Posted on 11/27/2007 5:20:37 AM PST by JRochelle
Former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney suddenly faces questions about bicoastal tragedies involving three murder victims, a vicious killer, and a permissive judge he appointed who helped magnify this mayhem.
Daniel Tavares Jr., 41, pleaded guilty in 1991 to stabbing his mother fatally with a carving knife in their Somerset, Massachusetts home. While serving a 17 – 20-year sentence for that atrocity, Tavares allegedly punched one prison guard in the head and later spat on another while yelling “I’m going to kill you!” According to a Department of Corrections document cited by the Boston Herald, Tavares also “threatened to kill the governor [Romney], attorney general of MA, Bristol County Sheriff, and other law enforcement officials when released.” Nonetheless, he was freed last June 14 after just 16 years, thanks to “good time."
Police immediately re-arrested Tavares to prosecute him for his alleged assaults on these corrections officers. But Kathe Tuttman, a Romney-nominated superior-court judge, rejected both a lower-court decision and prosecutors’ requests to hold Tavares on $50,000 bail. On appeal, Tuttman overlooked Tavares’s prison antics, as well as his eight prior drug and robbery busts. She released him on his own recognizance on July 16. Tuttman also spurned prosecutors’ wishes that Tavares wear a monitoring bracelet. “There is no indication,” she ruled, “that he is a risk of flight.” Tuttman ordered Tavares to report to a probation officer thrice weekly, work as a welder at Davon Steel, and move in with his sister in Dighton, Massachusetts.
Instead, Tavares skipped town, went west, and married Jennifer Lynn Freitas, 37, a woman he met on inmate.com with whom he corresponded while incarcerated. They lived in a trailer near Graham, Wash., some 40 miles south of Seattle.
On November 17, Tavares allegedly argued with two neighbors, Beverly Mauck, 28, and Brian Mauck, 30, a young couple who liked scuba diving and married in the Turks and Caicos Islands on May 5, 2006. Police say Tavares wrapped a .22-caliber revolver in a towel, kicked in the Mucks’ door, and then fatally shot each of them three times in the head. Detectives say they matched Tavares to a bloody palm print and shoe prints found in the Maucks’ home. According to police, Tavares confessed to these crimes.
“It’s because of stupidity in Massachusetts that my daughter is dead,” Beverly Mauck’s father, Darrel Slater, told the Herald. “How does a guy who killed his mother, get charged with more crimes, get out of jail? How can he leave the state?”
Romney stepped into this controversy Saturday.
Judge Tuttman’s decision ‘‘showed an inexplicable lack of good judgment in a hearing that decided to put someone on the street who had not only in the past been convicted of manslaughter, but had threatened the lives of other individuals and was a flight risk,’’ Romney told journalists while campaigning in Derry, N.H. ‘‘And I think on that basis, that despite her record as being a law-and-order prosecutor, her lack of judgment suggests that she needs to resign from that post.”
When Romney appointed Tuttman, however, he seemed more focused on gender issues than on law and order. Tuttman was one of four associate justices nominated in April 2006 — all women.
All four had prosecutorial experience. In fact, Tuttman, a registered Democrat, was an Essex County assistant district attorney who, among others, prosecuted Eugene McCollom. He pleaded guilty in 2005 to decapitating a prostitute and burying her on a beach in Nahant, Mass. Nonetheless, contemporaneous news accounts show that as it unveiled these judicial appointees, the Romney administration seemed singularly enthused about how these nominees helped it celebrate diversity.
Romney made “a concerted effort to find qualified women and minority candidates for the bench,” spokesman Eric Fehrnstrom told the State House News Service on April 26, 2006. “For a long time, women and minorities didn’t even bother applying for judgeships because of the perception that the whole process was politically wired.” Fehrnstrom reportedly suggested that although none of these four women was a minority member, people should “stay tuned” for Romney to name judges of color. “The governor is interested in making sure that appointments to the bench, to the extent possible, reflect the diversity of the community at large,” Fehrnstrom said to the Boston Globe.
How might New Hampshire voters regard this development in their next-door neighbor’s presidential bid? Some may see this as further evidence that “Laxachusetts”’s leniency jeopardizes their safety. In a November 14, 2006, editorial, the New Hampshire Union-Leader complained: “When thugs commit crimes in Massachusetts, too often it is New Hampshire that gets punished.” The paper explained that “Massachusetts enters only about 5 percent of its outstanding warrants into the [FBI’s National Crime Information Center] database.” Consequently, 95 percent of criminals wanted in Massachusetts appear law-abiding when New Hampshire cops stop them and compare their names against this database. Romney proposed a bill to require state and local cops to report such warrants to the FBI, but failed to get it through his state legislature.
