In the Mid-90’s we had an epidemic of church burnings. Deval Patrick was co-chair of the National Church Arson Task Force (NCATF) in charge of putting and end to this activity and to find and prosecute criminals involved. While at the Department of Justice, Deval Patrick worked on strengthening laws and giving stiffer penalties to criminals, the Church Arson Prevention Act of 1996, made it easier to prosecute criminals and allowed federal authorities to be more involved to investigate cases.
Henry Hyde (R) and John Conyers (D) introduced the bill in the House, their note to fellow House members to co-sponsor the bill, emphasis mine.
Responding to testimony from the Department of Justice that current law does not give Federal authorities the tools necessary to prosecute and bring to justice people who burn, desecrate, or otherwise damage religious property, we have introduced H.R. 3525, the “Church Arson Prevention Act of 1996.” The bill amends 18 U.S.C. 247 in two important ways.
First, the Hyde-Conyers bill broadens the jurisdictional scope of the statute by applying criminal penalties if the offense “is in or affects interstate or foreign commerce.” This formulation grants Federal jurisdiction
Second, the bill reduces the dollar value of destruction which must occur before these crimes can be prosecuted.
I think we understand Kennedy’s reaction to Kerry Healey’s desperate attacks over the past few weeks as he was working with Deval Patrick in 1996 to put a stop to the church burnings. Kennedy co-sponsored the bill in the Senate. In the Cape Cod Times Kennedy noted:
Patrick’s stint at the Justice Department coincided with a rash of church burnings in the South that he aggressively investigated and prosecuted, Kennedy said.
“Church burnings are terrifying in any event, but in a community, in a rural community, the church is the only institution, the only central institution, the life of a community in so many ways, ” Kennedy said. “And so many of those people filled with hatred and bigotry went out and burned those churches, and there was a voice that said, what are we going to do about it, and that was Deval Patrick.”
Kennedy credited Patrick with being pivotal in prosecuting those charged with torching the churches and pushing legislation for the FBI to investigate.
Through his efforts, “that whole phenomenon came to an end,” Kennedy said. “Deval Patrick did that. Talk about soft, talk about soft,” an allusion to claims by Healey
So we know that Deval Patrick worked to stiffen penalties and broadened the scope of the law to allow for federal authorities to be involved.
What were the results of his work? The National Church Arson Task Force first year report noted the following:
* The NCATF has launched 429 investigations into arsons, bombings or attempted bombings at houses of worship since January 1, 1995.
* Federal, state and local law enforcement have arrested 199 suspects since January 1995, in connection with 150 of the 429 investigations.
* The 35% rate of arrest in NCATF arson cases is more than double the 16% rate of arrest for arsons in general.
* Federal, state and local prosecutors have successfully convicted 110 defendants in connection with fires at 77 houses of worship since January 1995.
So to review Deval Patrick’s work:
Tougher Laws, check
Stricter Penalties, check
Doubled Arrest Rate, check
Over 100 Convictions in First Year, check
Must be soft on crime.
Hey, let’s ask Kerry Healey to show her accomplishments during the Romney/Healey administration. Oh, forgot. Never mind.
This would make a GREAT ad.
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Explain what happened, have Teddy on it to talk about how great Deval performed.. etc. etc.
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It would be VERY effective.
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(Yo, Deval campaign people… make it happen!)
In 2004 there were 206 fatalities from drunk drivers in Massachusetts. That same year there were 169 murders in Massachusetts. 37 more people were killed by drunk drivers than other murders. In 2002 when Reed Hillman was advocating a pardon for his three time DUI convicted colleague there were 224 deaths from drunk drivers and 173 other murders. How could Kerry Healy, as chair of the governors council allow this to proceed? She could not leverage the governors council to reject the pardon application, she could not persuade Reed Hillman to drop the request and now she maintains she can balance the legislators. Give me a break. Tough on crime? Give me a break. Advocate for victims?
