deval’s mom is going to score points, they’re wrong.  It will look middle-school-playground at best and downright nasty at worst.

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    But the information itself — that’s public.  To be scornful of the request for information is foolish IMO.  It’s what people do with public information that may be worthy of scorn.

    • is desperation on the part of well paid consultants (potentially paid by a wealthy third party) who are under the gun to drudge up something, anything that could be used in the next few weeks in a further attempt to besmirch a decent man or his family.  Public records or not, people need to know that this is happening.  It is utterly contemptuous, despicable and exactly what the Republican party has come to stand for.  It’s one step away from data mining without a warrant.  It’s invasion of privacy.  It’s unAmerican and it is a trend that has to stop.  You’re technically right that in this instance, it’s a public record.  But I doubt the law would even be a consideration for these scumbags. 

        • I agree on the likely intent.  * I don’t agree that the request for public information should be public.  That is, I believe a member of the public should be able to request public information without (a) the requestor, or (b) the act of requesting becoming public.  Otherwise, it makes it harder for a member of the public to gain the information without retribution from another citizen or from the government.  * I agree that the GOP has become utterly contemptuous, although we don’t know that they have anything to do with this.  * It is not an invasion of property.  By definition, it’s public record.  * It’s not unAmerican.  In fact, the idea that certain information is public information is decidedly American.  America has been on the forefront of making information available to its citizens, from Ben Franklin’s introduction of the public library to the modern FOIA.  * I agree that the law wouldn’t likely be a consideration, in so far as they believed they wouldn’t get caught.

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        Bottom line: I don’t like what they’re up to, but welcome to living in a free society.  Don’t be upset by the information or its flow — be upset by action.  As of now, there’s been ugly action with Deval’s brother-in-law, and I too am upset about the role that different orginizations have played in that outcome.  But, I’m not upset with the information itself or the act of aquiring it. 

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        I’m not sure how to make my position more clear, although I suspect I’m not making it clear enough.

        • sunshine laws are good, and we should not discourage access to public records.  No argument there.  You’re perfectly clear and thoughtful on the subject. 

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          The despicable part is using good laws for unintended purposes.  That was my point.  I do consider it an invasion of privacy when scumbags decide to sift through family records to inflict damage on a candidate through his family.  The unAmerican part is the effort to subvert the meaning of those laws for devious purposes.  Don’t make me call them scumbags again.

  5. Wanna bet this is just a standard part of opposition research?  Get all publicly available records and scour them for anything untoward.  They may not have a specific use of the death certificate in mind, but a good investigator gets all the information s/he can without deciding ahead of time that some piece of information will not be valuable.

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    99% odds the death certificate will be just one of many useless pieces of paperwork that goes into the stack.  But on the off chance that it shows that his mother was born a man, or died of a drug overdose, or was an illegal immigrant, or anything else Patrick would rather not have know…why not look?

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    Honestly I don’t get what’s upsetting about this.  Isn’t doing a deep investigation of your opponent SOP?

    • mother’s death could be relevant in a run for office?

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      Answer:  None.

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      That’s why people don’t like the idea of it. 

        • Healey and Hillman’s records and files.

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          I’m a die hard liberal and patrick fan, but really I find it kind of annoying when my own side gets all righteous and says “We would NEVER” about standard political maneuvers.  If Deval’s campaign hasn’t been scruntinizing Healey details, they should be fired.

          • If Healey’s mother is dead, and I don’t know if she is, I would be just as disappointed in the Patrick campaign if they requested her death certificate.

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            And that has nothing to do with getting “all righteous.”  I don’t think anybody said “NEVER,” either, about legitimate oppo research.  A candidate’s mother’s death certificate is not legitimate oppo research, irrespective of party. 

          • Do you have any idea what Payne & Company, Kiley & Company, 3 Street Inc. do for their fee?  They win elections, at any cost.

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            Check the campaign expenditures.  If the Patrick Campaign hasn’t paid at least one of those companies fees, then the Campaign head should have been fired months ago. 

