Maggie Mulvihill stories from The Center for Public Integrity

Juvenile life without parole: Massachusetts moves cautiously toward reform

Massachusetts,United States — 2012-11-29T14:44:31-05:00

Massachusetts juveniles incarcerated for life without parole will likely wait well into 2013 or beyond for a chance at reduced prison time as lawyers, prosecutors, legislators and advocates carefully craft a strategy to bring the state into compliance with new federal law outlawing the mandatory sentence.

Massachusetts has not been as quick to act as states like North Carolina and Iowa, which have implemented new laws since the U.S. Supreme Court in June banned mandatory juvenile life without parole for murder. While change is expected in Massachusetts, either through the courts or legislation, no clear answers have yet emerged on how to handle new cases and review past convictions involving killers under 18.

Governor Deval Patrick’s point person on the issue wants life without parole banned entirely for juveniles, whether mandatory or not. Middlesex County District Attorney Gerald T. Leone Jr. wants teenage killers to serve a minimum of 35 years before becoming eligible for parole, while the Massachusetts District Attorneys Association has reached no consensus on a solution. Meanwhile, the state’s public defender’s office has mobilized and trained dozens of defense lawyers to potentially work with as many as 80 inmates and accused teen killers in Massachusetts who could be affected by the high court ruling.

The 5-4 Supreme Court decision in Miller v. Alabama banned the mandatory sentence, imposed in 29 states, as “cruel and unusual punishment,” but still gives judges’ discretion to impose life without parole for teen killers.

Last week, a Middlesex Superior Court judge wrote the first decision in the state discussing the consequences of the high court ruling, arguing that the only option available to judges now is to sentence teen killers to life in prison with the possibility of parole. Legislation would be required, wrote Judge Kathe M. Tuttman, only if the state determines it wants the option to sentence juveniles to life without parole, a process that she said would require legislative guidelines.

The ruling tore open a door victim’s families thought was locked forever. Across the country, more than 2,100 individuals are serving mandatory life without parole sentences for murders committed while they were under 18, said Marsha Levick, deputy director and chief counsel of Philadelphia’s Juvenile Law Center.

Jennifer Bishop Jenkins, the Illinois-based head of the National Organization of Victims of Juvenile Lifers, said states shouldn’t change law in response to the decision without talking to victim’s families.

“Of course the uncertainty of these months after Miller is painful for these families. Swift can be good for victims if it is thorough and properly done, but the state of Massachusetts cannot act until they talk to every family of a Massachusetts victim,” said Bishop-Jenkins, whose sister, brother-in-law and unborn child were murdered by a teen now serving three life sentences. “Most of these families have had to wait for justice in any case.”

The high court gave states no specific guidance on how to apply the decision, nor indicated whether it should be applied retroactively to those already sentenced.

But the decision mandated that at least going forward, if prosecutors want juveniles to serve life without parole, the defendants are entitled to individualized sentencing hearings that consider factors like their home life, intellect and emotional capacity at the time of the slaying. According to the Massachusetts Committee for Public Counsel Services, at least 80 people could be affected by the high court decision: the 62 inmates imprisoned for murders committed as juveniles, some of whom appealed their sentences before the court ruling, 17 who are facing pending charges and another juvenile who was convicted before June but not yet sentenced.

A bill to allow juveniles serving life without parole a chance at release after serving 15 years, which was proposed long before the high court decision, died in the last legislative session and no new proposals have been submitted, said Massachusetts Child Advocate Gail Garinger, Patrick’s top liaison on the issue.

In Massachusetts, unlike in other states, no teen killers have to date filed motions for resentencing in the wake of the decision but legal developments are unfolding in other ways.

Leone’s office is considering whether to appeal Tuttman’s decision in the case of Ben Peirce, now 17, who is charged in the 2010 slaying of 29-year-old Adam Coveney. Peirce’s lawyer, John Salsberg, had asked Tuttman to clarify what the Supreme Court ruling meant in Peirce’s case.

It is a question being asked by many defense lawyers, who have said they can’t advise juveniles without knowing the potential punishment.

“I think that is a quandary for the states,” Levick said. “You have to know what sentence you are exposed to when you enter into plea negotiations.”

Kevin Keo of Lynn, serving life without parole for a murder committed when he was 16, is appealing his conviction to the Supreme Judicial Court based partly on the high court decision that the punishment is unconstitutional.

Leone wants Marquise Brown to serve life without parole for the 2009 Framingham slaying of Tyriffe Lewis. Brown, then 17, was convicted in August but sentencing is delayed as prosecutors seek clarification on the high court’s ruling in Brown’s case.

So far, Leone is the only state prosecutor to publicly advocate for a particular position on juvenile killers, arguing that they should serve decades in prison before parole eligibility. Other prosecutors “have not come to a consensus” on what to do, said a spokesman for Worcester County District Attorney Joseph D. Early Jr., president of the Massachusetts District Attorney’s Association.

But Massachusetts officials are carefully eyeing other developments in other states for clues on how to move ahead. Iowa Governor Terry F. Branstad in July commuted 38 juvenile lifer sentences, requiring inmates to serve a minimum of 60 years after their original sentencing before applying for parole. An Iowa judge later rebuked him for ignoring the Supreme Court by not providing offenders any meaningful opportunity to obtain release.

“A blanket sentence for 38 juvenile offenders that provides no eligibility for parole for sixty years is not the sort of individualized sentencing envisioned under Miller v. Alabama,” Iowa District Court Judge Timothy O’Grady wrote.

North Carolina and California have passed laws since June applying the decision retroactively, allowing hundreds of juvenile killers a chance at parole once they have served 25 years in prison, a sentence Garinger opposes.

“Any state that imposed a substantially longer sentence, one over 15 years without a chance for parole for individuals under 18 – it would not be something I would support,” Garinger said.

Garinger wants Massachusetts to go further than the nation’s high court, banning juvenile life without parole completely, and is briefing Patrick on reform discussions.

“The governor is very well informed on this issue and very concerned about it,” Garinger said.

Josh Dohan, director of the state public defender’s Youth Advocacy Division, said dozens of attorneys are being trained to represent the at least 80 individuals potentially impacted by the high court’s ruling, most of whom are indigent.

It is likely that any proposals that require teenage killers to spend decades in prison before they have a chance at freedom will be challenged in the courts. The Supreme Court decision said juveniles deserve a “meaningful opportunity to obtain release,” based on demonstrated maturity and possible rehabilitation.

“Huge sentences that span the majority of a normal youth’s life expectancy are in fact life sentences,” Dohan said.

Some parents of murder victims agree.

Sonia Booker, 79, whose son Jeffrey was murdered by a 16-year-old in 1988, said teens that kill shouldn’t be punished forever.

“Don’t take their whole lifetime away. Vengeance is not mine,” she said.

Milton Jones, whose son Elijah Pace was killed by two youths, said juveniles deserve a chance at redemption.

“Prison has its purpose, but it can wear out if it is too long,” Jones said.

Juvenile killers in other states are challenging their punishment. A New Hampshire judge has given Stephen Spader, the convicted killer of a Mont Vernon woman in 2009, until January to file an expert witness report in his request for resentencing. Robert Tulloch, 17 when he helped kill two Dartmouth College professors in 2001, has also requested resentencing.

