Kerry Healey: Queen of the ring

KERRY HEALEY may hail from Harvard and Prides Crossing, but as the Republican gubernatorial nominee demonstrated this week, she's a street fighter.

And in a week when Democrat Deval Patrick has seemed a less than candid candidate with an awfully faulty memory, Healey has knocked him back on his heels.

Healey has attacked Patrick on two fronts: His representation of a Florida cop-killer and his parole advocacy for a Massachusetts rapist.

The toughest of the twin attacks comes in a visceral television ad castigating Patrick for the work he did as a NAACP Legal Defense Fund lawyer to spare Carl Ray Songer from the death penalty for the December 1973 murder of a Florida highway patrolman. The spot ends by asking whether voters want someone who has defended a cop-killer as their governor.

It's a powerful ad -- until you actually stop to think about it. Is Healey saying that someone sentenced to death doesn't deserve the benefit of competent counsel, that he doesn't have the right to appeal, or that his appeal shouldn't be fully considered?

``No, of course he had a right to appeal the sentence," says Healey campaign manager Tim O'Brien.

In this case, the Florida Supreme Court eventually agreed with arguments made in Songer's behalf, vacating his death sentence. He is now serving life, with the possibility of parole.

If one concedes that the criminal justice system should offer those opportunities, how is it a valid criticism of Patrick that he provided such representation?

Patrick's position on criminal justice issues is fair game -- but this ad hits below the belt.

Now to Patrick's personal advocacy for convicted rapist Benjamin LaGuer.

An indefatigable courter of opinion-makers, LaGuer beguiled a number of academics and journalists into thinking he might well have been wrongly convicted for the brutal rape and beating of a Leominster woman in 1983.

But his claim of innocence suffered a huge blow in 2002 when DNA testing his supporters had paid for actually linked LaGuer to the crime. (He has since suggested that police obtained a sample of his semen to frame him, years before DNA-testing became a forensic tool, no less.)

Certainly Patrick has seemed less than forthcoming about what he has done to help LaGuer.

Initially, Patrick said that his ``sole involvement" had been to write the parole board 10 or 15 years ago.

Actually, as the Globe reported Wednesday, Patrick sent one letter in 1998 and a second, virtually identical one in 2000.

And then there's the 2001 contribution Patrick made to help pay for the DNA testing -- a contribution Patrick initially told Globe columnist Adrian Walker that he had ``absolutely no memory of."

Further, Patrick's own account of the role he played leaves one wondering about his judgment. In a Wednesday interview, Patrick said that he didn't know LaGuer, adding that ``I can't say I studied the record with care."

``The issue that came to my attention at the time was the fairness of his trial and particularly the fairness of the jury deliberations," he told me.

Legitimate concerns, certainly, but why, then, had he pushed for parole for LaGuer and not a new trial? Because he wasn't representing LaGuer, and anyway, ``you don't address that to the parole board," Patrick said. ``The only thing you can address to the parole board is his readiness for parole."

But if he didn't know LaGuer, it's difficult to see how he could make a responsible assessment of that readiness.

``I had corresponded with him," Patrick noted later. ``You get an impression of him from that correspondence."

Or a misimpression, perhaps. So does Patrick now feel deceived by LaGuer?

``No," he said. ``Ben wouldn't be the first guilty person in prison who was maintaining vigorously their own innocence. . . . I am glad he got the DNA testing. I hope that is the end of it."

After the DNA results came back, did he tell LaGuer he no longer supported him?

``I don't think I conveyed anything to him when I found out, because I didn't have a relationship with him," Patrick said. ``Understand, I wasn't looking, by writing to the parole board, to have his conviction up-ended."

No. Rather, he was trying to get LaGuer released, based on a sense he felt he had of the convict from his letters.

Forgive me if I don't find Patrick's role or his reasoning -- or, for that matter, this week's political performance -- particularly reassuring.

Scot Lehigh's e-mail address is lehigh@globe.com.