DA race gets desperate

So former Assistant District Attorney Mike Cahillane's campaign for District Attorney is pulling out all the stops as they just trumpeted an endorsement from Amherst School Committee Chair Irv Rhodes.

Bonus points, I suppose, because Irv is black. Especially since Cahillane's boss, Elizabeth Scheibel came into such criticism for pressing forward the Jason Vassell case which was recently pretty much dismissed--a case Mr. Cahillane had a big hand in prosecuting.

Gotta wonder about Cahillane's campaign spinmeister using the People's Republic of Amherst as representative of the hard working 'Happy Valley', all those normal towns and cities that encompass the Northwestern District like Hadley, Hatfield, Belchertown, Easthampton or South Hadley.

Speaking as a 5th generation Amherst resident, I think not. And Mr. Rhodes will probably catch some grief for not clearly spelling out that he was speaking strictly for himself and not the Amherst School Committee, a charge SC member Catherine Sanderson is pelted with all the time for daring to have an open, transparent blog reporting school committee concerns.

Earlier today Dave Sullivan's campaign picked up yet another heavyweight endorsement from longtime judge (retired) Alvertus J. Morse.

#####################Cahillane campaign press release:
Amherst School Committee Chair Backs Cahillane for DA

“I am Irv Rhodes, chair of the Amherst School Committee and member of the Regional School Committee and I am writing to endorse and support Mike Cahillane for District Attorney.”


“Mike has extensive prosecutorial experience as can be witnessed by his
experience working as an Assistant District Attorney in the very office that
he seeks as a candidate for District Attorney. I am particularly impressed
as a former educator, with Mike's track record of fighting cybercrime by
going into schools to conduct workshops with kids as young as those in the
first and second grades. Additionally Mike has done a number of training
sessions with school administrators, guidance counselors and other staff on
how to identify and prevent bullying behavior and he wants to expand this
outreach, if elected, because he knows that it is important to prevent crime as well as prosecute those who break the law.”

Irv Rhodes

Monster misstep in DA race

So I've gone out and collected signatures over the past 25 years with more petitions and campaign forms than I care to remember. And yes, on occasion somebody simply refused to sign, saying they did not support the idea--sometimes even saying they hated the idea.

My response was always something to the effect that by signing this preliminary form you are not voting to support it, only getting it (or me) on the ballot for the electorate to decide; and isn't that what grass roots democracy is all about?

And of course one of the sacred rights in America is the secrecy of your voting ballot. Although the state decided long ago that campaign petitions to get things on the ballot are public documents. So beware what you sign, because most folks will consider that a sign of support.

Michael A. Cahillane is doing major backpedaling at the moment--today's Daily Hampshire Gazette front page article and a live appearance on the Cantara show, my favorite WRNX radio program this morning, trying to explain why he signed the referendum petition to ban gay marriage back in 2005.

Ironically he worked as a prosecutor in the DA's office--a position he now seeks--and one of their responsibilities at the time was to enforce the Open Meeting and Public Documents Law. So you would think he would have known better, although his boss Betsy Scheibel was pretty well ensconced as DA--and most insiders would not have predicted her retirement only five years later.

Of course this major misstep would never have seen the light of print/bandwidth over the past 12 hours if two citizens did not take the time to write a 'Letter to the Editor' of the venerable Gazette.

The main mistake Mr. Cahillane made was to ignore their legitimate concerns--probably hoping the issue would never get out of the closet--rather then addressing it head on many months back, when apparently one of the letter writers first brought it to his attention.

Gus Sayer: "Just go. I don't care how. Just go."

So in spite of being a private sector kind of guy, I know how CYA (Cover Your Ass) works.

I too, was guilty a few days ago when I first posted my reaction to the horrific South Hadley suicide by a young Irish immigrant girl, choosing to question why the DA came back so quickly with indictments against the brats involved with bullying teen-ager Phoebe Prince, but taking her sweet time with an incident in Amherst last year where a two-year-old died under the wheels of a school bus, eventually ruled an accident.

