Excerpts of Patrick's press conference on LaGuer case
DEVAL PATRICK: When I was first asked about the Ben LaGuer case frankly I hadn't thought about it for years. I tried to be responsible, I clearly did not have all the facts at my disposal. It is generally not my habit to try to answer questions without all those facts at my disposal and frankly I wish I had waited and done my homework. I apologize to anyone who feels that we didn't come forward with all the facts. I came forward with what I had as I had it. We have today all the documents and all the papers that we have, and frankly most of them have come from you. The first letter I remember sending to the parole board, from the Globe, I learned about a second letter from the Globe. Who's here from the Globe? Anybody? There you are, sorry, kudos on you. I learned about, I was asked about just yesterday morning a contribution to his DNA testing, which by the way I've still found no record of, but we got a letter from a minister who has been in touch with LaGuer thanking me for that and we will release that as well. I still feel that helping someone who has raised a serious issue when you can is a good thing and something that based on the information that I had when I wrote the letters I did I'm proud to have done. I'm also satisfied justice has been served in the way of the DNA testing that has been out. The third point I want to make though is just to take exception to the use of this issue as a political issue by my opponent here. There is a victim's family here who has suffered considerably, with whom I spoke this morning, who by having this issue -- if it's turned into a campaign issue -- stir up all again their own suffering, their own painful memories that go back many, many years and my heart goes out to them and I apologize to them that this issue has become a campaign issue.
I do think that's wrong. I think it is a little more than extreme for the Lt. Gov. to behave as if this issue is an indication of my being, as the saying goes, "soft on crime." Not only have I been a prosecutor, which I think you all know, but I have myself lived in crime-ridden areas on the South side of Chicago, been the victim of crime for that matter. And I don't need to be lectured to by anybody about the impact of violent crime. As a point of fact we have had a surge in gun and gang violence and in homicides all over the Commonwealth in the last four years. And what has been the response of this administration? It's been to cut the funds for cops, 5 to 700 cops, across the Commonwealth. The Lt. Gov. talks a lot about the importance of the sex offender registry and then they veto the funds to support that registry and refuse to appoint the staffing for that registry. There is so much that has to be done to help get serious about he importation of guns purchased in bulk outside of Massachusetts and brought in to Massachusetts. That is going to take statewide and regional leadership and that has not been coming from the current administration and it will come from my administration, should I serve as governor. There are all kinds of ways in which this issue today is being used by the Kerry Healey campaign to distract us all, not just me as her opponent, but all of us. From a record of consistent failure on criminal justice issues and in economic issue and in education and in health care. And those are the issues we should concentrate on and our plans for those. In my case I plan to put a thousand new cops on the street because community policing works. But we cannot just be about law enforcement. We also have to be about prevention. That is the best long term law enforcement strategy and that's why it is so important to focus on longer school days and after school and enrichment programs and summer job and volunteer opportunities and focusing in hard and concentrating on the handful of bad kids who are responsible for the bulk of juvenile justice violations. It's why its so important to support the juvenile justice system and not treat it like a second-class member of the justice system. And it is why it's so important for all elected officials to commit to and believe in and show that they believe in the fundamental fairness of the system because most of the time, most of the time, the prosecutors and the cops get it right. Occasionally they don't, but even when they get it right it is incumbent upon all of us to believe in and support the Constitutional right to a fair trial. And I say that again not as a theorist. I say that as someone who has been in the arena.
The very first capital case, death penalty case, I ever had was one that came to me in the last few hours before the execution was due out of the south. And we managed to get a stay of execution for someone whose head had been shaved, he'd been prepared for education, I mean execution, he's been moved into the holding cell. He got his execution stay only to find out that there was a sworn statement in the file positively identifying someone else as the killer. Even the state in that case had to concede that this was a Constitutional violation. I know from experience that the criminal justice system doesn't always get it right and I know that it is important for officials and any serious lawyer, and frankly any serious citizen, to look for balance in the system and to work to assure whenever there are serious issues raised that justice has indeed been served. So I don't apologize for the work I have done. I am proud of the work I have done and I will not have it trivialized or minimized by someone who's never seen the inside of a courtroom or never been involved in how the criminal justice system actually works on the ground. This is too important to be used as some sound byte for political reasons. We need to get back to the issues that are about our common and collective better future and they are how we can assure people a decent living, an opportunity to educate families and a chance for decent and affordable housing. Happy to take your questions.
Q: Have you spoken to (the mayor of Leominster)?
A: No, I haven't. I think -- do I have an appointment? Next week.
Q: Do you know when?