This actually lends support to the one single position that Healey is getting away with taking too much credit as her only real accomplishment, her area of expertise… when it is completely based on manipulated data, falsely representing the scope of the problem. This, is what people are taking about when she has been criticized (not loudly enough) for fighting unnecesary battles, “picking the easy ones”, when you consider the fact that Massachusetts has had a lower rate of traffic fatalities than any other state in the entire nation for the past five years in a row. Law enforcement has been doing pretty good here, maintiaining an excellent record. Annually in Massachusetts, 15 to 20 persons are “killed by” a driver who has consumed an amount of alcohol. Only about 10% of the couple hundred alcohol-related fatalities per year are innocent victims, consistently, year after year according to NHTSA figures. If there were 206 in 2004, then 21 of them were “victims”. Not to diminish the value of that in the slightest way, but I believe all 169 of the people murdered that year, were victims of an intentionally committed violent crime. If you are measuring the total number of alcohol-related traffic fatalities as compared to homicides, you need to get the total number of suicides and add that to base of murders, if you wish to present a fair comparison for public to base an opinion upon.
first in 2002 MADD gave Massachusetts a D- grade in the war for drunk driving, with Montana being the only state to receive an F. Theres alot of room for improvement there wouldnt ya say, but it did only take 4 years to toughen the laws.
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Secondly if that was my only point I may consider additional facts but I’m not. My point is that she couldnt even get the votes to keep a pardon off the desk of the governor from the governors council. How can she even imagine working with the legislators. The hypocrisy
But, don’t really understand why the comparison of murders is in there? Are you saying Hillman should be sponsoring pardons for hand-gun murderers instead? (I get the vague hypocricy, he supported a DUI offender while she says she is against DUI offenders.) You stated “37 more people were (A) killed by drunk drivers than (B) other murders” and that is false and misleading, to her benefit! While their administration has failed to do anything effective to address the escalating murder rate (B), their policies may even be at-fault for contributing to that problem, but tougher drunk driving penalties (A) is one area of law that Kerry Healey is taking great credit for as her big achievement. (aka had some level of involvement.) To me, your math seems to quantify that as a wise leadership choice, to devote most of your time and resources towards (A) because there were MORE of those than (B). There weren’t. There were 10x fewer and the number has not been rising, is not getting out of control. Whatever the government has recently invested toward solutions for (A), they should be held accountable to show that 10x as much has been spent on (B) if expect to get comparative results. Mrs. Healey hasn’t paid any attention to (B) because it’s hard, would require 10x as much effort, can’t just reword a couple of lines in a law and call it done. She could care less if a few persons lives were saved in Roxbury but she would love to be able to say she had something to do with it, if only there were some easy way, without really having to do anything.
Some sources claim two ammendments to 18 U.S.C. 247, others three. Of particular interest is whether the ammendment makes it easier for the feds to prosecute under the interstate commerce clause of the Constitution, or whether, as is stated in the NCATF report, it eliminates the requirement:
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If true, wouldn’t the feds have an incentive to demonstrate a crime was racially motivated? What does this do to the 32% cases of African American perpetrators on African American churces?
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Anyway, wasn’t the whole “epidemic of terror” debunked in 1996?
Not quite sure what you are talking about, the NCATF report was not solely for church burnings in 1996. Here’s the reports for 1997, 1998, 1999 and 2000. I thinking you are missing the point in general here, real people committed crimes and real people went to jail and a rate doubled from before the task force. You have an issue with this?
Mr. Fumento, appears to be what we call in the trade a “wacko.”
Thanks for that clarification, but isn’t the “rise” suspect if earlier data doesn’t exist? In NCATF’s first report, it reported there were 429 incidents of House of Worship Arsons/Bombings over a 29-month period between 1995-1997. In it’s fourth report, it states there were an addition 516 incidents over a 38-month period between 1997-2000. Was there a spike that hadn’t subsided since the feds got involved, or was there never a spike to begin with?
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Regardless, I still can’t wrap my head around why church burnings, heinous though they are, should be a federal crime. What about racially-motivated destruction of other property — a school for instance?
The reason racial attacks are a federal crime is that there were huge numbers of lynchings in the southern U.S. during the last century that went uninvestigated. The rest of the country could see what was happening and the state and local governments chose to do nothing about it. After decades of frustration (and lots of filibusters by southern senators), Congress was finally able to pass legislation making lynching a federal crime and allowing U.S. law enforcement to get involved.
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I don’t know offhand whether that would include property destruction, and I don’t know if there has ever been any interest in repealing the laws and returning complete authority to the state and local governments.
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An outstanding account of the workings of the Senate and the issues involved is in Robert Caro’s Master of the Senate, about LBJ.
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