Laxachusetts (Mitt’s messy crime record.)

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?”

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.”

“This is not a rant on defending Rommney it is just the hard facts of what goes on in all states. Unless we have the prison space for the criminals to serve their full sentences we will keep seeing horror stories like these. We have to get serious about encercating and excuting criminals.”

Get serious about incarcerating people? We lock up more people now than we ever have, in total and on a per capita basis. We hit a new all time high record back in 1979 for the most people behind bars ever, per capita and in total. Throughout the 20th century before that our incarceration rate had remained relatively flat. Since then our incarceration rate as multiplied to several times what it ever was before 1979. We now lock up more people than any other nation on the planet, even those with far larger populations than us. We only make up around 5% of the world population, but about 25% of all people behind bars are behind bars right here in the land of the free.

Prison is a limited resource. We can’t keep building them as fast as we’ve been building them. States can’t keep increasing their prison budgets. That’s one of the reasons why we have so many early release programs. The legislators keep keep trying to look tough passing more and more laws, criminalizing more conduct, turning what were misdemeanor crimes into felony crimes, increasing punishments on crimes, upping the classification of felonies such that they are in categories that require longer prison sentences, adding new sentence enhancements, etc. These same legislators end up having to pass all sorts of emergency resolutions to let people out sooner. They do that with much less fanfare than the laws they pass that are adding to our prison burden. In my state it used to be that if someone was convicted of a felony on Wednesday and sentenced to prison he’d be transported from the county jail to a prison by Friday. Now there is no room in the prisons or in the county jails so almost all of these people get to go home on reporting bonds, often signature bonds, and then they just call in every night until a prison bed opens up and they are supposed to turn themselves in the next day to be transported to the big house. It usually takes several months for a prison bed to open up. The parole board is doing all it can to free up bed space. Out of necessity they have to be more concerned with freeing bed space than with public safety. They push for more early release programs and they parole almost everyone out the first time they come before the board, even habitual offenders. Those released now have to practically kill someone before their parole will be revoked. It has to be this way because there is just no room at the inn.

“No matter which state it is our prison systems are not designed to punish criminals, they are supposed to “rehab” them...”

Things may have been that way in the past, but now rehabilitation isn’t nearly the focus as it used to be. Now it is about punishment, and just warehousing bodies, lots and lots of them. In my state at least we spend very little money on rehabilitation programs and really what these are in my state are short classes people can take to get released even earlier. It’s more about clearing bed space than it is about trying to give these people skills they can use to make it in society as law abiding citizens.

Crime rates did drop some as we started on our nearly three decade march to lock up as many people as possible, but in recent years crime rates have actually been on the rise, despite the fact that we keep hitting new record years for total number and per capita number of people incarcerated. It’s been decades since we actually locked up less people one year than we had locked up the year before. Just from 2004 to 2006 we added more than 100,000 people locked up in our prisons and jails. A few more billion dollars a year? No problem. We’re made of money.

On average I believe that people sentenced to prison these days spend an average of about two and a half years in before being released. That includes those who serve really long sentences, even lifers, and those serving much shorter sentences. Probably most do a good bit less than two years, often just a few months. If you want to lock people up longer on average, bring it on up to an average of 10 years or so rather than 2.5 years, we’d have to add several million more prison beds. It would end up costing us hundreds of billions of dollars a year.

Personally, I think we need to get a lot smarter about how we use our limited prison bed space. Prison isn’t much good for anything but keeping the really bad people away from the rest of us, at least until they are released. Ideally we’d keep the really dangerous ones locked up so they can’t cause us any harm. In order to do that without adding a lot of beds we can’t afford, we need to do a lot better job of prioritizing. There are a lot of people we currently send to prison that we wouldn’t be able to send if we are really trying to keep the more dangerous people locked up longer.

I think communities should take a much more active roll in deciding which people need to be locked up and for how long. The best way to do that in my mind is to require communities to shoulder more of the costs of incarceration. As it is, a county my pay for it’s county jails, but in most if not all states prison is an expense covered entirely by the state government. Prosecutors and judges in in your county can send as many people to prison as long as they want and it won’t cost them or your county a dime. The state with its massive budget pays for all that. When I see a judge send someone to prison for a couple of years because he’s $50 behind on his fine payments, and I’ve seen a judge do that over $30 before, I think the $60 grand or whatever it’s going to cost to incarcerate that prisoner ought to come out of the judges salary. We already keep statistics on state incarceration numbers. We have the data on where all the prisoners are coming from, which counties. Now we need to start rationing the prison space. The state could continue to pay for everyone sent to prisons, except when a county exceeds the state’s incarceration rate. If a county is using up more than its share of prison beds, than it ought to have to pay for those beds. Why should people in county “B” have to pay for the excesses of the judges and prosecutors in county “A”? People don’t think about any of that now because prison is basically free. The rich state government off in the capital pays for all of that out its seemingly endless budget. When people start complaining about potholes in their roads not being fixed and so on and then realize it’s because their elected prosecutor and judges are locking up too many people they’ll start taking a lot more interest in who is being locked up and for how long. Then communities will become involved in the process more than ever, deciding how they’ll use their limited prison resources.

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