A: No, he probably knows.
Q. Why do you think he brought this up?
A: Why do I think he brought this up? I have no idea. I'm looking forward to it. I'm told that he wrote to me. I've not yet seen a letter. I've heard that he's interested in talking about it from the media and I'm looking forward to that conversation.
Q. Can you tell us about your conversation with the family?
A: I'll tell you a little bit but it's.. uh.. was a private conversation with the family and the victim of Mr. LaGuer. I called them, I told them how sorry I was that the issue had become a political issue and we talked about that some and let me just leave it at that.
Q. That family's been very angry. Would you characterize them as less angry now at the actions that they thought you'd taken or other people who supported Mr. LaGuer?
A: I would only say that I gave them the opportunity to give me an earful and they did.
Q: Can you also just clarify the contribution. You don't remember exactly but you feel you probably did contribute to the DNA testing fund?
A: Yeah you know what I did last night. When I was asked about this yesterday morning by a reporter and I promised I would go back and see, because the reporter didn't even tell me to whom the check was written and I got home I don't know, 10, 10:30 last night, I went and looked. We have no bank records, frankly, back beyond three and a half years. So I have no record last night. What we did get last night was a letter from someone at New England Law School acknowledging a contribution. It didn't say how much but saying thank you for the contribution and we got that from a minister who had been in touch with Benjamin LaGuer. So I look at the letter, I have no basis to go forward with that. So all I'm saying is I can't tell you to whom the check was written or how much it was for.
Q: Are you saying you don't remember making the contribution? A $5,000 contribution?
A: I don't have any record of a $5,000 contribution.
Q: You have no independent memory of?
A: Correct. I will tell you that in 2001 we were a blessed family and we were able to make contributions in excess of $100,000 and frankly I couldn't tell you in detail what any one was.
Q: Were there any other tools at your disposal at the time between like '96 and 2001 to question the fundamental fairness of Mr. LaGuer's trial aside from asking the parole to consider his application?
A: Any other tools?
Q: Anything else you could have done, just written letters to other bodies to look at the fairness of the jury related issues that came up instead of asking them to accept his parole?
A: Had I represented him, understand I wasn't his lawyer. But had I represented him I could think of other avenues, motions for new trials, but I wasn't his lawyer. I was, I was um, I never represented him and I'll just leave it at that. There are other mechanisms if you were his lawyer, but they weren't available to me because I wasn't.
Q: Because if that had succeeded and they had given his parole, DNA testing down the line if that says he's guilty, your motion as well as others would have allowed him to go free.
A: Well you don't get parole based on guilt or innocence. You get parole based on whether you are eligible for release after having served some time and the parole board makes a judgment about your readiness for release and they do that on the basis of the whole record as I understand it.
Q: You made a donation to a DNA fund. Don't you think you would have followed up to see what the DNA test results were?
A: You're asking me a conditional question. If you're asking me did I follow up to find out what the DNA tests were, I checked when you started asking me questions about this. I haven't followed the case.
Q: Even though you donated money? You concede that you probably donated money to have his DNA tested, but you just let it go for 5 years or whatever it was until it came up again?
A: That's right. I got the thank you letter when I was working at Coca-Cola. Now I can promise you I had other things going on at Coca-Cola then concerning myself with the outcome.
Q: What was the legal issue that brought you to the Florida case that's now in the subject of a Healey commercial?
A: Yeah, does everyone know what we're talking about? This is the Songer case and the legal issue there was the constitutionality of his death sentence and at the Legal Defense Fund where I worked we had an active practice in death penalty defense. The case came to me after the conviction and sentence had been confirmed by the Florida state courts. It came to me, I believe, on the eve of the execution. I got involved with a team of my colleagues in addressing the fairness of the sentence and it mostly had to do with whether they had followed the rules the Supreme Court had set down for what makes a constitutional inquisition of the death sentence. That case went to the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals, the federal court of appeals, I think we argued it there, I think I argued it there, the Court agreed with me the sentence was unconstitutional and his sentence was reverted to life without parole and that's the sentence he continues to serve.
Q: In layman's terms what was the issue?
A: Well, there are no laymen's terms around the rules of a constitutional inquisition into the death penalty.
Q: What brought the NAACP and the Legal Defense Fund down there because Mark Robinson earlier today was saying you got to understand the work we do, it's for these high profile cases, cases where there's some pregnant legal question that needs to be addressed. What was it in this case?
