Free Republic

Gov. Deval Patrick said yesterday that he still hasn’t watched the parole hearing of felon turned cop killer Dominic Cinelli or reviewed the con’s lengthy criminal record even as House Speaker Robert DeLeo joined the outcry over Cinelli’s controversial release. “No, no,” said Patrick when asked if he’d examined the video of the six-member parole board interviewing Cinelli, who was serving three concurrent life sentences. The then six-member board — chaired by the governor’s former campaign driver Mark Conrad — included two other Patrick appointees who voted unanimously to spring Cinelli shortly after the 2008 hearing. The career criminal allegedly...

BOSTON — Gov. Deval Patrick canceled a speech in Plymouth on Thursday after learning that union members, mostly off-duty police officers, were preparing to greet him with a picket line. About 250 people from the South Shore and elsewhere in the state were waiting outside the Radisson Conference Center, said Jim Barry, spokesman for the Boston Police Patrolmen’s Association. Patrick was set to speak at an annual AFL-CIO conference. Before his arrival, the labor group’s executive committee voted to join the police officers outside, Barry said, so Patrick would have encountered not just a picket line, but also an empty...