Posted on 11/21/2007 6:11:19 AM PST by Hemingway's Ghost
The father of a Washington woman slaughtered along with her new husband - allegedly at the hands of a convicted Bay State killer - said his daughter’s accused murderer never should have been released from prison here.
“It’s because of stupidity in Massachusetts that my daughter is dead,” said Darrel Slater, 55, who is preparing to bury his daughter, Beverly Mauck, 28, and her husband Brian Mauck, 30.
The couple was executed in their home in rural Graham, Wash., Saturday after an alleged argument with Daniel Tavares Jr., 41, who in 1991 pleaded guilty to hacking his mother to death with a carving knife in their Somerset home in served 16 years for that crime.
Walter Steele Prosecutor/judge Steele may be best remembered as the special prosecutor who brought charges against Senator Edward M. Kennedy for leaving the scene of the 1969 accident on Chappaquiddick Island off Martha's Vineyard that killed 28-year-old Mary Jo Kopechne (Kennedy was found guilty and received a two-month suspended sentence.) Steele had just been appointed special prosecutor for Dukes County on Martha's Vineyard a month before the Chappaquiddick accident. He was named to the Superior Court in 1980 and stepped down from the bench in 1996 at the mandatory retirement age of 70. He was not happy about it, "They fired me" Steele put it. Judge Steele was a Boston Bruins fan who mourned the demolition of Boston Garden and wept openly when he learned that Bobby Orr had been traded.
If he was appointed in 1980, that means he was probably nominated by Ed King.
There HAD to be some poor smuck guilty of a drug crime...or some "white-collar" type crime..that could have taken that killers place. No freaking question in my mind....
This is sick...!!
I ditto that!
The system is bassackwards.
No kidding.............
OK. I’m not going to defend the judge, although I don’t think she needs much of a defense.
The man got 16 years for manslaughter for murdering his mother. I’m guessing because of the drug thing he claimed to be on drugs or something so it wasn’t premeditated. In any case, that sentence was completed, so what happened here doesn’t have anything to do with that.
HE wasn’t being let out early, or on parole, he had to be released for THAT sentence because it ended. In fact, he seems to have been held a little extra time, but I could be misreading it, as the story in 2004 said he’d be getting out in 2005 but he didn’t get out until 2007.
While in prison, he is alleged to have committed crimes, so before his release, they charged him. When his release came, he was arrested on those charges.
Bail was set at $50,000. That isn’t an impossible sum — he could have gotten a bail bondsman to cover it, or maybe his new wife had some money. He obviously appealed it, and we don’t know if had he lost his appeal he would have been out on bail or not.
The issue, and the mistake of this judge, was reducing a $50,000 bail to recognicance. It is possible that she read the $50,000 bail as a real bail, not as a “bail to keep the guy in prison”. Usually those bails are either denied or set in the hundreds of thousands of dollars.
So she may simply have been ruling that a guy who was just in prison for 16 years wouldn’t be expected to have the money to cover a $50,000 bail, and if you set the bail simply to get him to come back, that the bail was too high.
Of course, the story says he skipped his court date, that was in July.
So why was he still free from July to November? It seems that nobody in Mass. really cared where he was or what he was up to. Nobody went after him when he skipped his court date.
Blaming the judge for this is an easy reaction, but the ruling doesn’t indicate by itself some liberal judge running roughshod over the court system. I presume if she has other bad rulings our “stab-the-other-republicans-in-the-back” crowd here will gleefully find them and post them for us.
It appears that when she was appointed, other than being a democrat, she was a tough sell to the liberals who run Mass., being a prosecuter who hadn’t given proper deference to civil rights.
And there is little in the record from before her appointment, and nothing to suggest she was a liberal or would be prone to making rulings like this.
Further, it should be noted that while she overturned a lower court, there’s the supreme court above her, who could have reversed this ruling; and if she had ruled against, they could have reversed this ruling. Since they didn’t reinstate the bail, either the prosecuter didn’t appeal it, or they would have thrown out the bail if this judge had kept it.
As to who this helps or hurts, I don’t know or care anymore. We know Romney appointed democrats, and for those who think democrats are by nature evil and don’t deserve to be judges, that’s enough to disqualify him.
The reason the Horton case was important wasn’t that a judge appointed by Dukakis did something, it’s that DUKAKIS pushed the furlough program that let him out.
So it’s not at all comparable. Not that it matters to the shoot-first crowd.
Well, yeah. And I was able to turn up, in a very simple internet Google search, all sorts of material that inferred Tavares was a bad, bad man---even without this latest story. Witness the Globe Magazine article from 2004, for example.Shouldn't a judge charged with deciding whether or not a man should go, more or less, free, do the same due diligence? If, on 1 July, she had typed in Daniel Tavares into Google, she would have seen much of the same material I discovered . . . yet she determined this was a man who would live up to his word.
I mean, come on. Everyone's entitled to his or her fair share of mistakes, but sometimes the stakes are far too high. Err on the side of caution---make the guy surrender some dough.
Seems like you have an excuse for every slip up of Romney.
Yeah, no kidding...Or tax evasion (the only capital crime in Mass). ;-)
Thanks for that lengthy summary. You told me things I didnt’ realize. Yeah, I agree reducing the bail was a bonehead move.
Plus she overturned another judge. What kind of Judge would diss a lower judge over a scum like this, and....let him walk out? How more crazy does a person half to be, if possible, for Kathe to restrain?
She's a freeking, dripping liberal.
IMNSHO, the homicidal perps (like this one) that get set free by these judges should be executed immediately, and the judge that set them free should be incarcerated for the remainder of their initial sentence and serve the sentence for any crimes that they (the original perp) commit subsequent to release.
So when she was born, her mother looked into her little eyes and said “Look, Honey, it’s a liberal, let’s name her Kathe”.
Wow, the liberal media is pretty desperate to stop Mitt Romney. I hear gnats.
Nice to see the law-and-order wing of the conservative movement is alive and well, and ready to take charge.
Why don’t we just cut out the middle man, and we can simpy execute all the liberal judges right now?
How so? This story broke, for all intents and purposes, in the Boston Herald. The Boston Herald isn't exactly a bastion of the liberal media---it's a right-leaning tabloid.
Author...of Horton...Roger Ailes
I see no evidence that this is a slip-up for Romney. I see no evidence that this judge was a liberal, either when she was a prosecuter, or after she became a judge. She could well have been, but nothing in the record OTHER than this single ruling gives any indication of her particular political stance, other than that she was a democrat.
He was appointing democrats, and I see no evidence that any information was presented to him or known to anyone that, years after his appointment and after he was gone from the governorship, she would make a mistake like this in a bail hearing case.
And I can’t find a single freeper who called this woman out before they knew about this case, or any other conservative for that matter. Maybe the conservatives DID complain about her appointment, but looking through the record and searching google the ONLY complaints I find are from liberals, that she was a prosecuter and not in tune enough with civil rights.
I see no indication that a Governor Fred Thompson of Mass. would have picked a different person to be a judge. We can’t know of course since Fred has never appointed a conservative judge, OR a liberal judge, though he DID vote for some pretty liberal Clinton appointees while he was in the senate.
I wouldn’t hold Fred accountable for the liberals he voted yes on, although by the logic here I guess I should.
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