“People tragically have been killed over this,” Stephen Monier, New Hampshire’s U.S. Marshall told the Union-Leader. “It’s a huge issue.”
Former Democratic state senator Jarrett Barrios told the Herald, “Had he [Romney] actually followed our recommendations on appropriate programs for re-entering prisoners, not just this prisoner, but prisoners across the commonwealth, would be less likely to reoffend.” Barrios also accused Romney of ignoring his own blue-ribbon panel on penal reform. Among other things, it advised post-release monitoring of inmates and job training as methods to reduce recidivism.
Romney’s chief Republican rival, former New York City Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani, took this occasion to examine Romney’s crime record more broadly.
‘‘The governor is going to have to explain his appointment, and the judge is going to have to explain her decision, but it’s not an isolated situation,’’ Giuliani told the Associated Press Saturday while on a campaign bus tour across New Hampshire. ‘‘Governor Romney did not have a good record in dealing with violent crime.’’
“He had an increase in murder and violent crime while he was governor,’’ Giuliani continued. ‘‘So it’s not so much the isolated situation which he and the judge will have to explain. He’s kind of thrown her under the bus, so it’s hard to know how this is all going to come out. But the reality is, he did not have a record of reducing violent crime.’’
While it’s tricky to compare a four-year governorship with an eight-year mayoralty, the FBI’s Uniform Crime Statistics illuminate Romney’s and Giuliani’s records on law and order. While murders grew 7.5 percent in Massachusetts during Romney’s 2002 - 2006 gubernatorial term, they plunged 66.7 percent across Giuliani’s two mayoral terms (1993 – 2001). Burglaries rose 5.8 percent under Romney and slid 68.2 percent under Giuliani. While robberies climbed 12.3 percent on Romney’s watch, Giuliani supervised a 67.2 percent reduction in robberies. As Romney saw a 32.5 percent reversal in motor-vehicle theft, such crimes cratered 73.3 percent under Giuliani. Overall, Romney’s crime index fell 8.2 percent, while Giuliani’s tumbled 56.1 percent.
This ghastly episode’s most telling comment comes from the pen of the suspect behind this grisly double homicide, now isolated in Washington’s Pierce County Jail. As the Herald reported November 21, Daniel Tavares Jr. wrote his father to say he received a college education and learned seven languages behind bars. As this convicted killer added: “Only in Massachusetts.”
How dare you tell the truth about Romney?
Don’t you know that he converted to conservatism last week?
And he only pretended to be a liberal for the last 60 years?
And he was never quite as far Left as Giuliani and Huckabee?
/s
Mitt should step down and let a real conservative go against Rudy
The Romney Record, it’s criminal.
No matter which state it is our prison systems are not designed to punish criminals, they are supposed to "rehab" them (liberal feel good crap). Due to the cost of housing them which varies by state, to relieve overcrowding the state governing bodies use 'safety values' and release them early for 'good' behavior. How good behavior is calculated varies by state. 68% reoffend.
Average serve time is 30%...victims must fight hard to keep the criminal in prison due to the 'over crowding'. The juvenile criminals cost twice as much to house as do the adult criminal. Thus we have fewer juvenile prison beds..it's cheaper to keep giving them probation and let them keep committing crimes until they turn 18 and can be dealt with as an adult.
6-7% of our population have been encarcerated or are encarcerated.
Then you get the NIMBY..(Not in my back yard) crowd so when victims get fed up and demand that their governments do something about the crime rate the government ends up doing nothing to build more prisons or add additional beds to existing ones due to the cost factor.
Basically this early release is no different that the catch and release of illegal aliens.
Due to the early release i.e. parole/probation systems we have according to the BJS over 12,000 additional murders per year.
Nationally the recidivism rate is 68%...this is over a decade old study. BTW the recidivisim rate was 64% when Slick Willie was president, and went up to 68% under his watch. http://www.ojp.usdoj.gov/bjs/abstract/rpr94.htm Reports on the reassert, reconviction, and reincarceration of former inmates who were tracked for 3 years after their release from prisons in 15 States in 1994. The former inmates represent two-thirds of all prisoners released in the United States that year. The report includes prisoner demographic characteristics (gender, race, Hispanic origin, and age), criminal record, types of offenses for which they were imprisoned, the effects of length of stay in prison on likelihood of reassert, and comparisons with a study of prisoners released in 1983.