A: Well I'll tell you the best i remember Blaine because the way the so-called death cases came to the Legal Defense Fund was from a network of cooperating councils all over the country in the places where there was death penalty jurisdiction and we had a very active relationship with the lawyer in Florida who was the go-to person for court appointed council in cases like that and they're very complicated at the death penalty stage and in those days the Court was still trying to work out all the rules for what conditions to apply before death penalty was deemed constitutional. What additional evidence after the conviction had to be brought to the jury, whether there was access to that evidence, whether the representation of council was adequate, those kinds of issues and they fall under the 16th and 17th amendment and so forth and there's a whole litany of reviews to go through to see which ones applied in the Saunders case and I think in that case the question was about whether he had access and the opportunity to bring forth what is called, so-called mitigating facts about his character, about his upbringing, that the Court has said has got to be a part of the balance when a jury decides whether the death penalty ought to be involved.
Q: Deval there have been comparisons made between this new TV ad from Kerry Healey and the . . . ads of '88. What is your reaction to the whole?
A: You know what, I haven't seen it. I've heard about it and you know I guess I expected this. There is a page out of the national Republican play book that goes just like this -- let's distract as much as possible from our record of failed leadership, from the bread and butter issues, the pocketbook issues the people are really worried about, from the plans we have on our side and they don't have on theirs for the the future of Massachusetts. And lets get people to vote for their fears rather than their hopes. And I was prepared for this. I was disappointed but not surprised.
Q: There has been an evolution as you can see to when you opened up in terms of the clarity and depth of your answers over the course of this. Why should anybody not look at that and sit there and feel that you were obviating or just trying to cut off inquiry, believing it would end at any one of these different junctures over the last few days and only reluctantly dragged into this whole recitation of what happened? It goes to the heart of your honesty or forthrightness. Why shouldn't anyone come away feeling like you didn't have to be dragged?
A: Basically that's a fair question and I have tried to be candid about this but frankly as I've said I got most of the information about my involvement in this from members of the press. I remember the one letter, I read in the paper today that our correspondence may go back even farther than I thought it did. I've gotten many letters from Ben LaGuer over the years. I've acknowledged a couple, I saw those acknowledgements when I got copies of those letters from the Globe. I still haven't seen the second letter the Globe says I sent, although I think we've got it somewhere. If you'd ask me to go back and find a record of contribution to the DNA testing without the acknowledgment letter that I told you about a second ago. The records I have don't show, like I said I don't have any records from 2001, I don't even have any cancelled checks from 2001. I can't quarrel with the letter that comes from the New England School of Law, so the point is we screwed up in terms of how we have handled doing the homework before we answered questions about this issue, no question about that, and I take the responsibility for that. On policy issues I have worked very very hard to make sure I don't spout off without doing my homework. On this one there's a big exception.
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Q: You said yesterday knowing what you know now you would still have written those letters. Did you really mean that you would ask for the release of someone you knew was guilty of rape?
A: I don't think that's what I said. Knowing what I knew then --
Q: No, you said, I asked knowing what you know now would you do it? And you said I would do it again.
A: Well let me tell you what I meant. Knowing what I knew then I would do it again because I think that the issues raised were serious issues. I didn't make that judgement then thinking I would be running for governor today and there would be somebody looking to find every action and every blemish and to use it against me. If the question is would I have gotten involved knowing that DNA testing had been done -- was that the question? Was that you? I will tell you I think that's hard because the question of parole is a broader question than guilt or innocence. That question is about whether time has been served and the readiness for release, but the reason I was called to the case then is because of serious issues of discrimination in the jury room and that's something I've been involved in...
Q: Why did you recommend Benjamin LaGuer for parole? What was your thought behind that? And would you do it today? You still didn't answer that question.
A: No, is the answer because I'm running for governor and now everything is overly scrutinized. But to your question John -- first of all, well there are two reasons. One is there are very very serious issues raised about ? in the jury room. Those are serious issues. They don't negate guilt but they do address the question of the fundamental fairness of the trial and we have to care about that. Secondly I was asked to get involved by several prominent people whose judgment I trust and who asked me because I had been in civil rights whether I would lend my name. It's as simple as that.
Q: So you felt that he may or may not be guilty when you went and asked for parole.
A: Right, but you understand we're not talking about invalidating his conviction or giving him any sort of damages because he served time. He should serve his time. My understanding was he was eligible for parole, not entitled to, but eligible for and then in looking at parole the parole board would consider the whole record.
Q: So if you're elected would you consider recommending him for parole?
A: If elected I'm not going anywhere near that case. But it's a serious point, I don't make it as seriously as its due. I need to recuse myself from this. If I'm elected this decision needs to be made independent of me and again because of the importance of the integrity of the system.