The Pennsylvania Supreme Court is the first state high court to test the applicability of retroactivity, hearing oral arguments this summer on how to handle the roughly 470 juvenile murderers serving mandatory life without parole. Pennsylvania has also passed legislation granting future convicted juvenile killers the chance for release after serving between 20 and 35 years, depending on the age of the killer at the time of the crime.

At least two state appellate decisions in Florida, which has a mandatory sentence, have ruled the high court’s ruling is not retroactive. In another case, lawyers for a 12-year-old boy who was charged as an adult last year claim he can’t be tried for murdering his two-year-old brother without clarity on his eventual punishment. Courtroom or legislative activity on the issue is also unfolding in Wyoming, Nebraska and Michigan.

Back in Massachusetts, modifying juvenile sentences could burden a state budget already reeling from millions in unexpected costs generated by the crime lab scandal, juvenile lawyers acknowledge. Reviewing past cases involving juvenile killers could involve lengthy resentencing and parole hearings. But keeping prisoners for decades into old age could cost states even more, said National Juvenile Justice Network Director Sarah Bryer.

“You are looking at 80 years in prison for teenagers. By the time they are in their 90’s you have enormous medical bills,” Bryer said.

The protection of a juvenile’s rights, not cost, should be the priority for states, she said.

“If states want to take away someone’s liberty, expense shouldn’t be the most important question,” Bryer said.

Public betrayal in the Bay State

Massachusetts,United States — 2012-10-23T09:45:57-04:00

Deep flaws in Massachusetts laws constructed to keep government honest have sustained a recurring parade of criminal and ethical misconduct charges involving public servants in the past five years, a study by the New England Center for Investigative Reporting shows.

Massachusetts earned a “C” grade earlier this year in a national State Integrity scorecard released by the Center for Public Integrity. Among its lowest scores were an “F” for the transparency of the state budget process and public access to information, a “D+” for legislative accountability and a “C-” for the effectiveness of the state Ethics Commission. Judicial accountability earned a “C+ in Massachusetts.

The anti-corruption weaknesses have been borne out in the litany of public scandals plaguing Massachusetts in recent years.They include federal convictions of two former House Speakers, federal criminal charges lodged against top state Probation officials and the federal bribery sentence imposed on a once-rising female legislator.

At least 250 public servants in Massachusetts have been charged with crimes or ethics violations in the past five years, the NECIR analysis found. The charges range from the federal criminal cases to helping to hire friends and relatives to drug offenses. While government officials and watchdog groups say a corrupt public servant is going to find a way to break the law no matter what, wide cracks in accountability checks in Massachusetts have made it easier for misconduct to occur.

Budget process secrecy covers politician’s corrupt tracks

The swath of secrecy permeating the way the state budget is passed was a key factor in the ability of disgraced former House Speaker Salvatore F. DiMasi to demand furtive payoffs from a major software developer for help with securing $17.5 million in state contracts. In exchange for his advocacy, DiMasi and his business associates were poised to collect hundreds of thousands of dollars in kickbacks.

The Massachusetts Legislature, and by extension the state budget process, is not subject to the state’s public records law. A $4.5 million earmark for Cognos, a Burlington, Mass., software developer, was included in an obscure 2006 budget amendment that a DiMasi stalwart, former state representative, Robert Coughlin (D-Dedham) sponsored, even though the state Education Commissioner asked that it be removed. Coughlin later acknowledged he knew nothing about the contract but “it was an honor” to serve the speaker.

DiMasi engineered a second $13 million contract for Cognos in a 2007 emergency bond bill. Both deals had to be approved by the House Ways and Means Committee, run by DiMasi’s friend and the current House Speaker Robert DeLeo. The $13 million contract was approved by the Legislature a week after it was included in an emergency bond bill.

Political observers said the lack of wide public scrutiny for state spending enables misconduct.

“You have people who have obtained mastery of the process and know how to put something in there without setting off alarm bells,” said Maurice Cunningham, an associate professor of political science at the University of Massachusetts-Boston.

When a Cognos competitor complained about the contract awards, a state and then federal investigation began. Evidence at DiMasi’s federal trial for conspiracy, fraud and extortion showed he, his friend, Beacon Hill lobbyist Richard W. McDonough and a Cognos salesman arranged to have $65,000 paid to DiMasi over two years through phony payments to a law partner. DiMasi is now serving an eight-year prison sentence.

In sentencing DiMasi, U.S. District Court Judge Mark L. Wolf noted the lengths to which DiMasi and his co-defendant McDonough went to hide the Speaker’s corruption, beginning with insisting on the budgetary allocations for Cognos.

“This was not a scheme that was developed or executed spontaneously and thoughtlessly by either defendant. The corrupt transactions were carefully structured to hide what was occurring, bribes and kickbacks in exchange for official acts by Mr. DiMasi,” Wolf wrote, noting other cases brought against state leaders for corruption. “You succumbed to what seems to be a culture of arrogance and impunity that has been shared by some, not all, of the leaders of the state Legislature in the past.”

Secrecy shields key legislative activity

The secrecy is not limited to the budget process; the entire way bills are proposed, debated and signed into law can be shielded from public scrutiny and even voting members of the Legislature.

Massachusetts lawmakers can bundle hundreds of amendments into a single amendment – following closed door discussions with no transcripts taken. After debate on the floor, there is one straight up or down vote on the final amendment. The only way to find out exactly what happened is to ask representatives directly.

Former House Speaker Thomas M. Finneran hammered out the state’s redistricting plans in secret legislative meetings, but later lied to a federal jury about the extent of his role in the planning sessions. The plans diminished the role of minority voters and Finneran was later rebuked by a federal judicial panel. Finneran was convicted in 2007 of obstruction of justice.

“The idea at the time that he had very little knowledge of it was ridiculous,” Cunningham said.

Rank and file legislators said they often don’t have time to read the bills that move quickly through closed door meetings. Special “joint caucuses” allow legislators to negotiate in private, allowing lawmakers to move controversial bills through without debate.

“We’ve short-circuited the committee hearing process, even the roll call process,” said Steve Poftak, a former state finance official and executive director of the Rappaport Institute for Greater Boston, a public policy center based at Harvard University. “It’s hard for legislators to even get a hand on legislation.”

Gaps in financial disclosure laws, oversight enforcement lead to ethics violations

Weaknesses in the state’s financial disclosure laws and the enforcement ability of state oversight agencies have also contributed to criminal cases against public servants in recent years. Former state Ethics Commission Chairman George Brown, who teaches at Boston College, said the problem lies with a political culture that thinks it’s above the law more than a lack of laws.

“You need to have political leaders who make it clear that corruption in the broad sense of the word won’t be tolerated.” Brown said. “I’m not sure Massachusetts is getting that message or has gotten it.”

One politician who didn’t get it was disgraced state Sen. Dianne Wilkerson, a Boston Democrat who was caught taking bribes, including being videotaped stuffing 10 $100 bills in her bra. She pleaded guilty to corruption charges in 2010 and is serving a 3 ½ year federal prison term.

But signs of Wilkerson’s financial improprieties were known as early as 1997, when she was convicted of federal tax evasion. In 2005, Wilkerson was fined for multiple campaign finance violations, including failing to report $26,935 in donations; another $18,000 paid from her committee went unexplained. The state Office of Campaign and Political Finance, which is supposed to serve as a check on the propriety of political spending, has no civil enforcement power. The agency can only fine candidates for late or incomplete paperwork, referring questionable activities to the state Attorney General. Wilkerson’s mounting personal debt went undetected; she accepted tens of thousands in donations from friends, some of whom turned out to be state contractors. Critics say this gave Wilkerson a feeling of invincibility.