Highlights include the following:
Released prisoners with the highest reassert rates were robbers (70.2%), burglars (74.0%), larcenists (74.6%), motor vehicle thieves (78.8%), those in prison for possessing or selling stolen property (77.4%), and those in prison for possessing, using, or selling illegal weapons (70.2%).
Within 3 years, 2.5% of released rapists were arrested for another rape, and 1.2% of those who had served time for homicide were arrested for homicide.
The 272,111 offenders discharged in 1994 had accumulated 4.1 million arrest charges before their most recent imprisonment and another 744,000 charges within 3 years of release.
I blame diversity. Race and gender trumps qualification.
http://article.nationalreview.com/?q=NWQzZmUwMDNjZDk0M2Y0ZjBhNmFhYzJjYTNmNzI5Zjc=
Apparently the crime rate went up and down simultaneously in Massachusetts!
‘‘The governor is going to have to explain his appointment, and the judge is going to have to explain her decision, but it’s not an isolated situation,’’ Giuliani told the Associated Press Saturday while on a campaign bus tour across New Hampshire. ‘‘Governor Romney did not have a good record in dealing with violent crime.’’
Rooty, Rooty, Rooty (head shaking). You have no room to talk buster. Some of YOUR judicial appointments are just as bad if not WORSE. Not to mention your own personal enabling and abetting of criminals in NYC under your (cough) rule as mayor.
Immigration politics have similarly harmed New York. Former mayor Rudolph Giuliani sued all the way up to the Supreme Court to defend the city’s sanctuary policy against a 1996 federal law decreeing that cities could not prohibit their employees from cooperating with the INS. Oh yeah? said Giuliani; just watch me. The INS, he claimed, with what turned out to be grotesque irony, only aims to “terrorize people.” Though he lost in court, he remained defiant to the end. On September 5, 2001, his handpicked charter-revision committee ruled that New York could still require that its employees keep immigration information confidential to preserve trust between immigrants and government. Six days later, several visa-overstayers participated in the most devastating attack on the city and the country in history.
New York conveniently forgot the 1996 federal ban on sanctuary laws until a gang of five Mexicans—four of them illegal—abducted and brutally raped a 42-year-old mother of two near some railroad tracks in Queens. The NYPD had already arrested three of the illegal aliens numerous times for such crimes as assault, attempted robbery, criminal trespass, illegal gun possession, and drug offenses. The department had never notified the INS.
So Mr 'Sanctuary City', not only did you protect criminal Hispanic ILLEGALS, your 'hands off' policy enabled the 9-11 TERRORISTS to plan their attack in that now infamous Brooklyn Mosque. (Rooty shouldn't be running for POTUS, he should be running from the law and under indictment.)
Back to Rooty and his judges; there's been a few articles on the nincompoop bonehead affirmative action judges he picked and what they've done. The RATS will release that salvo when the time's right. It'll make Romney - or anyone - look Elliot Ness.
Not defending Romney, but Rooty is a complete phony on 'Law and Order' (no pun).
It’s a poor political trick to blame a governor, or president, or mayor for a mistake that some appointee made imo.
People will have fun with this for a while, but really, why is this Romney’s fault?
Deroy Murdock still pimping for Rudy911 ping.
More cherry-picking of stats, more bullsh** from Deroy.
I’ll give this scandal its fair due when I see
DEMOCRATS HELD RESPONSIBLE FOR WHAT THEIR JUDICIAL APPOINTEES DO.
You got it!
Yah know... I’m not a huge Romney fan, and I’m even a resident of Pierce county where these gruesome murders happened. But trying to pin this horrible event on Romney is just plain lame.
Does anyone actually take Deroy “Rudy is pro-life because abortions decreased while he was mayor” Murdock seriously???
I seem to recall that Giuliani appointed some real nuts.
And, of course, he appointed criminals as well.
Its a two person race, Romney and Guiliani.
Really?
I choose neither.
Yes, Romney should be ashamed of this appointment. He should have known that a woman would be soft on criminals. He should have foreseen the terrible result of female intuition. But alas, he is only an imperfect human.
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