As well as it should have been. Not really a bombshell, nor was the original post.
Just so that everyone is aware, I wanted to provide a public service to everyone who has to read random lunatic posts. While I cannot keep up with Ernie, I wanted to sprinkle in a little news/fact in the process in case anyone was wondering.
That actual news was a ruling that O’Brien “abused a position of public trust”
Assistant US Attorney Fred Wyshak said after the hearing that, with the enhancements, O’Brien is facing 57 to 71 months in prison. Under sentencing guidelines without enhancements, O’Brien would have been looking at 30 to 37 months behind bars.
It was reported that O’Brien waived a jury trial on the so called “enhancements”
According to sentencing guidelines, a sentence must be significantly increased if a defendant convicted of racketeering is found by another jury trial or the judge to have engaged in activities that violate the public trust.
Interesting.
Wyshak did NOT seek out enhancements for Burke and Tavares sentences (no matter what others make up in posts) but it appears from the ruling that sentence enhancements will be factored in to all three.
Of course Judge Young denied the motion. If he allowed it, he would be concluding that Judge Mulligan committed perjury. Judges don’t do that to judges. The fact that Judge Mulligan kept a list of job candidates with a column coded for the Senate President and Speaker directly contradicts his trial testimony that politics played no role whatsoever when he made his hiring decisions. Mulligan would have no reason to track the job candidates’ sponsors if it was truly irrelevant to him. (Mulligan admitted hiring the father of the Senate President’s chief of staff who’s highest qualification was short order cook, but that wasn’t political hiring!?)
Any motion containing substantial evidence that a Chief Judge perjured himself is in fact a bombshell, and it was appropriately characterized in Mass Lawyers Weekly. The Globe is heavily invested in Mulligan and Wyshak so they have an irreconcilable conflict with this case. You will never read the full facts there. Nor will the Globe investigate the hiring in Mulligan’s office. The media doesn’t do that to their sources.
instead of a jury trial for the additional time for violating the public trust? Because O’Brien wanted MORE time? You know, since the entire Massachusetts justice system is in cahoots with one another?
Come on now. It’s hysterical postings with a lot of liberties taken on the facts.
eb3 failing to deliver on his chronic hyperbole
The government ie. Wyshak doesn’t have to ask for the sentence he did. The rules allow him to. Not the same. Judge Young simply stated what the law says and what O’Brien was convicted of which by definition is violating the public trust.
Wyshak is evil mother fucker and this case is scarier than the Caswell Motel case when it comes to government overreach.
The manufacturing of these indictments based on intelectually raping the law and facts to satisfy his bizarre and dangerous thirst is fucking Nazi like.
We need a clearer legal definition of racketeering. The RICO law was designed specifically to go after career criminals who used otherwise legitimate businesses to launder their money. It worked, but many people think a lot of federal prosecutors overreached. (Sorry for the vague wording but I’m not an expert.)
But if we accept the premise that O’Brien engaged in racketeering by hiring people legislators wanted him to hire, then aren’t legislators “racketeers” too? They were “in business” with O’Brien. Or are we supposed to imagine that O’Brien went over and entrapped them with this novel idea of hiring people?
I get that everyone is glad to see someone perp walk for what we collectively see as widespread corruption. But “creativity” from prosecutors ought to raise flags, and if “mail fraud” isn’t a creative touch … then I don’t know what is.
…that patronage is not illegal. And if the legislature was not a corrupt supermajority it would be in a New York minute.
‘We” need to push for a civil service exam for all these provisional appointments that last for decades. At least they’d have to pass the test. And even show up for it.
I agree with the problem statement, that patronage is not a crime. I’m not sure how we’d actually ban it though. Is it banned anywhere? It’s certainly prevalent in the private sector.
In the private sector, if you run a major project that your employer has bet the enterprise on, you staff that project with sons, daughters, spouses, god-children, god-parents, and — for that matter — best friends and lovers, and the project fails, then your career is over.
There are very few private sector companies that can survive the kind of flagrant nepotism, favoritism, and venal corruption that so dominates Beacon Hill.
Obscenity is notoriously hard to define, and enjoys far more explicit constitutional protections than patronage, yet we still have found ways to regulate it well enough.
One aspect of that is the relatively new requirement that a full, accurate and public record be maintained of every participant in every explicit video.
I suggest that a similar public requirement for public-sector appointments would go a long way. Perhaps require a full, accurate, and public disclosure of any and all connections to the hiring official. Maintain those disclosures in a publicly accessible database searchable by anybody (akin to the on-line property databases now widely available for eastern MA).
Civil service exams and protections are one excellent tool that worked relatively well for the federal government (at least until the GOP started to dismantle them in the Reagan era).
I agree with you that patronage should be illegal. I agree with you that the civil service approach works better (although that, too, can be gamed by those who have learned the tricks). I would like to add one proviso to the latter, though — NO “preference” for civil service exams. No “veterans” preference. No “minority” preference. NO PREFERENCES. One test for everybody, one standard for comparison for everybody, no score adjustments for anybody. Period.
The “patronage is not illegal” argument was thoroughly examined, vetted, and demolished during the trial. The judge was explicit in the jury instructions, the jury clearly understood the distinction, the jury discussed it at length, and … the jury convicted the defendants.
What Mr. O’Brien and his co-conspirators (both indicted and un-indicted) was racketeering, not patronage. That’s why they were indicted (some of them), prosecuted, and convicted. The problem that remains is that Beacon Hill is still full of corruption. The Speaker of the House is still un-indicted.
A major reason for that is that far too many participants are repeating the “patronage is not illegal” canard far too often.