“This lack of accountability leads to a slip shod practice and a thought that they can’t be touched,” Brown said.

Lawmakers are required to disclose fees or campaign donations that pose the appearance of a conflict of interest to the Ethics Commission or the House or Senate Clerk. Wilkerson never did and voted in 2005 to give one of the donors, a major developer, a $4.3 million state contract.

In sentencing Wilkerson for the 2008 bribery case, U.S. District Court Judge Douglas P. Woodlock expressed dismay at the boldness of Massachusetts leaders to use their office for personal gain.

“It appears that the assumption has become at large that the consequences of engaging in bribery, particularly after a first crime, are not so scary as to make people decide not to do it,” Woodlock wrote. “. . . there is a kind of ganglion of concerns that surround bribery in this state, political corruption in this state, and that Gordian Knot has not yet been cut. People go back and do it again.”

DiMasi argued the $65,000 referral fee he got for sending the Cognos business to his law partner was legal, and not a bribe. Legislators who like DiMasi also practice law cannot act on budget items or bills if they or their business partners have a financial interest. Even if he had disclosed the transaction, which DiMasi did not, the Ethics Commission does not have to disclose if a lawmaker makes an inquiry about a potential conflict.

“There is no way to determine in advance if somebody has a conflict of interest,” said David Giannotti, spokesman for the State Ethics Commission. “It’s incumbent upon the legislator. All the enforcement is after the fact.”

Public access to financial disclosure forms, known as SFI’s, is limited. Public officials are also notified every time someone requests to see the SFI’s and a requester must show identification in order to review them. The SFIs have been criticized for being too broad and non-specific. More information can be gleaned from one year’s tax return, released by both presidential candidates, than what’s asked for in Massachusetts’ SFIs.

A bill sponsored by state Representative Carolyn Dykema, a Holliston Democrat, is moving forward to remove those restrictions and make SFIs available online.

“The whole democratic process relies on people having faith that the government and elected officials are acting in their best interests,” Dykema said.

DiMasi was not required to reveal the amount of a second mortgage loaned to him by former campaign treasurer Richard Vitale. Vitale was acquitted of conspiracy and mail fraud in the same case. Neither did DiMasi have to report his soaring credit card debt that grew to nearly $275,000, five times his salary as speaker. In other states, like New Jersey, which received an “A” in the integrity index for ethics enforcement, such debt would have to be public through financial disclosures.

Only one full-time staff member in the Ethics Commission is in charge of more than 4,500 Statements of Financial Interest documents filed each year.

“One person looking at the stuff makes it extremely difficult,” said Alice Boelter, a former city and state official who teaches public administration at Regis College. Boelter reviewed Massachusetts laws for the State Integrity Index.

Dick W. Simpson, a political science professor at the University of Illinois in Chicago, said there is little political will to make the disclosures more explicit.

“They don’t want to make them more restrictive because they don’t want to release information about their private affairs,” Simpson said. “They tend to make them very broad and not very illuminating.”

Judiciary exemption from public records law protects probation misconduct

Like the Legislature, the Massachusetts judiciary is exempt from public records laws. It's a weakness that took center stage when a massive patronage scandal in the state Porbation Department was revealed in 2010. The pay-to-play scheme remained well hidden; then-Probation Commissioner John O'Brien did not have to release recommendations for jobs or candidate's test scores so was allegedly able to hire friends and relatives of favored legislators, who voted on his budget, with impunity. Thoughthe Probation Department falls under the state judicial branch, it provided little to no oversight.

Pam Wilmot, executive director of Common Cause Massachusetts, said the lack of an independent overseer left the probation department in “darkness.”

“It’s become one of the biggest areas of patronage dumping.” Wilmot said. “It’s a major problem.”

O’Brien has been forced out of office and faces federal corruption charges, as do a number of other probation officials. A federal grand jury is hearing testimony from witnesses, including current lawmakers that could result in further indictments.

New rules on hiring were signed into law last year. A new independent court administrator will oversee all hiring. The law creates standard hiring practices and lists minimum qualifications for jobs. The law also puts any recommendations by lawmakers into the public record.

Reforms not broad enough, critics say

The recent scandals led to ethics reforms passed in 2009 that banned all gifts to public officials, increased penalties across the board for bribery and other campaign finance violations and gave the Ethics Commission and Attorney General expanded powers when investigating and prosecuting a violator.

But critics said the reforms still lack an important tool used by federal investigators to catch corrupt public servants - power to conduct one-party surveillance or record someone without their knowledge. At least 40 states afford either federal or state Attorneys General that power.

“It’s a crucial tool because of the nature of the crimes and how much really hinges on a witness turning state’s evidence,” Wilmot said.

At its core, many political observers in and out of Massachusetts note some of the corruption in Massachusetts stems from the risks associated with the powerful one-party Democratic government that has long held a grip on power in the Bay State, as well as entrenched resistance to change by the political culture.

“Whenever there is an advance made in ethics requirements, it’s always done with a gun at the head of the legislature,” Cunningham, the U-Mass Boston professor, said. “It’s a sad old story in Massachusetts.”

Violating the public trust?

Massachusetts,United States — 2012-04-30T14:44:51-04:00

In the past five years, Massachusetts residents have been forced to witness an embarrassing parade of fallen public servants caught up in corrupt acts, handcuffed and led away. Their names still prompt a wince: Finneran, DiMasi, Wilkerson, Turner, Marzilli and more. The scandals’ cost to the public purse is untold; the cost to public confidence in government leadership incalculable.

Yet the overwhelming majority of public servants embroiled in criminal or ethical scandals since 2007 are people most in Massachusetts have never heard of. They draw their paychecks far from power centers like Beacon Hill or city halls, but in small town schools and libraries, municipal police and fire stations, in local housing projects, on rural postal routes, in state prisons, county jails and courthouses dotting the Bay State. From a former Springfield school teacher accused of insurance fraud to a Lawrence police officer charged with rape to a Dighton town official sanctioned for hiring his relatives, hundreds of ordinary individuals paid to serve the public interest have been charged with or admitted to crimes and ethical misconduct in Massachusetts, according to a new analysis by the New England Center for Investigative Reporting.

The NECIR compilation of public servants accused of crimes or ethical misconduct was culled over the past several months from news reports, agency press releases, state and federal court records, Ethics Commission dispositions, government annual reports and interviews with municipal, state and federal officials.

The first four months of 2012 alone have featured at least 19 public servants who have either admitted to criminal or unethical conduct or are facing new state or federal criminal charges, the NECIR analysis shows. The group includes a Billerica man who was selling cocaine to substance abuse patients at the Veterans Affairs hospital in Bedford, where he worked, a West Bridgewater High School teacher and coach who portrayed himself online as a mom who would pimp out an 11-year-old daughter and a Shirley town administrator who admitted videotaping women in a town restroom.

“This is a much larger dataset than I would have expected. What’s going on here is that New England tends to enforce its laws,” said Craig Holman, a government ethics scholar with the citizens’ advocacy group Public Citizen in Washington D.C. Holman reviewed the data from Massachusetts and five other New England states for NECIR.

