Only in Mass would NOT commuting the sentence of a convicted child molester be controversial.
Does anyone know more about this? Why is this controversial?
His name is Gerald Amirault and they would have already let him out but he refuses to admit his guilt. You see the former AG Tom Reilly and his DA MArtha Coakley would rather an innocent man rot in jail then admit that they are wrong.<p? One thing I can say about Mass is that they let ACTUAL molesters go with a slap on the wrist and stick normal people behind bars. If Mr. Amirault had been a transvestite then prison would have been deemed "unsafe" for him and he could have went home. Perhaps he should have worn a dress to his trial?
For Gerald Amirault of Massachusetts, who got, for crimes that never took place, a prison sentence far longer than the one Abbott got for murdering a fellow prisoner, there are, of course, no hopes of a parade of celebrities urging his release. Neither a Maoist, nor a murderer, nor a writer who saw in prison a metaphor for the corrupt nature of American society, nor, above all, a criminal guilty of the charges against him, his is not a case likely to have commended itself to the attention of literary society, as Jack Abbott's did back in the 1980s. His sole revolutionary act was to refuse, as his similarly guiltless mother and sister did, to "take responsibility" for molesting minors, and go and sit in classes for sex offenders.Literary society might, of course, if it were disposed, have found much of interest in Gerald Amirault, his prosecutors, and the corrupted Supreme Judicial Court that has kept him imprisoned. For those interested, we have the case of the state's current governor, Jane Swift. Six months after her own parole board unanimously called for commutation of his sentence--and pointed out, in a way unprecedented for such a body, the ludicrous charges, the grave doubts as to the justice of this prosecution--Gov. Swift has still been unable to bring herself to act one way or another.
A variety of reasons have been offered--one being that she had promised the accusing children and their families she would make no decision over the Christmas holidays, in order to avoid causing pain, whatever that decision might be. Then the governor was busy finding a willing running mate for the gubernatorial election in November--a grueling effort evidently, considering the number of her choices who decided it might be best to let the opportunity pass. Now there is talk that the scandal of child abuse charged to priests in Massachusetts could cause the governor to decide the political risk is too great to agree to commutation for Gerald.
The rest of that column is at http://www.opinionjournal.com/medialog/?id=100001695.
A site dedicated to spreading the facts about the Amirault case is here: http://cltg.org/cltg/amirault/amiraults.htm.
I hope Romney is willing to take some action on this travesty. The way Swifty sleazed out on it is disgusting.