Tom Reilly |
Attorney General Thomas Reilly, who wants to be elected governor, is a proven master at chasing — and capturing — headlines. He nosed his way into the Catholic Church’s sex-abuse scandal, the sale of the Red Sox, and the outrage that ensued when local radio slime-masters engaged in racially offensive banter. Never mind that Reilly’s office had no jurisdiction. That’s politics, Massachusetts-style: so much hot hair so much of the time.Time, of course, wounds all heels. Reilly paid the piper in spades with his flip-flops on the death penalty and same-sex marriage. More painful still were the well-deserved black eyes he received for inappropriately meddling in a Worcester County drunk-driving investigation and ineptly naming the admirable but nevertheless income-tax delinquent state representative Marie St. Fleur as his running mate. But hey, at least the dailies spelled his name correctly.
Now comes a case that is a bit more difficult to get one’s mind around, but shows — in all its hollowness — how Reilly as a leader tackles a particularly difficult and philosophically challenging issue. If you are wondering what we’re talking about, don’t feel bad. Trying to follow a shell game is no easy matter. In this instance the shell game concerns the number of people wrongfully convicted of serious crimes.
Two-and-a-half years after he garnered headlines statewide by promising action in 90 days (oops), Attorney General Reilly and the Massachusetts District Attorneys Association (MDAA) last week proudly released their “Justice Initiative” report. Well, perhaps not proudly. They released it at 4:45 pm on the Friday of Labor Day weekend, without a press conference, press release, or comment. And they did not post the report on the MDAA or Attorney General’s office’s Web sites.
If they are ashamed of the report, they should be. It sheds no light on the causes of known wrongful convictions; concludes that the problems lie in the past, rejects almost every reform that has been suggested — including those of the New England Innocence Project, which was the only outside entity asked to provide input; and spends much of its meager 25 pages praising the state’s current prosecutorial offices.
Rather than pressing for change at local police stations, it tells them to adopt reforms only when “practical” — including those called for by the courts, like taping interrogations. Many of the scant calls for change are for pet AG projects that are almost wholly irrelevant to the issue of why people are wrongfully convicted, such as expansion of the Sexual Assault Nurse Examiner program and eliminating the statute of limitations for child molestation. Now those particular recommendations may have some merit, but coming as they do on the eve of a closely fought Democratic primary (in which Reilly trails), they smack of political opportunism that is base — even by the elastic standards that prevail on Beacon Hill.
If Reilly had kept to his own self-proclaimed 90-day timetable, his report would have been ready sometime in August of 2004. When he launched the initiative, he acted as though he knew what he wanted to do. The press release and accompanying materials suggested as much. Reilly made clear that he rejected out of hand all calls for an independent “innocence commission,” as well as mandatory tape-recording of police interrogations. And while that might have been a bad start, even cynics expected some sort of progress after the show Reilly staged.
The cynics, it turns out, were not cynical enough. The report starts off emphasizing that most of the wrongful convictions in Massachusetts “were investigated and tried 10, 15 and 20 years ago . . . before DNA came into general usage. . . . [T]his handful of high-profile cases from the 1980s and early 1990s did not suggest a present systems failure.” To which a reasonable person might ask: if there’s no problem, then why should the taxpayers spend the money you ask for in the report’s recommendations? And why did you waste your valuable time for more than two years studying the nonexistent problem? And, if there was a problem back then, why oppose a commission to identify other wrongful cases from the past?
The so-called Justice Initiative reached its conclusions based on its examination of 15 exonerations, 11 of which were from Boston. Several wrongful convictions from other counties were not examined. There was no attempt to look at other overturned cases, dismissed cases, or cases that strongly suggested wrongful conviction. There also is no apology for anything the prosecutors’ offices might have done wrong.
Anyone who doubts that wrongful convictions are a serious problem should consider these facts:
• The Suffolk County DA and Boston Police Department adopted an entirely new system for obtaining eyewitness evidence, released in July 2004, and trained all BPD detectives over the following six months or so on the new methods.
• The Supreme Judicial Court ruled in 2004 that any police interrogation not tape-recorded in full will only be admitted into trial with a strong warning to the jury questioning the credibility of the police testimony.