As least 12 police employees in Springfield have been charged in the past five years, the highest amount from any one city or town, in criminal cases ranging from incest to larceny to drunk driving, the records show.

Criminal charges or ethical violations have been lodged against at least 11 firefighters since 2007, including five in Hampden County prosecuted for arson and conspiracy.

More than two dozen individuals were either elected officials or ran for public office before being sanctioned for ethical violations or charged with public corruption, the records show. Among them are seven state lawmakers as well as an assortment of city councilors, selectmen, sheriffs and three mayors.

At least 37 Massachusetts public servants have been prosecuted by the U.S. Attorney’s office in Massachusetts over the past five years, ranging from felony cases against two consecutive House speakers to a U.S. Port Security official accused of assisting an illegal immigrant, the records show.

The federal prosecutor in Massachusetts far outpaced her counterparts in every other New England state with the number of criminal complaints brought against individuals on the public payroll, the NECIR analysis shows.

Prosecuting public corruption is the top national priority for the F.B.I., said Christina Sterling, a spokeswoman for U.S. Attorney Carmen Ortiz in Boston. Sterling said she could not confirm the number of cases the Massachusetts’ U.S. Attorney has prosecuted.

"It is policy that we rely solely on Department of Justice verified statistics, so we wouldn’t be able to respond to any questions that utilize statistics from any other source," Sterling said in an email.

Sterling’s email said unlike the other New England states, the federal prosecutor’s office in Massachusetts is considered a special U.S. Department of Justice “extra-large district” with 100 attorneys or more.

Sterling released a statement from Ortiz noting that while the vast majority of public servants are honest, public corruption has stained many corners of government in Massachusetts.

“In our work to root out corruption and safeguard public resources, we follow the facts where they lead. And as we have seen, the leads have taken us to legislatures, courts, city halls, law enforcement departments, school and zoning boards, and government agencies of all kinds.” the statement said.

Dick Simpson, a government corruption expert at the University of Illinois, said places with dominant one-party government, such as heavily Democratic Massachusetts, tend to have more problematic rates of violations of the public trust.

“Places of high corruption — such as Boston, Chicago or New Jersey — were all places that practiced machine politics,” said Simpson, author of a recent Chicago corruption report.

But George Brown, a former chair of the state Ethics Commission, said the high number of cases doesn’t necessarily reflect that Massachusetts has more dishonest public servants than other New England states.

“I think it is a matter of the underlying practice or culture; this U.S. Attorney’s office has always had a practice of being aggressive when it comes to political corruption,” said Brown, a professor at Boston College Law School.

The analysis comes as Massachusetts earned a “C” grade in a national investigation released last month assessing each state’s risk for corruption. Massachusetts earned high scores for the transparency of its political financing and lobbying systems but got an “F” grade for the accessibility of public records, the investigation concluded. The state review was conducted by NECIR in collaboration with The Center for Public Integrity in Washington, D.C.

Given that many of the more current charges against public employees are still pending or are being appealed, it is not possible to accurately determine conviction rates from the data nor is it possible to calculate the financial cost to taxpayers.

Sterling said because there is no central billing system for costs associated with each case, it is not possible to provide an accounting of the amount of public funds spent to investigate and prosecute public servants in Massachusetts.

A spokesman for Attorney General Martha Coakley, who declined requests for an interview on her record prosecuting public servants, agreed.

“We don’t bill taxpayers by the hour like a private firm, so we don’t track cost per case that way,” Brad Puffer said in a statement.

Coakley has come under criticism recently for indicting former state Treasurer Timothy Cahill for allegedly using public funds to advertise the successes of the Massachusetts state lottery, which he oversaw, while he ran for governor in 2010. Cahill has pleaded not guilty.

The AG has brought criminal charges against at least 34 public servants since 2007, the NECIR analysis shows.

“Our office believes it is important to investigate and prosecute public employees or government officials who abuse the public trust or commit other criminal violations. Last year, we formed a public integrity division dedicated to cases involving public corruption and fraud, including the misuse of taxpayer funds. We will continue to pursue cases where the evidence warrants prosecution,” Coakley said in a statement.

Over 100 claims of misconduct lodged against Massachusetts public servants in the past five years have come from the state Ethics Commission, which bolstered its ability to punish transgressors of state ethics laws in 2009, following the federal indictment of former House Speaker Salvatore F. DiMasi that same year.

The Ethics Commission has cited politicians for failing to submit financial disclosure forms, fined the police chief in East Bridgewater for involving himself in disciplinary proceedings brought against his son, who was also on the force and fined a Boston City Councilor $2000 for trying to get his own parking tickets dismissed.

Some transgressors have failed to pay ethics fines, according to agency records obtained under a state public records law request. They include Nantucket Sheriff Richard M. Bretschneider, who has failed to pay a $1200 fine imposed in 2011 for ignoring the state's financial disclosure law, requiring him to submit asset information for 2010. Bretschneider filed his asset disclosure form 111 days following the expiration of the grace period in September, 2011, the records show. Bretschneider has also failed to respond to the commission's decision to fine him.

A message left at Bretschneider’s home on Nantucket was not returned. He was defeated for sheriff last year.

Former Lawrence School Committee member Priscilla Baez has not yet paid $275 of a $2000 fine she agreed to in 2009 for violating the state's conflict of interest law. Baez admitted she had twice voted in 2008 as a school committee member to approve a higher-paying job being specially created for her brother by the then School Superintendent, Ethics Commission records show.

A recording on the phone listing for Baez’s home in Lawrence said it was not accepting messages last week.

Public sanctions are just a small fraction of the roughly 900 to 1100 complaints against public servants made to the Ethics Commission each year; hundreds of private letters are mailed annually to public employees who have failed to adhere to the state’s complex conflict of interest and financial disclosure laws, an agency spokesman said.

The 2009 reforms have also caused an uptick in the number of requests for both legal advice as well as complaints to the commission. In the four years prior to the reform, the average number of complaints filed with the agency was 975, while in the four years since it has grown to 1,120, agency statistics show.

The New England Center for Investigative Reporting is a non-profit newsroom based at Boston University. NECIR interns contributing to this report were Chelsea Feinstein, James Robinson and John Wayne Ferguson.

A judge, a teenage killer and a mother who forgives

2012-03-20T09:44:27-04:00

As the nation’s highest court prepares to hear oral arguments today on the constitutionality of sending juvenile killers to life in prison with no chance for parole, an unlikely trio of Bostonians is hopeful the justices move quickly to abolish the sentence.

“I would give my life for Hassan and he would do the same for me,” said retired Massachusetts Juvenile Court Judge Mark E. Lawton, speaking about a teenage killer he sentenced more than 20 years ago — but has now become Lawton’s close friend.

“If he were the devil incarnate I wouldn’t have anything to do with him, but he is a great tool for goodness,” Lawton said last week, as he prepared to introduce Hassan Smith, now 40, to his juvenile law class at New England School of Law in Boston.

Smith, now a father of three who mentors troubled inner-city youth, believes firmly teenagers — like the one he once was — deserve a chance at redemption no matter how serious their mistakes.

It is that very question the high court is being asked to rule on in the appeals of two-14-year-old killers. Like Smith, who was 16 when he shot Jeffrey Booker in Boston, both inmates are black.

