Romney hits foe on executions

Eyeing next year's gubernatorial election, Governor Mitt Romney yesterday accused Democratic Attorney General Thomas F. Reilly of using a manpower shortage in the state crime lab as a pretext for opposing the Republican governor's new bill to reinstate capital punishment.

Romney called Reilly's opposition to the new death penalty measure ''particularly disappointing" because it was not ''based on principle nor lack of information but seemed political." Romney added that he respects the position of Reilly's rival, former assistant US attorney general Deval Patrick, saying Patrick's objections are based on personal morals.

''Attorney General Reilly, who's been a long-term supporter of the death penalty, flipped by saying there's a backlog at the [State Police] DNA lab and therefore he can't support it," Romney told reporters at a news conference he called to respond to widespread criticism of his bill. ''I would say that it's pretty obvious that the right answer to a backlog at the crime lab is not to say we shouldn't be carrying out punishments or prosecutions but instead we should fix the backlog, which is of course exactly what we're intent on doing."

Reilly, holding his own news conference later on, said it was Romney who was playing politics on the death penalty issue -- national politics, as Romney tests the waters for a potential presidential run in 2008.

Reilly said he objects to the bill because he believes the state cannot handle the extra tasks and costs of lab work required to prosecute such cases.

Still, when asked if he would sign the Romney bill if he were governor, Reilly said, ''Yeah, probably."

The back and forth came more than a year before the November 2006 election for governor, and it was unusual because Romney has refrained from directly criticizing Reilly. Earlier this year, Reilly criticized Romney's leadership and focus on fund-raising rather than keeping companies in Massachusetts.

The dispute surfaced the day after Romney introduced legislation to reinstate the death penalty for a narrow set of crimes such as deadly acts of terrorism and the killing of police officers. The bill would establish a series of unprecedented hurdles to execute defendants, relying heavily on scientific evidence, requiring that indigent defendants get at least two clearly qualified lawyers, and allowing defendants to have their cases heard by juries that are not necessarily in favor of the death penalty in general.

Reilly said he sees Romney's decision to unveil a death penalty bill at a time when the Legislature is the most left-leaning in more than a decade as a move to establish his credentials with Republican voters far from Massachusetts.

''This is part of a national agenda, and that's where his focus is . . . and not right here on the needs of Massachusetts, and we have seen this time and time again," Reilly said, citing Romney's recent pronouncement against human embryonic stem cell research that involves a type of cloning. ''It's a red herring on his part, and I'm certainly disappointed by his comments."

Patrick, who early in his legal career defended death row inmates, sought to close ranks with Reilly in opposing the bill rather than side with Romney's attack on his competitor.

''The governor's bill won't help get kids out of gangs, guns off the street, or drugs out of the hands of abusers," Patrick said in a statement sent to the Globe. ''Real leadership is about dealing with the causes of violent crime, not hollow symbols like the death penalty."

The state Republican Party sought to keep the heat on Reilly yesterday, e-mailing reporters a series of Reilly quotations over time to highlight his changed position on the death penalty, citing it as evidence that Reilly has a ''lack of conviction on major issues."

Reilly, once a death penalty opponent, was Middlesex district attorney before his election as attorney general in 1998. He spoke out in favor of the death penalty in the mid-1990s, according to a review of his public comments.

He explained later that he had switched to favoring capital punishment in 1991 after a jailhouse interview with a potential suspect in the abduction case of Sarah Pryor, a Wayland girl whose disappearance stymied law enforcement authorities for years. The man had already been convicted of murder in Texas and showed no remorse for that killing.

''I changed my mind right then," Reilly recalled in 1998. ''My only reservation was whether or not the death penalty could be applied fairly. I'm satisfied that it can be applied fairly."

In 1997, Reilly backed a death penalty measure that was defeated in a tie vote in the state House of Representatives.

At the time, Reilly justified his position by saying the bill created multiple layers of review to ensure that no defendant would be wrongly put to death -- the kind of layers that the Romney bill sets out in his legislation.

Asked what has changed between 1997 and now, Reilly said budget cutbacks have left the State Police DNA crime lab with a massive backlog that makes it incapable of dealing with evidence in routine rape cases, let alone capital cases, in a timely manner.

