{"id":14193,"date":"2019-11-27T08:53:11","date_gmt":"2019-11-27T13:53:11","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/jimbovard.com\/blog\/?p=14193"},"modified":"2019-11-27T08:53:11","modified_gmt":"2019-11-27T13:53:11","slug":"usa-today-deval-patricks-forgotten-catastrophic-coverups","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/jimbovard.com\/blog\/2019\/11\/27\/usa-today-deval-patricks-forgotten-catastrophic-coverups\/","title":{"rendered":"USA TODAY: Deval Patrick’s Forgotten Catastrophic Coverups"},"content":{"rendered":"
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USA TODAY, November 27, 2019 <\/a>\"\"<\/a><\/h3>\n

Will Deval Patrick be president? Not if his past scandals have anything to say about it.<\/a><\/h1>\n

by James Bovard<\/p>\n

Former Massachusetts Governor Deval Patrick entered the presidential race last week. Patrick is touted as a centrist Democrat and is reportedly former president Barack Obama\u2019s favorite candidate<\/a>. Patrick is also the only candidate in the race responsible for disastrous coverups at both the federal and state level.<\/p>\n

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Patrick was assistant attorney general for Civil Rights in the Clinton administration.\u00a0 Shortly before Clinton won the 1992 election, U.S. marshals killed 14-year-old Sammy Weaver and an FBI sniper shot Randy Weaver and killed his wife, Vicki Weaver, as she held their baby in the cabin door at Ruby Ridge.<\/p>\n

An Idaho jury found Weaver not guilty on almost all charges and federal judge Edward Lodge slammed the Justice Department and FBI for concealing evidence and showing \u201ca\u00a0callous disregard for the rights of the defendants and the interests of justice<\/a>.\u201d A task force of 24 FBI and Justice Department officials\u00a0compiled a 542-page report<\/a>\u00a0detailing federal misconduct and coverups and suggested criminal charges against FBI officials involved in Ruby Ridge. Patrick rejected the task force\u2019s recommendation, ruling instead that the FBI sniper who killed Vicki Weaver had not used \u201cexcessive force\u201d and did not intend to violate her civil rights.<\/p>\n

When the facts came out, Patrick barely flinched<\/h2>\n

In June 1995, the secret report leaked out and made a mockery of Patrick\u2019s \u201cno excessive force\u201d ruling. One FBI SWAT team member at Ruby Ridge recalled the Rules of Engagement: \u201cIf you see ’em, shoot ’em<\/a>.\u201d The report condemned that rule as practically a license to kill that flagrantly violated the U.S. Constitution. The task force was especially appalled that the Weavers were gunned down before receiving any warning or demand to surrender, noting that the FBI\u2019s tactics \u201csubjected the government to charges that it was setting Weaver up for attack.” Patrick apparently shrugged off such concerns.<\/p>\n

Top FBI officials were suspended on suspicion of committing perjury on the case the following month. Though Patrick had effectively absolved the government, the\u00a0Justice Department paid $3 million to settle a wrongful death lawsuit<\/a>\u00a0from the Weaver family. When the Senate Judiciary Committee held hearings on Ruby Ridge later that year,\u00a0five FBI officials<\/a>\u00a0(including the sniper who killed Vicki Weaver) involved in the case invoked their Fifth Amendment rights to avoid incriminating themselves. In 1997, the chief of the FBI\u2019s violent crimes section was\u00a0sent to\u00a0prison<\/a>\u00a0for destroying a report\u00a0on the FBI\u2019s failures at Ruby Ridge, Idaho.<\/p>\n

<\/figure>\n

If Patrick had accepted the task force\u2019s recommendation and permitted prosecutions, the Weaver case might not have swayed so many Americans to believe that FBI agents can kill gun owners with impunity. When FBI snipers swarmed on the scene of the Bundy Ranch five years ago, memories of Ruby Ridge spurred\u00a0legions of gun-toting activists to race<\/a>\u00a0to the scene to protect the Bundy family.\u00a0(FBI lies and misconduct in that case resulted in\u00a0charges being dismissed<\/a>\u00a0and a federal judge condemning the bureau last year.)<\/p>\n

In 2006, Patrick was elected governor<\/a>\u00a0of Massachusetts, one of the nation\u2019s most liberal states. In July 2012, Patrick declared that \u201cwarehousing non-violent offenders<\/a>\u00a0is a\u00a0costly\u00a0policy\u00a0failure\u201d and proudly signed a bill that offered parole to a few hundred non-violent drug offenders. But despite the governor\u2019s rhetoric, Massachusetts continued\u00a0rounding up and locking away vast numbers of people caught with prohibited substances.\u00a0Patrick strongly opposed<\/a>\u00a0decriminalizing marijuana.<\/p>\n

The Massachusetts drug-conviction assembly line relied on state laboratories which assessed suspected narcotics. In September 2012, Massachusetts state lab chemist Annie\u00a0Dookhan was arrested<\/a>\u00a0for falsifying tens of thousands of drug tests, \u201calways in favor of the prosecution. Worse, when she was feeling especially helpful, she\u2019d add\u00a0bogus weight to a borderline sample<\/a>,\u201d as\u00a0Rolling Stone\u00a0reported. Dookhan routinely certified samples she received as illicit narcotics without ever testing them.<\/p>\n

Governor Patrick described Dookhan as an isolated \u201crogue chemist<\/a>\u201d\u00a0but the\u00a0Boston Globe\u00a0concluded that the lab debacle \u201ccrushes any hope Patrick\u00a0may have had of finishing his term unburdened by scandal.\u201d Patrick responded to the scandal by announcing plans to\u00a0“create a kind\u00a0of boiler room, or a war room<\/a>\u00a0where some folks who can work through the documents\u2026 from different agencies to make sure we get a comprehensive list” of people potentially wrongfully convicted thanks to Dookhan.<\/p>\n