One of those defendants, Evan Miller, from Alabama, was 14 in 2003 when he and an older boy fatally beat a drunken neighbor to death in a trailer park, lit the victim’s home on fire and fled.

The second defendant appealing to the high court, Kuntrell Jackson, was convicted in a 1999 armed robbery in which another youth fatally shot an Arkansas convenience store clerk. Both Miller and Jackson were sentenced to life without parole.

Their lawyers argue the court should build on its own recent decisions outlawing other harsh sentences for juvenile offenders, like the death penalty and life without parole for non-homicides. The court has relied, in part, on scientific studies demonstrating young teens are less able to control their impulses or realize the devastating consequences of their choices at the time of the murder.

A ruling is expected in June.

“Don’t put these children in jail for life”

Hassan Smith knows how deeply fortunate he has been in avoiding the same fate as Miller and Jackson. He was tried in Massachusetts juvenile court when the harshest sentence he could get for murder was a commitment to the state Department of Youth Services until he was 21.

In 1996, a high point in Boston’s juvenile crime rates and following an especially brutal slaying by a teenage altar boy, Massachusetts passed legislation mandating youths over 14 convicted of first-degree murder should be jailed for life without parole.

“Those laws scare me,” Smith said. “I am very, very sorry for what I did when I was 15.”

Seven youths — all but one minority — have received the sentence in Massachusetts, the only New England state to impose the harsh punishment on defendants as young as 14

“If the laws then were as they are now the world would have lost a very positive, loving human being,” said Lawton, a former legislator who spent 27 years on the bench.

Both Smith and Lawton, who reconnected by chance in 1992, are outspoken advocates against the sentence and for a proposed reform effort underway in the Bay State to allow those defendants parole eligibility after 15 years.

They are joined by the woman whose life Smith destroyed in 1988 when her son was fatally shot outside her Roxbury church. Jeffrey Booker was unarmed and 21, the father of a year-old son and an aspiring cellist.

“Don’t put these children in jail for life. No, no, no,” says 79-year-old Sonia Booker. “It’s not going to bring my son back. Nothing is ever going to bring him back.”

Booker said she has never been asked before about the life without parole sentence.

“There is a chance for these children to be redeemed,” she said of teen killers like Smith.

“It’s not up to me to keep revenge”

Booker, a former elementary school teacher and pianist, disputes Smith’s claim he has sought her forgiveness, though she said she would give it if he asked.

Sonia Booker grew up with Smith’s family and was close friends with his mother, Elizabeth Smith, now 73.

“It’s not up to me to keep revenge. When my son got shot on Father’s Day, I had to walk by myself and ask the Lord to show me the way to forgive,” Booker said.

“His mother is a beautiful person. I don’t believe in holding no anger in my heart. You can kill your own self doing that,” Booker said.

Massachusetts prosecutors, who have charged more than 60 youths aged 14 to 16 with murder in the past 15 years, firmly believe the law should not be changed. In a report issued last fall, the Massachusetts District Attorney’s Association argued teenage murderers should not get “leniency and mercy that they never showed their victims.” The MDDA also claims prosecutors are judicious in their use of the first-degree murder charge, given only seven Massachusetts youths have received the sentence to date.

But to sitting Juvenile Court Judge Leslie E. Harris, who has handled teenage murder cases, people like Smith deserve a chance to prove they are sorry.

“Hassan has tried to be a different person, has tried to be a role model,” Harris said. “I don’t believe in throwing away any child.”

“We should hold him accountable, for sure. Hassan should never forget what he did, but that doesn’t mean we should ever forget about him,” Harris said.

Harris points to a current Michigan case in which a 13-year-old could be sentenced to life without parole for a drug-related slaying committed by his estranged father, whom he had just recently reconnected with. Charles Lewis Jr. was in a car with his father and a group of his father’s friends in 2010 when they kidnapped a rival’s girlfriend and Lewis Sr.’s gun fired accidentally, fatally wounding the victim.

“All I could think about were the kids I see who come in front of me — 13, 14-year-old kids charged with shoplifting, shooting a gun. Who they are at 12 is not who they are going to be at 28 or 30,” said Harris, who regularly speaks to state prison inmates.

“We still have this mentality that children are monsters and they are not,” Harris said. “We have some monstrous cases, but they are the exception, not the rule.”

Harris, like Lawton, has connected with a defendant whom Harris sentenced to five-to-seven years in a shooting. The bullet did not hit anyone.

“This was a child that was giving up on himself. Before he left the courtroom, I told him he couldn’t give up on himself. This didn’t have to define him for the rest of his life,” Harris said.

Harris, who has two grown sons, said as a teenager he might have made different choices than he would today.

“If I were provoked, I’d run because I want to be there for my kids. When I was younger, I might not have run so quick and that is the difference.”

Lawton agrees.

“No one seeks to demean the Bookers. The transcendent tragedy is the loss of life,” said Lawton. “But in all of these matters there are corollary tragedies. Unfortunately this is a tragedy that will follow Hassan for the rest of life.”

For Lawton, the inconsistency in how juveniles have been sentenced for murder in Massachusetts indicates one of the dangers of the mandatory punishment. Last year, the New England Center for Investigative Reporting found the sentence was being applied inconsistently and unfairly to teens charged with murder. In some cases teens who committed more violent and grisly slayings than those convicted of first-degree murder, were able to plead guilty or obtain second-degree convictions, making them parole eligible, NECIR found.

“You can take a truly heinous crime, charged as murder one, and because of some evidentiary weakness that defendant can apply for parole in 15 years,” Lawton said.

“I had never been called ‘son’ by a white man”

Smith has struggled to remake his life after the “horrible mistake” he said he made nearly 24 years ago. Raised in the housing projects, Smith got his first gun at 12; sold cocaine and marijuana, was kicked out of school and fell into gang life.

He said he feared for his own life on the day of Booker’s death, which Lawton said was triggered by a gang dispute.

“In Hassan’s neighborhood, to carry a gun was a necessity; it was part of the neighborhood culture,” Lawton said.

Lawton remembers the moment when the jury found Smith delinquent of murder.

“I remember looking at Hassan and he looked at me. I said ‘I wish you all the luck in the world,’” Lawton said.

Those words meant something to Smith.

“I took them to heart. Judge Lawton called me ‘son’ in the courtroom. He treated me with respect. I had never been called ‘son’ by a white man before; ‘boy,’ yes, but that is a racist term,” Smith said.

After finishing his DYS commitment, Smith moved in with a foster mother in Northampton to escape the crime-ridden Boston streets and earn his high school diploma. He took college courses and was looking for work when he spotted Lawton on a city subway car in 1992.

Tapping him on the shoulder, Smith asked Lawton, who was on his way to preside over a Cambridge jury trial, if he remembered him. The judge did not. When Smith reminded him, Lawton asked what he was doing with his life and Smith responded: “I’m looking for a job.”

The judge’s invitation for a cheeseburger lunch a few weeks later sparked a warm friendship that has spanned two decades.

“He’s like a little brother to me,” Lawton said. The pair often eats dinner together, visit one another’s homes and have met each other’s children in the intervening years.

Lawton helped Smith find a job as a prison guard at the Suffolk County House of Correction, where he worked for ten years.

But there have been struggles. Smith’s bid to become a Boston Police officer in 1997 was rejected by the then-commissioner because of his juvenile record. Smith was let go from his corrections job after sexual harassment charges were filed against him in 2003. A five-year relationship with a woman he met in an emergency medical technician class ended badly in 2005.

