-- A man from Weymouth allegedly stole a truck and used it to steal a lawn mower from Sears. While trying to escape, he drove the wrong way on I-495, and eventually hit a tree. [Metro West Daily News] -- A 23-year old man from Georgia was arrested on Tuesday for possession of an illegal firearm. The suspect was stopped on Meridian Street with a broken brake light an officers determined he had an invalid driver’s license and illegally attached plates. [BPDNews.com]
The leading news story of the day is the death of Eunice Kennedy Shriver at the age of 88. Earlier today, Shriver's body was moved to the Kennedy's Hyannis Port compound where a family wake will take place. Funeral plans are not yet known. Reaction to her death and remembrances of her extraordinary life are continuing all day. Her brother, Senator Edward M. Kennedy, issued a touching statement in her honor, as did her son-in-law California Gov. Arnold Schwarzeneggerand Cardinal O'Malley. The JFK Library posted two condolence books today.
--"Clark Rockefeller" was sentenced to 4-5 years in prison just two hours after his conviction on kidnapping and assault charges. Judge Frank Gaziano's sentence matched what prosecutors recommended. [Globe]
-- 23-year-old Daniel Harris, one of four injured during last week's shooting on Dorchester's Elder Street was held without bail today in the murder of Alexandra Gomes. Gomes' and Harris' families co-own a moving company. Harris was injured after one of his alleged victims returned fire. Prosecutors have not advanced a motive in the killing. [Herald]
--Bye-bye, Filene. The legendary store saw some "major destruction" today. [More photos at On Common Ground]
--A former Marshfield High School student who was arrested in 2004 for planning a Columbine-like attack was convicted of conspiracy to commit murder and could face 20 years in prison. He was, however, acquitted on a deadly weapons charge and on "promotion of anarchy." [Boston Globe]
--The State Supreme Judicial Court just overturned the conviction of a Methuen ex-police officer accused of raping a woman in 2000. The case hinged on whether or not lawyers could prove the woman was "too intoxicated to consent, not that she was merely high and drunk." However, the SJC felt that the trial judge didn't give proper instructions to the jurors. The ex-officer will get a new trial. [Boston Globe]
South End residents who are bracing for the opening of the BU Biolab, where scary germs like ebola will be studied, have a reprieve. The "National Emerging Infectious Diseases Laboratories" was supposed to open in the fall, but the National Institutes of Health has declared that its review won't be finished until "on or before" April 2009, the Globe reports.
Mark A. Flomenbaum, the former Chief Medical Examiner who was dismissed after the office of the Chief Medical Examiner was revealed to be an unsanitary hellhole, is suing because he feels "Governor Deval Patrick lacked grounds to dismiss him."
--Fires ran rampant yesterday. A mother and her son were injured last night in a fire in Somerville. One firefighter was treated and released at the hospital. [Boston Globe] --Another fire broke out in Haverhill last night, and people were injured jumping out of the windows. No one died in the blaze, but 24 people have lost their homes. [Boston Globe, Boston Herald] --The state Supreme Judicial Court is letting Heidi Erickson, who kept...
Neither Sophie Currier nor the National Board of Medical Examiners are going to back down. Even though Currier won an appeal to get extra time to take a medical exam so she could pump breast milk, the Board appealed the appeal.
In Rhode Island you can't get married as a same sex couple. You can't get divorced as a same sex couple either. Well, at least not yet. According to the Providence Journal, the Rhode Island State Supreme Court has agreed to hear arguments and give an answer to the question: "May the Family Court properly recognize, for the purpose of entertaining a divorce petition, the marriage of two persons of the same sex who...
The Supreme Judicial Court gave Mitt Romney and his conservative cohorts a mild smacking today when the justices ruled that they cannot force legislators to vote on whether or not a proposal to ban gay marriage should be on the 2008 ballot. This ruling is the latest in a set of complex legal wranglings, which Bostonist has explained here and here, that started when the Legislature recessed before voting on the proposed ballot measure. Romney...