The lab scandal continued<\/h2>\n

Five months after the Dookhan scandal broke,\u00a0another Massachusetts state lab chemist, Sonja Farak, was arrested for tampering with evidence as well as heroin and cocaine possession. Patrick quickly assured the media: \u201cThe most important take-home<\/a>,\u00a0I think, is that no individual\u2019s due process rights were compromised\u201d by Farak\u2019s misconduct.<\/p>\n

Actually, Farak had personally abused narcotics from her first day on the job in 2004 \u2014 sometimes even cooking crack cocaine on the single burner in the lab and snorting meth and cocaine in courthouse bathrooms when she was called to testify.\u00a0She detailed her drug adventures in hundreds of pages of diaries, including the day she was \u201cfreaking out\u201d and \u201ccrawling on the floor<\/a>…\u00a0trying to find crack, which I thought was there.\u201d<\/p>\n

The state attorney general\u2019s office insisted that Farak had only started consuming narcotics at work a few months before her arrest and blocked all efforts to expose her drug binges since 2004.\u00a0Massachusetts state lawyers also withheld reports \u201cshowing that the machines<\/a>\u00a0used for testing in Farak\u2019s lab were issuing faulty reports\u201d that could lead to unjustified convictions.<\/p>\n

Though Patrick, whose second term ended in early 2015, had promised speedy justice to the wrongly convicted, state officials scorned due process and decency. Slate reported in 2015<\/a>\u00a0that \u201cdistrict attorneys take the position that it is not their responsibility to help identify Dookhan or Farak defendants….[P]rosecutors have no special duty to notify defendants that their convictions might have been obtained with evidence that was falsified by government employees.\u201d\u00a0A\u00a0ProPublica investigation noted<\/a>\u00a0in 2016 that \u201cit took four years for prosecutors to even attempt to systematically notify the thousands of defendants that their convictions might have been won unfairly.\u201d\u00a0Most of the victims could not afford lawyers to challenge their convictions, resulting in innocent people spending more months and years in prison. In 2016, a judge condemned two prosecutors overseeing the challenged convictions for their \u201cintentional, repeated, prolonged<\/a> and\u00a0deceptive withholding of evidence from the defendants.\u201d More than 61,000 drug convictions were eventually overturned due to the state laboratory abuses.<\/p>\n

Deval Patrick does not bear responsibility for either Ruby Ridge or the Massachusetts drug lab debacles, but he does bear responsibility for his responses. He compounded the first scandal, failing to stand up for the Weavers’ civil rights. And he failed to honor his pledge for speedy relief of injustice in the second scandal.<\/p>\n

That’s not a record that qualifies Patrick for the presidency.<\/p>\n

James Bovard, author of “Attention Deficit Democracy<\/a>,” is a member of USA TODAY\u2019s Board of Contributors. Follow him on Twitter: @JimBovard<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

<\/div>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

USA TODAY, November 27, 2019 Will Deval Patrick be president? Not if his past scandals have anything to say about it. by James Bovard Former Massachusetts Governor Deval Patrick entered the presidential race last week. Patrick is touted as a centrist Democrat and is reportedly former president Barack Obama\u2019s favorite candidate. Patrick is also the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":11907,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[2173,349,2171,2175,519,1457,2176,1322,2174,652,2172],"class_list":["post-14193","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-annie-dookhan","tag-coverup","tag-deval-patrick","tag-drug-scandal","tag-due-process","tag-edward-lodge","tag-fbi-sniper","tag-lon-horiuchi","tag-massachusetts","tag-ruby-ridge","tag-sonja-farak"],"yoast_head":"\nUSA TODAY: Deval Patrick's Forgotten Catastrophic Coverups - James Bovard<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/jimbovard.com\/blog\/2019\/11\/27\/usa-today-deval-patricks-forgotten-catastrophic-coverups\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"USA TODAY: Deval Patrick's Forgotten Catastrophic Coverups - James Bovard\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"USA TODAY, November 27, 2019 Will Deval Patrick be president? 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The Wall Street Journal called Bovard \"the roving inspector general of the modern state\" and Washington Post columnist George Will called him a \"one-man truth squad.\" His 1994 book, Lost Rights: The Destruction of American Liberty, received the Free Press Association\u2019s Mencken Award as Book of the Year. His Terrorism & Tyranny won the Lysander Spooner \"Best Book on Liberty in 2003\" award. He received the Thomas Szasz Award for Civil Liberties work, awarded by the Center for Independent Thought and the Freedom Fund Award from the Firearms Civil Rights Defense Fund of the National Rifle Association. Bovard\u2019s writings have been publicly denounced by FBI director Louis Freeh, the Secretary of Agriculture, the Secretary of Housing and Urban Development, the Postmaster General, and the chiefs of the U.S. International Trade Commission, the Drug Enforcement Administration, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, and the Federal Emergency Management Agency, as well as by many congressmen and other malcontents.","sameAs":["http:\/\/www.jimbovard.com","https:\/\/www.facebook.com\/jim.bovard","https:\/\/x.com\/jimbovard"],"url":"https:\/\/jimbovard.com\/blog\/author\/admin\/"}]}},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/jimbovard.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14193","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/jimbovard.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/jimbovard.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jimbovard.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jimbovard.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=14193"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/jimbovard.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14193\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":14194,"href":"https:\/\/jimbovard.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14193\/revisions\/14194"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jimbovard.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/11907"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/jimbovard.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=14193"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jimbovard.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=14193"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jimbovard.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=14193"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}