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.  

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.  

Interesting when the victims filed suit the only Circuit Judge that saw and spoke reality was from Puerto Rico. 

TORRUELLA, Circuit Judge, concerning the denial of en banc review. Some cases are of "exceptional importance" Nos.09-1950 10-1766 09-1951 09-1952 Donahue v. United States Entered: October 6, 2011 Close because of the potential they have to affect the lives of millions of people. See, e.g., Igartúa, et al. v. United States, No. 09-2186, __F.3d __, 2011 WL 3340120, *2 (1st Cir. Aug. 4, 2011) (Torruella, J., dissenting). Other cases are of exceptional importance because of the light they cast on our public institutions. The latter, while not always directly affecting as broad a segment of the population, are nevertheless exceptionally important by virtue of what they demonstrate about the trust that we -- for better or worse -- place in those institutions. This is one of those cases. Yet barely a month since a divided vote in Igartúa denied 4 million United States citizens residing in Puerto Rico review of constitutional issues of exceptional importance, this court continues this noxious pattern and once again prevents consideration by the full court of questions of exceptional importance. By this action it allows the government's outrageous conduct to remain free of any consequence, and as in Igartúa, perpetrates a monstrous injustice on another, albeit smaller, but no less worthy, group of hapless citizens. Is it so unreasonable for citizens to rely on what their government was repeatedly asserting as the truth? Can the government be allowed to benefit from its own perfidious conduct in duping its own citizens with stonewalling and outright lies? Are citizens to be held to such a standard of cynicism in their dealings with government, especially with such hallowed agencies as the FBI? Taken individually, these concerns -- individual injustice, loss of public trust, and substantial legal error -- might not by themselves justify en banc review. Taken together, I believe they do. Two hundred and thirty-five years after we rid ourselves of King George III and his despotic ascendancy over colonial America, we cling to a doctrine that was originally based on the Medieval notion that "the King can do no wrong." This maxim was blindly accepted into American law under the assumption that it was incorporated as part of the common law in existence when our Nation separated from England. See Owen v. City of Independence, Mo., 445 U.S. 622, 645 n.28 (1980). However, this assumption does not withstand historical scrutiny. See Edwin M. Borchard, Governmental Responsibility in Tort (pt. VI), 36 Yale L. J. 1, 17-41 (1926). Furthermore, the present case is the quintessential example of the fact that at times the government can, and does, do wrong. The Donahue and Halloran cases are an unfortunate but vivid example that even in the United States, with all our legal and constitutional safeguards, the government can go rogue. Although it is my belief and hope that our system is normally self-corrective, there are times when the courts have a duty to intervene to keep our system within the bounds of decency. The moral of this outcome seems to be that crime does pay, at least for the government. This case cries for redress, either by the Supreme Court, or by a special bill of Congress. 

A complete change of venue is in order not just a recusal by the current judge on the case.  Clearly the goal is to drag this on and on until Bulger is dead so the government employees involved at the time and still alive escape exposure; to hold this trial in the Boston Federal Court sets it up for an appeal whether before Judge Stearns or not.   The federal court system in Massachusetts is a mini mob family where these tax paid public servants from the clerks office to the circuit executive office aid and abet each other in the commission of federal crimes and also aid and abet certain "elite" attorneys escape consequence for not only criminal federal law violations but straight up unquestionable "fraud upon the court". They protect their own!!!!! The current primary example of bias in this court, when it comes to one of their own in need of protection for willful violation of rights and purposeful violation of federal law, is the reappointment of the CORRUPT Magistrate Judge Leo T. Sorokin. http://www.scribd.com/tired_of_corruption Time and time again the federal court system in Massachusetts proves that rule of law and justice is low priority and that the will of the corrupt not the legislature is the basis of decisions made!!!

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...