Living in the Bay State we remember when we had a brand-new ruling from the Supreme Judicial Court legalizing same-sex marriage. It seemed to be one of those high court rulings that didn't really make it legal (because, you know, it's the judicial branch, not the legislative) but rather defined was something was or wasn’t. Last week the Worcester Superior Court ruled on something not quite as groundbreaking and offered up a definition. A burrito is not a sandwich.
(OK, not really.) If you live and work in Boston proper, or in Cambridge, or really anywhere other than Somerville, the ongoing saga of the development of Assembly Square feels like a distant local squabble. But for Somervillionaires, it's a big, exciting question: Will mayor (and assistant football coach at Somerville High) Joseph Curtatone be able to deliver on one of his major campaign promises and turn Assembly Square from a down-at-the-heels, semi-industrial wasteland to a prosperous, Ikea-having, retail and residential Shangri-La by the tranquil banks of the Mystic River?
approved this year, it will have to be approved again in 2007-2008, and would then go to the voters.) Naturally, protesters for and against were out in force.
The Supreme Judicial Court ruled yesterday that a proposed constitutional amendment to ban gay marriage is not unconstitutional. The Globe described this as "a major victory" for bigots opponents of same-sex marriage, but honestly, any other outcome would have been something of a shock.
Why is South Boston's gangster past so captivating? Bostonist can't say. Sensible people should look upon Whitey Bulger and his ilk with nothing but scorn for all their killing and mayhem, but somehow, between Whitey's intriguing life on the lam and the awesome, wide-collared shirts that all those guys used to wear, the imagination is captured. Apparently, even the usually staid justices of the Supreme Judicial Court are not above this, as the first three...
Oh, Bostonist does love cat-hoarding. OK, not really - we think it's cruel and repellent, but the fact that it is a pathology that actually exists amuses us in a sick way (as does the fact that people in New York are managing to take their pet dogs on airplanes by claiming they are "emotional support dogs" and the owners would bug out if they had to be dogless for even a few hours; but...
The weather is gorgeous. Great day to hit Fenway for an evening match-up. Too bad we don’t have tickets. As is standard this time of year, we’ve got baseball on the mind. Well, baseball and the next challenge to same-sex marriage here in the Bay State. To be perfectly accurate the case the Supreme Judicial Court will hear today is about banning a ballot question, a question which would move to ban same-sex marriage. There are power plays and legal particulars involved that confuse and confound us. So we’re just going to kick back and think about baseball – and homosexual innuendos. Sure, it may not be politically correct, but without the internets where would creative editing be? Brokeback Mountain meets Jeter and Johnny – brilliant. The video trailer is a nice outcropping of the image we've seen floating around the internets for a while.
As Bostonist's non-lawyer friends stumble into work today and read the paper, they keep e-mailing us and asking, "Bostonist, you law-talking person, how is it that the Supreme Judicial Court can rule that a ban on same-sex marriage is unconstitutional generally, but OK when applied to out-of-state couples?" Allow us to explain. This case involves a challenge to an old law that says no one from out-of-state can get married here if they would be...
This morning we’re not really bringing you a specific video but an archive of videos so you can feel just like a real Justice of the Supreme Judicial Court. When we cracked open the print edition of the Boston Globe this morning, the story on Justice Sosman watching webcasts grabbed our interest. Why? Because we have a friend who runs around the halls of the SJC for a living, and it's nice to know that hot internet crazes are reaching him even there in the august and learned halls of justice.