The guardian ad litem sorting out the couple’s custody issues credited Smith for his parenting skills and diligent financial support of him and his girlfriend’s two young boys. Smith has since worked as a skills trainer with the disabled at the Boston Center for Independent Living and ran unsuccessfully for Suffolk County Sheriff in 2010.

“I’m proof the system worked”

Still, Smith points to the irony of a sealed juvenile record that continues to haunt him.

“I’m proof the system worked. The purpose behind the sealed juvenile record is that it doesn’t hinder my future,” Smith said.

Today, with a daughter in college and two boys, Smith spends his time mentoring youngsters at risk of straying down a path of drugs, crime and guns.

“I tell them: it’s not how far you fall, it’s how far you rise,” Smith said, pressing the kids to avoid dependence on using race as an excuse for their troubles.

“The marching era is over. It’s time we do for ourselves,” he said.

“He talks about the harm and the pain you can cause. That type of empathy, concern and love you rarely see in some of our best citizens,” Lawton said.

Smith credits his own mother with doing her best as a single parent raising seven children in one of Boston’s toughest neighborhoods.

“She raised us with the best intentions. She put me in Kung Fu classes, tried to get me a big brother,” Smith said. “She would have turned me in if I hadn’t been arrested.”

Smith said he is deeply remorseful for the pain he caused the Booker family and has tried to prove it in the decades since the shooting.

“It’s one thing to say you are sorry; it’s another to mean it. I’m demonstrating I mean it,” he said.

As for his victim’s mother, she hopes the country’s highest court sees that children are not adults, despite terribly bad decisions they make as teenagers. She includes Hassan Smith in that group.

“That boy don’t know what he took away from me when he took my son away,” Sonia Booker said, remembering the murder trial decades ago. “I had to sit there and think about why this boy killed my son; it was a hurting thing but the hurt goes away and love comes in. I wouldn’t mind talking to Hassan if he would come.”

The New England Center for Investigative Reporting is a non-profit investigative newsroom at Boston University. This is a follow-up report to the center’s 2011 investigative series on juveniles serving life without parole in Massachusetts.

Teen killers get inconsistent sentences

2012-02-14T08:25:27-05:00

Shrewsbury teen Valerie N. Hall pushed her mother down a flight of stairs in 2000, smashed her head in with a hammer and left Kathleen Thompsen Hall to die while she went for a ride with her boyfriend. For her mother's murder, Hall, a depressed and suicidal 16-year-old at the time, served nine years in prison.

Lincoln-Sudbury Regional High School student John Odgren, who suffers from depression and other mental ailments, fatally stabbed schoolmate James Alenson in the boy's bathroom in 2007 when he was 16, and after realizing what he had done, tried to get help. Odgren is serving life without the possibility of parole at Bridgewater State Hospital.

Both crimes were ghastly. Both teens suffered from mental illness. Both were charged with first-degree murder.

But their punishments could not have been more different.

The dispositions of the Hall and Odgren cases illustrate the profound inequities that have grown up in the Massachusetts juvenile justice system since the passage of a tough sentencing law enacted 15 years ago and designed to punish the most depraved “super-predators” among teen killers.

An investigation by the New England Center for Investigative Reporting reveals, for the first time, that that law is not being applied consistently to the most horrific juvenile murder cases, as it was intended. The findings come as the U.S. Supreme Court prepares this spring to tackle whether it is “cruel and unusual” punishment to sentence juveniles 14 and under to life without parole for murder.

In Massachusetts, there is no obvious pattern as to why some killers are sentenced to life without parole and others — who committed shocking, grisly crimes such as fatally beating a 2-year-old — escaped the harsh sentence. Juveniles whose crimes approach the cruelty of the teen whose case triggered the passage of the 1996 law, Edward O'Brien, have escaped the severe sentence, while spontaneous acts of violence by teenagers with little prior record are punished with life behind bars.

O'Brien was 15 in 1995 when he fatally stabbed his best friend's mother, slashing her more than 90 times. He was initially to be tried in juvenile court, but public outcry about the possibility of a lenient juvenile sentence led lawmakers to quickly pass the tough new law aimed at punishing “adult crime with adult time.” Under that law, a teen convicted of first-degree murder must serve life in prison without any chance of being released.

Before the change, juvenile killers could only be sentenced to serve until age 21 unless their case was transferred to adult court.

Since 1996, dozens of teens between the ages of 14 and 16 have been charged with murder in Massachusetts, but only seven have been sentenced to life without parole. In only two cases — the fatal beating with a hammer and the stabbing of a stranger in a school restroom — did their crimes approach the depravity of O'Brien's murder of Janet Downing.

Four of the teenage lifers acted impulsively, settling petty disputes with lethal attacks, the review of murder cases shows. Only two of the seven lifers had a record of violent crime, the investigation found, and two had no criminal history at all.

“We'd like to reserve the maximum penalty for the worst cases, for the most dangerous individuals,” said Northeastern University criminologist James Alan Fox, a critic of the current system. The seven teens that got life without parole “do not appear to be the worst cases.”

In addition, though five juveniles have been charged with murder in Worcester County in the past 15 years, only Hall was convicted of murder. Three of the Worcester-area teens either had their charges dropped, were acquitted or were convicted of a lesser charge, state records show.

Worcester District Attorney Joseph D. Early Jr. declined comment, referring NECIR to a collective statement issued by all state prosecutors supporting the law.

But examples abound of teens charged with similar — and sometimes more atrocious slayings — whose punishments differ significantly. In one, a 16-year-old went looking for pot at a Brookline High School graduation party, then shot the guest of honor in the chest when he got a racial slur instead. In the other, a 16-year-old stabbed a man 23 times inside his Springfield apartment, returning the next day to steal things from the victim's home while his body lay nearby.

The murderer in Springfield, Edgardo Rodriguez, accepted a plea deal for the 2004 killing of Joel Rivera Delgado, allowing him to potentially walk free within the next decade.

The other teen, Antonio Fernandez, took his 2002 case to trial and received life without parole for shooting Perry Hughes. Until then, Fernandez had never been charged with anything worse than stealing video games.

Some Massachusetts judges have expressed concern the sentence is not appropriate for teens this young.

Odgren's trial judge, S. Jane Haggerty, wrote, in a decision denying his attempt to reduce his sentence: “There is tragedy in a sentence of imprisonment for life without the possibility of a parole for a 16-year-old offender in the circumstances of the defendant.”

Similarly, some judges who have presided over juvenile murder cases have expressed discomfort with the use of the maximum sentence.

“I don't know what the answer is. But I don't think we do justice by sentencing someone 16 and under to life without parole, no matter what the circumstances,” said retired Superior Court Judge Isaac S. Borenstein, who presided over the Fernandez trial.

Juvenile crime rates have dropped in recent years, but criminologists attribute it more to a decline in youth gang activity than get-tough laws. In fact, the once-feared generation of “super predators” never materialized.

Odgren's father, Paul Odgren, said it's time to realize that murder cases are not always clear-cut, and that teenagers convicted of first-degree murder should at least have a chance at parole. He realizes that his child can never again be without constant supervision, but his son has no hope that he'll ever get out of prison.

“The only thing that is worse than what happened to us is what happened to them,” said Odgren, referring to the victims of his son's crime.