Thus demonstrating the Northwestern District Attorney is nothing if not conservative in the careful sense.

But if you are going to indict the pack of juvenile brats who drove young Phoebe Prince to suicide, then why not the paid professional adults who stood by and did nothing? And is sounds like, with Scheibel's use of the term "troubling" for their behavior, that she came pretty damn close.

My self-interested concern is that one persons bullying is another persons banter. And having been on the receiving end of Amherst Town officials trying to have me arrested for suggesting a town official should be removed from office because she no longer lived in town (eventually proven true), or another chief official railing against my "chilling effect" on his governmental board because of my respect for the Open Meeting Law, I'm just a tad sensitive to incidents sending us down that slippery slope to censorship.

Speaking of censorship, Gus Sayer when he was Amherst School Superintendent in 1999 first reacted to the tempest in a teapot about the Amherst Regional High School performing 'West Side Story' and being accused of racism responded unequivocally quick: "No group, neither in the majority nor in the minority, should have the ability to censor the decisions our community’s educators make about what to teach, what to read, or what to produce on the stage."
A few days later he collapsed like a cheaply constructed Chinese school building in an earthquake, allowing the even wimpier High School Principal Scott Goldman to cancel the play--the only time in history such sacrilege would occur.

Two years later Sayer hires Steven Myers as the new principal--at $85,000 annually--to lead the Amherst Regional High School, who at least by physical appearance is gay (Not, as Seinfeld would say, "That there's anything wrong with that."). In the People's Republic of Amherst certainly worth extra credit.

Soon thereafter a mother complained that Meyers propositioned her 15-year-old son, asked him to remove his shirt to expose his breasts, invited him out to a movie, and for a soak in his hot tub.

Superintendent Sayer took the charges seriously enough to hire a lawyer and undertake an investigation of his own, thus he was then duty bound to file a report with the Department of Social Services (G.L.c.119, 51A). He did not--at least not until the news broke and created a firestorm.

Sayer told Myers that if incident became public his Principal job would be “untenable."

This all occurred in January, 2002. Daily Hampshire Gazette digging and Amherst PD uncovered Myers had been under investigation in Colorado for pedophilia and Mass Department of Social Services stepped in and removed his recently adopted 8-year-old boy. Mr Meyers was never charged, disappeared, and has not been heard from since.

Mr Sayer soon "retired" after 14 years as Superintendent of the Amherst Regional High School, but quickly assumed the post at South Hadley High School following in the footsteps of Michael Smith whose brother Dan is still Principal. The 'Good Old Boys' network.

And they rest as they sadly say, "is history." A young girl who immigrated here from from Ireland, after continuous verbal battering, wraps a scarf given to her as a Christmas present by her sister only three weeks earlier around her neck to end the torment the only way she knows how. She was only 15.

At age 67, Gus Sayer is certainly traditional "old school" when it comes to running a publicly funded education empire. Time to head out to pasture. Actually, that time --too late for Phoebe Prince--was a long time ago.

Phoebe speaks

Slate Magazine strongly hints Gus should go

An Irish paper reports

Rush to judgement

UPDATE: Wednesday morning

So Izzy Lyman, my conservative cohort and former (Happy) Valley Girl--also known on the Masslive Amherst Forum as 'Icky' Lyman--just jumped in with her take on the sad Phoebe Prince affair.

The Castillo Chronicles



ORIGINAL POST Monday morning
Why is it Northwestern District Attorney Elizabeth Scheibel took so long to issue her findings of no-fault in the tragic death of two-year-old Abraham Espinoza under the wheel of an Amherst school bus?

Even with two accident reconstruction police reports (Amherst PD and State Police) completed in May both declaring the event a tragic accident, her final report did not come out until early September--almost a full year after the horrific event.

In the equally tragic troubling case of Phoebe Prince a young girl who committed suicide, the DA after a lightening like two month investigation brings criminal charges against nine youths, some of them--"stalking" or "Statutory rape"--quite serious.