''With the worsening economy, resources have been cut back from law enforcement and we have other priorities in this state," Reilly said.

''I support the death penalty," Reilly said yesterday. ''I do think the death penalty can be fairly and equally applied. I do believe in that. But in terms of whether, realistically, this bill is going to get passed at this time, he knows full well the chances of that are very slight and very slim, so it's where you devote your energies and your focus, and his [Romney's] focus is on somewhere else. It's not on Massachusetts."

Reilly's support for the death penalty puts him at odds with the liberal core of the state Democratic Party, whose platform explicitly opposes the death penalty but supports life sentences without possibility of parole. The platform does not specify which crimes would be subject to a life sentence.

Currently, Reilly holds an advantage over Patrick in name recognition and campaign dollars, though Romney's attention to Patrick's death penalty position brought some attention to Reilly's rival. A March Boston Globe poll found that 78 percent of Massachusetts adults were unfamiliar with Patrick. By comparison, those polled preferred Reilly over Romney, 48 percent to 41 percent.

Romney yesterday speculated that Reilly fears losing ground to Patrick among Democratic voters because of his support for the death penalty.

''I'm afraid the real reason the attorney general has backed away from his long-term support of the death penalty is that he is facing a more liberal opponent in the primary," Romney said.

The governor, responding to the reaction to his death penalty bill this week, said he saw the responses breaking down in ''two camps."

''One was the camp of people who said, 'I support the death penalty with proper safeguards . . . There are others who simply oppose the death penalty on moral grounds, such as Deval Patrick, who's announced his candidacy for governor. I respect both of those camps as being principled positions," Romney said.

Massachusetts is one of 14 states that either has no capital punishment law or had such a law abolished by state high courts recently.

Romney said his administration is working to bring the DNA laboratory up to speed, pointing out that his annual budget proposal called for $5.4 million to create an interim lab to expand and improve forensic research, increase the number of lab technicians, and thus reduce the backlog.

But state Representative David Linsky, a Democrat from Natick, said the problem with Romney's bill is not its reliance on the beleaguered lab, but the immense strain it would put on district attorneys' offices, many of which have annual budgets that are only a fraction of what a single, typical capital case costs.

''You would need an expert on DNA, an expert on tools, and expert on any piece of corroborating evidence," Linsky said. ''It's the DA's office that pays the fees for the expert witnesses."

Globe correspondent Janette Neuwahl contributed to this report.

Statements of Thomas F. Reilly for and against capital punishment, 1990-2005

Attorney General Thomas F. Reilly once was a death penalty opponent, but changed that position in the 1990s. Now, Reilly says he is against a bill authored by Governor Mitt Romney to reinstate the death penalty.

March 1990: As a candidate for Middlesex district attorney, Reilly said he opposed the death penalty. ''I, too, have never supported a death penalty in this particular state," he said.

1991: Reilly would say years later that he became a supporter of the death penalty in 1991 after a jail house interview with a possible suspect in the abduction of Sarah Pryor. The inmate had been convicted of murder in Texas and showed no remorse. ''I changed my mind right then," Reilly recounted in a September 1998 candidate forum. ''My only reservation was whether or not the death penalty could be applied fairly. I'm satisfied that it can be applied fairly."

May 1995: At an emotional State House hearing about a bill to reinstate the death penalty, Reilly, then the Middlesex district attorney, said: ''To me, the death penalty is punishment, just punishment of people for what they have done."

March 1996: As the Legislature debated a bill to reinstate capital punishment, Reilly and a majority of the other district attorneys said they would seek to impose the death penalty. ''I had reservations on whether it could be fairly applied, but this bill creates three layers of review," said Reilly. ''There are some cases where some people deserve to die for what they've done."

Oct. 8, 1997: Announcing his candidacy for attorney general, Reilly said: ''Certain cases are so bad and horrendous that people deserve to die for what they have done."

April 28, 2005: Reilly, now the attorney general, said he opposes Romney's bill.

''At this point, without the infrastructure in place, I think we have greater priorities in public safety and housing and jobs."

April 29, 2005: Asked if he would sign the Romney bill if he were governor, Reilly said, ''Yeah, probably."