“Still, kids are not adults. It's reflected in all our other laws. They can't drive. They can't vote. They can't get married. They can't join the military. Why should they never, ever have a chance to rehabilitate themselves?” Odgren asked.

Massachusetts is the only state in New England or New York to impose life without parole for crimes committed by juveniles in the past 15 years. Nationally, at least six states have abolished similar laws, making Massachusetts a target of criticism even from law and order Texas where legislators recently repealed life without parole for juveniles.

The Bay State is “meting out unequal justice” to teenagers, declared Texas state Sen. Juan “Chuy” Hinojosa, who led the fight to make juvenile killers eligible for parole after serving 40 years of their life sentence.

No prosecutors from the Massachusetts counties where teens have been sentenced to life without parole — Middlesex, Suffolk, Essex and Norfolk — would comment on their cases for the record.

But the Massachusetts District Attorney's Association released a statement supporting the law, arguing that teens who commit especially heinous crimes should not get “leniency and mercy that they never showed their victims.”

Tom Reilly, who prosecuted O'Brien when he was Middlesex District Attorney and led the charge for the super predator law, still strongly supports it, saying it has improved public safety.

An adult trial for murder defendants older than 14 “is a perfectly appropriate way of dealing with truly heinous situations,” said Reilly, a former attorney general now in private legal practice.

Some victims' families argue that, if anything, the super predator law doesn't go far enough.

“If it was my decision, we'd have the death penalty,” said Olivia Singletary, the adoptive mother of Perry Hughes, Fernandez's victim.

But critics of the law say that recent scientific studies demonstrate that it's wrong to treat adolescents like adults in murder cases. Brain imaging research indicates that adolescent brains are underdeveloped in areas associated with risk assessment and moral reasoning, making them more prone to impulsive responses than adults, according to the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry, which opposes life without parole for juveniles.

The research findings have led some lawmakers to rethink their stance on the issue.

State Sen. Harriette Chandler, D-Worcester, who voted for the 1996 law, introduced legislation this September to allow juveniles sentenced to life without parole to apply for release after 15 years.

“I've had second thoughts,” Chandler said. “Given what we know about how children's brains develop, they are indeed capable of growth.”

Likewise, some jurors in teen murder trials say they are haunted by the cases. Carlotta White, foreman of the jury that voted to convict 16-year-old Kentel Weaver of first-degree murder in the 2003 shooting of 15-year-old Germaine Rucker, said she had no idea Weaver could wind up with such a harsh sentence.

“I didn't think he was going to get life,” she said.

Like Fernandez, Kevin Keo rejected a deal from prosecutors that would have made him eligible for parole in 15 to 16 years for the shooting death of Christian Vargas-Martinez, a gang rival he blamed for slicing off part of his ear a few weeks earlier. Then 16 and with no criminal record, Keo insisted he was innocent right up to the moment he was sentenced to life without parole.

“He was just a baby a few years ago, and now his life is done,” said Keo's father, Vong Oung, who now regrets that he didn't press his son to accept the plea deal.

Parents of some of these teen lifers said they made foolish decisions because they had no understanding of the judicial system. Kentel Weaver, for instance, said he confessed to the murder of Germaine Rucker mainly because his mother mistakenly insisted that was the only way he could get a lawyer.

Another lifer was left to make life-determining legal decisions almost entirely on his own.

Noeun Sok, a 15-year-old Cambodian immigrant, was accompanied only by his sister when surrendering to police in 1999. He immediately waived his right to remain silent and confessed to fatally stabbing a gang rival earlier that day. At his friend's urging, Sok admitted that he chased Keoudone “Tiny” Onexavieng, 18, down the street and put a 30-inch samurai sword in his back.

“I never meant to hurt Tiny. I only wanted to scare him,” Sok told the police in 1999.

Sok's parents didn't attend his trial, so when he began sobbing uncontrollably, the judge ordered an additional lawyer to act as his guardian.

Other teens that had lengthier, more violent criminal records than Sok, Keo and Fernandez have escaped the sentence of life without parole.

Michael “Shawn” Warner's juvenile record included multiple counts of assault and battery with a dangerous weapon when the 15-year-old twice shot John Rodrigues from behind during a drug dispute. He fled the scene on his scooter and evaded arrest for nearly three years.

But the jury in Suffolk Superior Court couldn't reach a verdict at his 2003 and 2007 trials and prosecutors instead offered him a deal to plead guilty to manslaughter. Sentenced to 12 to 14 years in prison, Warner is eligible for release between 2020 and 2024.

Likewise, Billeoum Phan, a 14-year-old Lowell boy, had already faced charges in numerous violent attacks before he shot Samnang Oth, a feared gang member, during a 2006 birthday party in Lowell. Yet, he was convicted of manslaughter — not first-degree murder — and the trial judge pronounced him “salvageable,” sentencing him to the Department of Youth Services until he turns 21. After that, he'll have to serve five years' probation and an additional 12-year suspended sentence.

The New England Center for Investigative Reporting at Boston University is a nonprofit investigative reporting newsroom. Maggie Mulvihill, the center's co-director, supervised this project. Other contributors were Jenna Ebersole, Rochelle Sharpe and NECIR interns Jill Carlson, Susan Zalkind, Carol Cole and Alexandria Burris.

States slow to act against New England polluters

Maine,United States — 2012-01-12T10:21:07-05:00

For many in New England, fresh powdered snow is a welcome sign of the season. For Maine mother Jill Callela, the flakes showcase something much darker — the dirty air her family is breathing.

“OK, we have black snow again,” Callela, 39, said, remembering recent winters when the factory directly across the river from her home in Bradley, Maine, polluted the snow in her yard with what she says was lead-laden soot spewed from its smokestack.

Tests Callela had done have shown elevated levels of lead in the snow, she said. Icy winds sweeping over the Penobscot River behind her home amplified the problem.

“It was in everyone’s house and got into the blowers in our cars,” Callela said. “When we would turn on our heaters it would come through the vents.”

The factory, Old Town Fuel & Fiber, a paper mill, has over the past five years racked up $267,000 in federal air pollution fines for releasing illegal amounts of carbon monoxide, sulfur dioxide and methanol into the air above its facility.

Callela claims her complaints about the mill to state regulators have been ignored even though it is among a number of New England facilities labeled “high priority violators” by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. A facility can become a high priority violator, or HPV, by exceeding emission limits, violating a local state or federal order or meeting other criteria developed by the EPA to identify polluters in need of close scrutiny.

An investigation by the New England Center for Investigative Reporting shows that regulators in Maine and nearby states have taken months and even years to sanction facilities violating the Clean Air Act — even those the government itself has called HPVs, such as the Old Town paper mill.

The factory has been violating its carbon monoxide limits since December 2010 but the issue is still not resolved. Melanie Loyzim, head of Maine’s Bureau of Air Quality, said regulators are in negotiations with the factory's owners to improve their technology and has proposed fining them $497,000. Loyzim argued the emissions are not dangerous.

“You can say we don’t act fast enough but we are talking about carbon monoxide emissions at a level that don’t have a public health impact,” she said.

Dan Bird, a spokesman for the factory’s owner, Patriarch Partners, said most of the pollution happened under previous owners and it was never proven that the soot in Bradley came from the mill. He said the plant struggles to stay within its carbon monoxide limits and is seeking a state permit to increase emissions of the gas.