Actually, considering the overwhelming public interest in this case, any charges rendered by the DA are serious. Like for instance, "disturbing a school assembly."

Six months ago, when I published my complaint about the length of time taken on the Espinoza case, my friend the Grumpy Prosecutor replied: "A terrible fact of life is that tragic things happen, but they do not always involve criminal conduct. Not every tragic death can be vindicated in a court of law. But this case, and all the people concerned about it, deserved a thorough review, and the amount of time involved is one indication that that happened here."

And in a follow up comment: "The point is that we need the folks who are bringing criminal charges to be careful about it. Because, guilty or not, the person being charged is going to be very miserable. You remember being publicly accused of engaging in "stalking" and how that felt, don't you, Larry?"


All too well, all too well indeed.

Yeah, even the venerable Washington Post gets it

Justice delayed

Yeah, this is what I'm talkin about

I've got a secret

So don't get me wrong I love Northwestern DA Elizabeth Scheibel: a successful woman, as such a great role model for my young daughters and of course that rarest of breeds in this state--a Republican.

But damn, she can be ultra-conservative when it comes to releasing information. And my friends at the Springfield Republican are correct when they editorialize that letting public documents like the Fire Department incident reports see the light of publication can possibly help with the investigation as readers may remember something in their neighborhood that occurred around that time.

Besides, the audio tapes of the emergency dispatch are already on the web. Here we are days later and she will not even confirm the names of the two dead citizens long ago confirmed to the media by family members.

Long time readers of this site may remember me breaking the story of the investigation into the horrific bus accident in Amherst that claimed the life of a two year old. My ultra-reliable sources confirmed both Amherst PD and State PD accident reconstruction teams concluded it was an accident and by mid-May the DA had both reports on her desk, yet she waited until September to officially close the case.

The Springfield Republican speaks:

Larry Kelley reported:

And many months later:

Justice delayed...

So Northwestern District Attorney Betsy Scheibel, finally, got around to issuing a report concerning the horrific bus accident that claimed the life of two-year-old Abraham Espinoza almost one year ago.

Amherst PD quickly came to the conclusion it was a terrible, terrible accident and the State Police Reconstruction Team back in May concluded the same. I guess with the high-profile controversial cases like Pottygate and Justice For Jason still gnawing at her, the DA wanted to be ultra conservative with her findings on this tragic event.

Not that anybody will sleep better now.

The Blogger reported

All the news...

So I'm trying to figure out how the DA can complete an investigation in 6.5 months where a man is shot by two different people, the second one--a police officer--killing him (and I agree it was justifiable) but still has not released her findings on the terrible, terrible bus accident that claimed a 2-year-old in North Amherst last October.

My reliable sources tell me the State Police accident reconstruction investigation team concluded it was an awful accident.

The Springfield Republican reports


The Bully reported (way back then)

An accident...a horrible, horrible accident

Update 8:30 PM

So yeah, as you can well imagine, the DA’s office received at least two—possibly three—calls from newspapers’ and maybe one from a local TV station within hours of this upload.

The official comment was “the investigation is still ongoing.” Hmmm…

What that really means in bureau-speak is the State Police Reconstruction Team issued their report to the DA saying NO negligence involved and she can of course overrule that and file charges if she so desires.

Thus, while she’s thinking it over, the “investigation is still ongoing.” And as a result it’s currently immune to a Public Documents request (you know that transparency-in-government law her office is charged with upholding.)
#################################################################
Original Post 1:45 PM

My ultra-reliable sources (note plural) are telling me (off the record of course) the State Police Accident Reconstruction Team finally finished their investigation of the horrific death of 2-year-old Abraham Espinoza almost 8 months ago under the wheel of an Amherst School Bus, and forwarded the results to Northwestern District Attorney Elizabeth Scheibel.

No criminal charges will be filed, no negligence on the part of the driver or maintenance personnel. Although, school officials are bracing for a civil lawsuit.

It was an accident--a horrible, horrible accident. And why it has taken THIS long for state officials to release those results is anybody's guess.

What else can I say?