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OK. I’m not going to defend the judge, although I don’t think she needs much of a defense.

The man got 16 years for manslaughter for murdering his mother. I’m guessing because of the drug thing he claimed to be on drugs or something so it wasn’t premeditated. In any case, that sentence was completed, so what happened here doesn’t have anything to do with that.

HE wasn’t being let out early, or on parole, he had to be released for THAT sentence because it ended. In fact, he seems to have been held a little extra time, but I could be misreading it, as the story in 2004 said he’d be getting out in 2005 but he didn’t get out until 2007.

While in prison, he is alleged to have committed crimes, so before his release, they charged him. When his release came, he was arrested on those charges.

Bail was set at $50,000. That isn’t an impossible sum — he could have gotten a bail bondsman to cover it, or maybe his new wife had some money. He obviously appealed it, and we don’t know if had he lost his appeal he would have been out on bail or not.

The issue, and the mistake of this judge, was reducing a $50,000 bail to recognicance. It is possible that she read the $50,000 bail as a real bail, not as a “bail to keep the guy in prison”. Usually those bails are either denied or set in the hundreds of thousands of dollars.

So she may simply have been ruling that a guy who was just in prison for 16 years wouldn’t be expected to have the money to cover a $50,000 bail, and if you set the bail simply to get him to come back, that the bail was too high.

Of course, the story says he skipped his court date, that was in July.

So why was he still free from July to November? It seems that nobody in Mass. really cared where he was or what he was up to. Nobody went after him when he skipped his court date.

Blaming the judge for this is an easy reaction, but the ruling doesn’t indicate by itself some liberal judge running roughshod over the court system. I presume if she has other bad rulings our “stab-the-other-republicans-in-the-back” crowd here will gleefully find them and post them for us.

It appears that when she was appointed, other than being a democrat, she was a tough sell to the liberals who run Mass., being a prosecuter who hadn’t given proper deference to civil rights.

And there is little in the record from before her appointment, and nothing to suggest she was a liberal or would be prone to making rulings like this.

Further, it should be noted that while she overturned a lower court, there’s the supreme court above her, who could have reversed this ruling; and if she had ruled against, they could have reversed this ruling. Since they didn’t reinstate the bail, either the prosecuter didn’t appeal it, or they would have thrown out the bail if this judge had kept it.

As to who this helps or hurts, I don’t know or care anymore. We know Romney appointed democrats, and for those who think democrats are by nature evil and don’t deserve to be judges, that’s enough to disqualify him.

The reason the Horton case was important wasn’t that a judge appointed by Dukakis did something, it’s that DUKAKIS pushed the furlough program that let him out.

So it’s not at all comparable. Not that it matters to the shoot-first crowd.

The issue, and the mistake of this judge, was reducing a $50,000 bail to recognicance.

Well, yeah. And I was able to turn up, in a very simple internet Google search, all sorts of material that inferred Tavares was a bad, bad man---even without this latest story. Witness the Globe Magazine article from 2004, for example.
Shouldn't a judge charged with deciding whether or not a man should go, more or less, free, do the same due diligence? If, on 1 July, she had typed in Daniel Tavares into Google, she would have seen much of the same material I discovered . . . yet she determined this was a man who would live up to his word.
I mean, come on. Everyone's entitled to his or her fair share of mistakes, but sometimes the stakes are far too high. Err on the side of caution---make the guy surrender some dough.