Today’s issue of the Standard Times featured an article about a New Bedford man, respected in his community, who has been accused of rape and kidnapping.
The Bristol County District Attorney immediately asked for a dangerousness hearing when the defendant was arraigned on Wednesday. Judge Jeffrey Clifford granted the request and ordered the man held without bail.
The defendant’s lawyer is quoted as saying, “After speaking with him, I honestly believe he is innocent. There is evidence that will exonerate him.”
Nevertheless, the man will likely be held in pre-trial detention for at least four months in Sheriff Tom Hodgson’s dismal hellhole of a jail — presumed guilty, unable to freely consult with his lawyer, and having never had his day in court.
Just last week Randy Gioia, deputy chief counsel of the Committee for the Public Counsel Service’s Public Defender Division, wrote a letter in the Standard Times decrying the practice of using dangerousness hearings to routinely deny bail to defendants in Bristol County. “During fiscal years 2017 and 2018, Quinn’s office had 368 dangerousness hearings in New Bedford alone. That’s more than Boston and all of Norfolk County, combined, during that same period of time.”
It is not a coincidence that Bristol County also has the highest rate of pre-trial detention deaths and the highest rate of jail suicides. Bristol County is a blood red stain on the entire state.
If this were not bad enough, DA Quinn has been lobbying for even more draconian dangerousness provisions in a bill Republican Governor Charlie Baker sponsored, H.66, “An Act to protect the Commonwealth from dangerous persons.” Quinn apparently wants even more blood on his hands.
Gioia was critical of New Bedford mayor and former prosecutor Jon Mitchell’s attacks on the judicial practice of granting bail as it was intended under the constitution. Mitchell, speaking more as prosecutor than mayor, told the Standard Times that the practice has “compromised the safety of our city, negated the hard work of our police officers, and undermined the public’s respect for the state judicial system.”
Baloney.
I’m not worried about judges who follow the Eighth Amendment — but I am extremely concerned about those who act as rubber stamps for prosecutors. When judges and prosecutors are too friendly, as they are in Bristol County, injustice and death is the result.
I don’t know enough about the facts of this specific case, neither does Jon Mitchell and — more importantly — neither does a jury of the man’s peers. Until the man is sentenced we are supposed to regard him as innocent. Let’s do that — and not deny him his Eighth Amendment rights.
If Bristol County keeps on denying civil rights to defendants, just itching to play vigilante, and rewarding abusive sheriffs and prosecutors, we just might have to rename the SouthCoast “the Deep South Coast.”
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