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            They’ve checked background on Ms. Healey, Mr. Hillman, their relatives, close friends, all public records.  It’s that simple.  In the business, self-rightiousness is either naive or stupid.

    • Just saying, if his mother was born a man, she would have had a bit of trouble becoming his mother.

    • Just saying, if his mother was born a man, she would have had a bit of trouble becoming his mother.

      • Presumably they are also in Chicago requesting Patrick’s birth records/adoption records as well, eh?

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        People lead all kinds of lives with all kinds of surprises…

  6. Is this really what we’re talking about today? There’s nothing more important? For all we know this was some relative of Deval’s mother making a family tree or someone who’s selling a house she used to own (I requested a death certificate for a stranger for that reason).

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    Now does some poor reporter have to check to see if anyone’s requested death certificates for any of Healey’s relatives? This is truly a non-story.

  7. I’ve often thought in the last few years that this whole country not only needs new leadership, but it needs an exorcism.

    • I trust it will appear in that rag they give away free at the T stops after 3pm (rhyme’s with Gerald) alleging such.

  9. mother’s death certificate.  I’m sure they have examined every piece of Patrick’s family history they could get their hands on, that is probably how they found out about his brother-in-law.  I don’t think this is politics as usual though.  Remember about a month ago it was reported the under Rove’s leadership Republicans were going to scour personal records of all Democratic candidates to find anything they could to run negative campaigns against the Dems.  I’m sure this is part of that strategy.  Healey’s campaign is all about what a scary black man Deval is, and she has dug up anything she can to characterize Deval as such.  I find it disgusting.

  10. If anyone has ever heard Deval’s stump speech from over the summer, he often spoke of his mother’s complicated illnesses (I can’t remember them precisely) but the point of his story was the treatments were such that they conflicted, aggravating her decline. The anecdote about his mom was an attempt to illustrate the amount of bureaucracy in the health care system, as he explained how mom was shuttled from specialist to specialist, often waiting a long time between visits and did not receive preventative care. I am not suggesting that he was not being truthful in his speech. The story was actually quite poignant. But maybe the Healey oppo folks are looking for holes in the story, in order to dig up a Gore’s mother’s dog prescription drug moment against Deval. Remember that GOP smear? Pathetic, if that’s the case.

  11. How about if someone is writing a biography of a rising star within the Democratic party? Seems like due diligence an author would do, doesn’t it?

  13. Who knows, and who cares. If there’s nothing in it that’s newsworthy, then it was a waste of resources. If there is, it would have been to the loss of the camp that didn’t dig it up.

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    I don’t know how effective playing the victim is, but if it’s a strategy that works, we should use it. Then again, it could backfire if, down the road, the Patrick campaign is caught digging something up on Healey’s personal life considering he’s been complaining about her, true or not.

  14. Without knowing who’s asking for it and why, I’d just shrug at this news.  It is a public record, and I think we’re well-served by a public climate of openness about public records instead of jumping to conclusions prematurely.  If it turns out that someone uses this for dirty politics, that’s when we can be outraged.  Maybe it’s just some curious high school student doing a school project on genealogy?  Who knows.

    • Cos, what do we tell them?  ANYTHING that you don’t want to see on the front page of your hometown paper, TELL ME NOW.  Because it WILL be there.

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      Jack Robinson (the father, not the candidate son) said at a campaign school I went to that if Google existed, Nixon would never have resigned.  Because everything they were looking for is now freely available on-line.

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      That’s what makes Deval’s ingidnation about his brother-in-law so weird.  In WHAT universe did he think that wouldn’t come out?  As an officer of the court, he bears personal responsibility as well.  And the whole thing with the kids not knowing – they are now adults, did they not notice Dad was in JAIL for 6 months when they were teens?

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      His snivelling just exposes what a hyperbaric chamber his life has been since he won life’s lottery at age 14.  It’s like a Fresh Prince of Bel Air episode – except we have Carlton as a candidate, not Will.

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