“This is a huge economic engine in our relatively rural neck of the woods,” Bird said. “That doesn’t give us license to be outside of our legal requirements at all, but we’ve had a difficult time in a few areas. We’ve had some episodes but the majority of the time we are operating within our parameters.”

It took Massachusetts approximately 18 months to levy a fine against resin manufacturer Solutia Inc., for failing to properly operate required pollution control equipment on several occasions at its Indian Orchard plant in Springfield.

“It smells a lot. I can tell you that,” said Donald Carr, a Springfield postal employee who has worked across the street from the plant for 10 years. “I’m not surprised it’s a major polluter and I don’t even know the effect it will have on me.”

Massachusetts Department of Environmental Protection spokesman Edmund Coletta said that there is no set length of time for the state to find and resolve a violation.

“Every case and every facility is different,” Coletta said. “There are some (facilities) that work quickly to resolve issues while others don’t.” Solutia is on schedule to return to compliance, he said.

Messages left at Solutia’s Indian Orchard plant and its Missouri headquarters were not returned.

Being labeled a high priority violator may earn such facilities slots on a closely guarded EPA “watch list” that is updated monthly. The list was made public for the first time following federal Freedom of Information Act requests by the Center for Public Integrity and National Public Radio.

The release was part of a joint CPI/NPR investigation into lax enforcement of the Clean Air Act in hundreds of communities nationwide. Following last year’s investigation, the EPA, for the first time, made the lists of alleged Clean Air Act, Clean Water Act and Resource Conservation and Recovery Act violators available on its website.

The most recent available Clean Air Act list, from November 2011, includes nearly 250 government and industrial facilities, with the majority located in the South and Midwest. The nine New England facilities on the list include power companies, manufacturers and a hospital.

The facilities’ status, and ensuing slow state enforcement, is notable given that many of them have emitted toxics deemed so dangerous to human health they were targeted for control in amendments to the federal law more than two decades ago.

The first Bush administration promised that reductions in airborne emissions of nearly 200 chemicals would lead to sharp declines in cancer, birth defects and other serious health problems. A focus of the amendments was to reduce the chemicals’ release into the air by tighter state and federal regulation of chronic polluters. But in New England, as in many other parts of the country, that has not always happened.

A leak in June, 2008 at CYTEC Industries in Wallingford, Conn., didn’t result in a notice of violation from state regulators until September, 2009, records show.

Jaimeson Sinclair, supervising air pollution control engineer for the Connecticut Department of Energy and Environmental Protection, said the delay came about because state officials had to confirm with the EPA the failure to promptly repair the leaks was a violation of the Clean Air Act.

CYTEC has been labeled a high-priority violator and was on the EPA “watch list” as recently as September 2011 for illegal nitrogen dioxide emissions. The chemical can impair lung function and is an irritant to the nose and throat, according to the EPA.

In May 2011 Connecticut environmental officials fined the global chemical giant $52,000 for the 2008 leak as well as failing to run timely, required tests on boilers for nitrogen oxide in early 2010.

Nancy Alderman, an environmental law and public health expert who heads up the non-profit watchdog group Environmental and Human Health Inc., in Conn., has studied CYTEC’s emissions with concern.

“If you look at CYTEC, we know that they release formaldehyde into the air, which is a carcinogen and a respiratory irritant. But we also know they release butyl alcohol, which is a nervous system depressant. What we haven’t understood yet is what is in the air at what time and how the effects of these combine together,” Alderman said.

Company officials for CYTEC, headquartered in New Jersey, did not respond to several requests for comment.

Sinclair defended the state’s record on forcing CYTEC to comply with air pollution laws.

“Once we learn of a violation, we take action,” he said.

Environmental watchdogs and even some state officials claim a sharp reduction in resources is to blame for slow enforcement of the law. Congress delegated enforcement of the Clean Air Act to the states and authorized the federal government to cover up to 60 percent of the states’ compliance activities. Lately, however, that figure has been closer to 25 percent. And over the past three years, funding for environmental enforcement has been cut in four of six New England states, budget records show.

Sean Mahoney, vice-president of the Maine office of the Conservation Law Foundation, a network of environmental advocacy groups, said he and his colleagues try to bring the most urgent air quality concerns to the states’ attention as regulators struggle with dwindling resources.

“To be honest, we’re like a finger in the dike,” Mahoney said.

State officials hope the cuts are only temporary as they shoulder bigger enforcement burdens. In Maine, about a dozen employees of the state’s Bureau of Health Quality are responsible for monitoring air quality for more than 600 facilities, said Loyzim, of the Bureau of Air Quality.

“I have every confidence that the struggle for funding at the moment is not an undermining of environmental regulation, but a reflection of the difficult economic climate nationwide,” Loyzim said.

And some state officials said the EPA’s HPV criteria can make states appear to be lagging in their enforcement duties. When a violation is reported, a facility is only returned to compliance in the eyes of EPA when the offense is redressed formally, which can take years, Sinclair said.

He pointed to an uneven ratio of violations to staff.

“We can only do what we can with the people that we have,” he said. “Addressing actions are prioritized around the severity and risk to human health.”

An EPA spokesman cautioned that there can be flaws in the watch list. Allegations not yet proven against a business may land it on the list, while other companies remain on the list even after they have corrected problems because they are being watched by regulators for continuing compliance, the spokesman said. Officials say that institutions can linger on the list for years, until the EPA formally closes out enforcement actions.

Still, the EPA’s own internal watchdog has expressed concern about the level of attention being paid to high priority violators. A 2009 report by the agency’s inspector general found that “in many instances EPA and States are not addressing high priority violations . . . in a timely manner,” thereby allowing “continued emissions from facilities (that) may result in significant environmental and public health impacts, deterrence efforts being undermined, and unfair economic benefits being created.”

Last year, another Massachusetts HPV, the Milford glass bottling factory for building materials conglomerate Saint Gobain, agreed to a $2.25 million fine for violating the Clean Air Act over a 20-year-period by improperly building or modifying its glass furnaces.

As part of the enforcement agreement, the company has converted two furnaces to reduce greenhouse emission, nitrate dioxide, sulfur dioxide and particulate matter emissions at its Milford facility, according to an emailed statement provided to NECIR by company spokesman Craig Kovan.

“We don’t believe the inclusion of any Saint-Gobain Containers’ Inc. (SGCI) facility on the EPA list is appropriate,” the statement read.

Meanwhile, in Maine residents are bracing for state regulators’ decision about Old Town’s efforts to get permission to double its carbon monoxide allowance.

Callela said neighborhood dogs and cats run through the “gray mucky sludge” that she claims at times has coated her backyard from the factory’s emissions and then track it inside her house.

“Imagine what is not visible,” said Callela.

Mary Dolan, who has lived in Old Town for nearly a decade, attended a public meeting last fall to protest Old Town’s permit application, pointing out that the factory has already broken federal air pollution rules.

“It just seemed ridiculous that if you can’t meet one license, you can just ask for a new one,” Dolan said.

Old Town spokesman Bird defends the move, saying the facility cannot operate economically under the current license.

“You can increase emissions standards to a certain point, but eventually no technology will produce at that level,” Bird said.

The New England Center for Investigative Reporting is a non-profit newsroom based at Boston University and a member of the Investigative News Network.