Related: O'Brien's Conspiracy
Now I finally understand why Massachusetts has so many stupid laws. It's a jobs program for those with privileged connections.
"Ex-probation chief sentenced as system decried" by Milton J. Valencia, Globe Staff November 13, 2014
A federal judge sentenced former probation commissioner John “Jack” O’Brien to 18 months in prison for political corruption Thursday, saying his rigging of a state hiring system to favor the politically connected was a disgrace to the Massachusetts judicial system.
So was the sentence.
O’Brien’s sentence, along with a $25,000 fine, is significantly less than the nearly six-year maximum prison term he had faced, but US District Court William G. Young said he could not single out O’Brien and his deputies as “rogue” perpetrators of crimes that had historically infested the state’s courts.
And I'm supposed to believe ion the $y$tem of ju$tus, huh?
“What we have here, in this court’s considered judgment, is fundamentally decent people utterly without a moral compass, at sea, in a field awash in political patronage,” Young said before a quiet, packed courtroom of roughly 100 people.
In Democrat-dominated Massachusetts? Surely you jest!
Prosecutors had earlier identified more than 30 co-conspirators who were never indicted and named state legislators, including House Speaker Robert A. DeLeo, who sponsored job applicants that O'Brien’s department hired to curry favor on Beacon Hill. No lawmakers have been charged.
Meaning this was basically a sacrificial scapegoating trial exempting top scum.
The more things change....
“John O’Brien did not invent patronage hiring in the Department of Probation,” the judge said. “Today, every judge in the state of Massachusetts must stand ashamed and appalled at the level of patronage and corruption” in the judiciary, which includes the Probation Department.
Elizabeth Tavares, O’Brien’s top deputy, was sentenced to three months in prison, and deputy William Burke III, the department’s deputy for Western Massachusetts, was sentenced to a year of probation. Burke and Tavares had faced nearly four years under sentencing guidelines.
O’Brien, Tavares, and Burke seemed to welcome the sentences, smiling as they wiped away tears and hugging their lawyers and family members outside the courtroom after the hearing.
I think all three should have been sentenced to death. That will stop all this corruption.
Lawyers for the three said they plan to appeal the convictions, saying the case straddled a thin line of criminality under federal law....
And as it turns out, government itself is the worst criminal enterprise going.
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