Remember these guys? They were arrested last year after their story of finding antique coins and currency buried under a tree turned out to be a cover for stealing antique coins from some lady's attic. They're back in the news today, seeking dismissal of the charges against them, apparently on the theory that since the lady didn't know the stuff was on her property, it was "abandoned" for legal purposes and these guys could claim it. Allow Bostonist to call bullshit: Way back in 1874, the Supreme Judicial Court said that "the finder of lost goods, who, at the time of first taking them into his possession, has a felonious intent to appropriate them to his own use and to deprive the owner of them, and then knows or has reasonable means of knowing or ascertaining who is the owner, is guilty of larceny." So if you, find valuable coins in some lady's attic, do you have reasonable means of knowing who owns the coins? Um, yeah - you found them in someone's house! And even if you're not sure, it's probably more reasonable to ask the lady whose house it is than take the coins, make up a story about finding them somewhere else, and pose for dumb-looking pictures (above). We're glad their lawyer is working overtime to give these guys a fair shake, but seriously, abandoned items on someone else's property? If the plumber is in Bostonist's house and discovers a missing toy that Toddler Bostonist has left behind the toilet, can the plumber just claim the toy as his own? (Would he even want to?) We think not.
Thank goodness! Another update in Bostonist's favorite ongoing story, the neverending battle over gay marriage: The Supreme Judicial Court yesterday heard oral arguments in a challenge to a 1913 law being used by state government to deny marriage licenses to out-of-state gay couples who do not intend to move to Massachusetts. Bostonist is enjoying this subset of the gay marriage debate because it makes clear just how similar today's opposition to same-sex nuptials is to...
Our dear old Supreme Judicial Court, whose decisions so frequently bring ire to Americans outside the Commonwealth borders (and, to a lesser degree, to those within it), won a little victory yesterday, much to the chagrin of journalists everywhere. The U.S. Supreme Court declined to take an appeal from the SJC by the Boston Globe, after the paper lost a libel suit and had to pay $1.68 million to a doctor implicated in the death...
Poor Mitt Romney, stymied at every turn. Last week, the Supreme Judicial Court refused to tell him whether he could legally demote Mass Pike chairman Matthew Amorello, and this morning we learn that there are even more leaks and defects in the Big Dig than previously thought (Bostonist can imagine Mitt inside the Statehouse, shaking his fist at one of the east-facing windows that looks down Ashburton Place toward the John Adams Courthouse). Worse still, state lawmakers yesterday approved a law allowing distribution of the morning-after pill without a prescription, and Mitt must now sign or veto it, forcing him to take a stand that will hurt him either in the 2006 state election (if he nixes it) or the 2008 national election (if he lets it ride). And to rub salt in his wounds, conservative groups aren't even bothering to mobilize opposition to Mitt's nomination to the Supreme Court (despite Bostonist's firm belief that he would be a wise pick for W.). With all this and the gloomy weather, Bostonist can only hope that the Governor isn't doing what we would be doing right now if we were in his shoes.
When elected leaders make extra time to hear the concerns of well-heeled campaign contributors, Bostonist doesn't bat an eye. After all, politics is not a field from which we expect, um, ethical behavior. But when the amount of cash donated corresponds to the number of Red Sox tickets given to the donor, civic duty requires that we cry foul. Today's Globe reports that the Republican Governors Association will give four roof deck tickets for next Monday's Sox-Indians game to anyone who coughs up $50,000. Of course, donors also get photo-ops with various Republican Governors, including our own (he's the vice-chairman of the Rep. Govs. Assoc.), and get to attend the fun-filled New England Governors Forum (which, in addition to the Republican Governors of Massachusetts, Rhode Island, and Connecticut, features the Governors of two lesser-known New England states, Arkansas and Missouri). So maybe it's not scalping - maybe donors are contributing $49,820 and $180 is face value for four tickets. (Or maybe the Red Sox are donating the tickets as an inducement to encourage private giving, the way local businesses do with public radio, although we doubt it). But The Globe also informs us that "those offering smaller donations - from $5,000 to $25,000 - get either two or three tickets to Fenway's right-field roof, depending on the amount" [Bostonist's emphasis]. This quid pro quo is starting to sound more like the sort of activity prohibited by Mass. General Laws chapter 140, section 185A.
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