Take ego out of the equation. Take out one jurist’s desire to preside over the trial of the century. What’s left is good reason for US District Court Judge Richard G. Stearns to step down from the James “Whitey” Bulger trial.
A judge like Stearns, who worked as a federal prosecutor in Boston while Bulger was roaming the streets with blessings from the FBI and US Attorney’s office, should not preside over his trial.
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Good for you Joan - the Boston office of the FBI were a cabral or more accurately a cesspools when Bulger was at his peak. Two classes of people roamed the FBI and the US attorney's office -those that knew, cooperated or looked the other way and the others that didn't know what was going on. does it make any difference which group he belonged to. I had to work with some of them and they turned out to be worse than the people we were chasing. At least the the thugs had a sense of honor
I agree wholeheartedly. Many people will say "who cares"? But the fact is we should all care. Everybody gets a fair trial or nobody does.
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I am not an expert on criminal law and the alleged crimes Mr. Bulger may have committed over the past 20-30 years. What stuns me a bit though, is that Corporate Crime and alleged criminals are treated in a totally different manner as "Criminal" offenses and offenders.. For instance Mr. Bulger is sitting in a locked-down cell in South Boston for allegedly committing twenty mudres or at least having some hand in these crimes. Yet, there are people in coporate America that are really harming thousands of Anericans by their actions (the corporate individuals) and they are never prosecuted, never tried, and in many cases they are championed as "damn good businessman" who are "leaders" ? or are really model citizens???....I worked at State Street Corporation and I was forced to train Indian Nationals to take my job and the jobs of others, and this has been happening across the US in the cities of Kansas city adn Irvine CA, and Nortgh Quincy Mass, all after State Street receieved a $2 Billion US TARP bailout, and after State STreet sent an HR representative, for lack of a better description, to lie about all of this activity to Emily Rooney in the Greater Boston SHow on Channel 2...My point is, maybe we as Americans sometimes put the wrong people in orange jumpsuits and allow others to harm what I estimate to be 3,200 US American families - not just 20...
Whitey's trial will be a bore. What would really be exciting is Billy's trial.
Every prosecutor working in the Criminal Division of the United States Attorneys Office in the 70's and 80's was acutely aware of the government's repeatedly unsuccessful efforts to investigate and prosecute Whitey Bulger. As an eager beaver boy prosecutor, Stearns was no exception. Further, given the various senior positions he held in the office over time, Stearns was in a position to have access to sensitive information that most line Assistant United States Attorneys did not.
What then explains this jurist’s curiously dogged and rather unbecoming efforts to cling desperately to the Bulger case, and to resist all reasonable calls that he gracefully relinquish his role as trier of fact in favor of one perceived to be less biased by virtue of his association with the government?
I think I have an answer: Richard G. Stearns was widely regarded by his colleagues in the U. S. Attorneys Office as one of the laziest, least productive, and most assiduously self-promoting of prosecutors. He regularly displayed an almost pathological habit of cultivating pet reporters in need of a story, and leaking information to them in return for favorable shout outs in their columns and stories. Worse, if that’s possible, Stearns was adept at "cherry-picking" for himself high-profile cases, leaving his less senior colleagues to mop up the less glamorous matters.
Stearns, like John Kerry, has spent a lifetime starring in his own movie, and what Joan writes about is the just another example of the vanity of human wishes in high places.
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Everyone who was anyone on both sides of the law; knew or had to surmise that Jimmy and his crew had police protection; we may not have know whether it was Boston, State or Federal; however as a criminal even on the lowest level you could not have gotten away with what these guys were doing... None, where even getting called into the police stations at the time; and everyone was aware of the Southey crew, run by Jimmy... As for me, in those old days, I could not even spit on the sidewalk at that time without having a State cop up my rear...