But that hardly ends this woeful tale of prosecutorial malfeasance and hypocrisy. Just two days before the Court of Appeals ruling, Auerhahn appeared once again on the public stage — this time as a member of the federal-prosecution team of three Boston cops allegedly involved in a drug-trafficking scheme in Southern Florida.
So now we have a federal prosecutor, deemed an obstructer of justice and perjurer by four federal judges, pursuing not only the former House Speaker, but Boston police officers charged with corruption as well. Do as I say, not as I do. Indeed, if the Bush-administration Department of Justice’s marching orders are never to admit error or wrongdoing, be it intentional or not — providing advice, say, on the legality of torture or on ways to justify official lies — it appears that the US Attorney’s office in Boston is in lockstep, just doing its job.
Oh, and one more thing: it was announced last Friday that US Attorney Sullivan has been named acting head of the federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms in Washington — a considerable promotion — and it appears likely that he will get the permanent post.
Forced tattoo removal?
At first glance, it seemed like little more than another ghastly instance of racial violence deserving harsh punishment. In November 2002, Josiah A. Spaulding III — blue-blood son of the president of the Wang Center for the Performing Arts and grandson of a state Republican Party leader and founder of the Spaulding Rehabilitation Hospital — engaged in what Suffolk District Attorney Daniel F. Conley’s office called a “vicious, unprovoked attack” on two black women. Spaulding, 23 at the time and in the company of skinhead friends, was alleged to have spewed racial epithets at two black teenage girls while beating them with a riot baton.
However, the resolution of the case proved anything but ordinary. When Spaulding stood trial before Suffolk Superior Court Judge Charles T. Spurlock this past July, the judge — himself a member of a prominent black family and the nephew of the first black woman to be elected a judge in the United States — acquitted him of the more serious civil-rights charges while convicting him of assault and battery with a dangerous weapon. Spaulding faced a maximum prison term of 10 years. The district attorney’s office recommended two-and-a-half. Instead, Judge Spurlock imposed one of the most unusual sentences in memory: five years of probation, restitution to the victims, 200 hours of community service, visits to Beacon Hill’s African Meeting House and Washington’s Holocaust Museum, and — here comes the unusual part — the removal of Spaulding’s racist Nazi tattoos.
Many letter writers and blogospherians were quick to label the Spaulding case another example of how American white elites buy their way out of legal trouble. Such a vicious, racially charged attack surely would have resulted in jail time had the white defendant come from a less privileged background, they argued. For example, on the Huffington Post blog Susan Madrak questioned whether “young men without such blue blood — or such very white skin — get the same understanding treatment.” Had the outraged multitude known that the judge himself was black, they might rightly or wrongly have toned down their criticism. But in today’s politically correct world, that information never got mentioned in the Globe and Herald stories, although it was obviously known to their news reporters. Only Herald columnist Alan Lupo, writing almost a week after the verdict’s release, noted Spurlock’s race.
