Here’s an editorial from the Scituate Mariner
Posturing on crime
Thursday, October 12, 2006
Willie Horton is back.
Horton, an African-American rapist who committed a brutal crime while on furlough from a state prison, was used by Republicans to portray Michael Dukakis as soft on crime back in 1988.
This time, the part of Horton is being played by Benjamin LaGuer, an African-American rapist who argued he had received an unfair trial for a 1983 rape in Worcester. Between his persistent letters and his high-profile lawyers, LaGuer managed to attract some prominent supporters, including Boston University President John Silber, Nobel laureate Elie Wiesel — and Deval Patrick, now the Democratic candidate for governor.
Patrick wrote a couple of letters to the parole board on LaGuer’s behalf and contributed to a fund to underwrite a DNA test to prove his innocence, but dropped his support when the DNA test found him guilty. Patrick has made some mistakes in responding to criticism about the case, misstating the number of letters he wrote and initially denying he had made a contribution to LaGuer’s cause, but he did nothing wrong in showing an interest in the case.
Nor did he do anything wrong in another case, which is the subject of a brutal ad by his opponent, Republican Kerry Healey. In 1985, when he was a lawyer with the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, Patrick helped successfully appeal a death sentence imposed on Carl Ray Songer, who had killed a police officer in Florida. That’s what NAACP lawyers do.
Healey’s ad acknowledges as much, in a backhanded fashion: “Lawyers have the right to defend cop killers, but do we really want one as our governor?” it asks. Note the syntax, which leaves the impression a cop killer is running for governor. That’s no accident.
Meanwhile a real cop killer has been roaming the halls of the State House, the Boston Herald reported recently. The head of the Boston Police Patrolmen’s Union, no stranger to political games, charged the Romney-Healey administration with allowing the man who killed a Boston detective during a 1973 robbery to be part of a Beacon Hill cleanup crew while serving the tail end of his sentence in a pre-release center.
And as Patrick has noted, if writing to a parole board disqualifies him for public office, it would also exclude Healey’s running mate, former state trooper Reed Hillman, who wrote to the parole board on behalf of a friend convicted of assaulting a police officer.
The game of pin-the-“soft on crime” tail on the candidate is in full swing. There’s just one problem: none of the above has anything to do with fighting the commonwealth’s recent upsurge in crime.
Crime is a legitimate issue, and there are ideas to talk about. Patrick is proposing to put 1,000 new cops on the streets, a strategy that would do more to stop crime than mindlessly extending sentences. Healey wants to reduce recidivism by having mandatory supervision for all felons released from state prisons, a position Patrick shares.
Patrick, a former top official in the Justice Department, and Healey, a former criminologist, know that reducing crime is a matter of policies, not posturing. Their ideas are worth a debate, which would certainly be more enlightening than rehashing stories of long-ago crimes.
Healey, especially, is choosing the politics of fear over a debate on solutions. Nearly two decades later, the Willie Horton ad stands as a paragon of below-the-belt campaigning. Is that the kind of politics Healey wants to wage?
Absolutely.