Lenient bail must end
Massachusetts is not officially a “Sanctuary State,” but there is plenty of sanctuary for criminals. For them, the commonwealth is all too often an oasis from real justice and sometimes an easy springboard to freedom.
Frederick Q. Amfo, 30, a Ghanian national, was charged with the April 8 early morning rape of Emily Murray of Weymouth in his Uber car. On April 13, he posted $10,000 bail and was freed on the condition he turn over his passport. Instead, he jumped on a flight to Ghana.
Murray told the Herald, “I don’t feel that I’ll ever have justice for what’s happened to me.” She might be right. Thomas Latanowich, charged with the April 12 murder of Yarmouth police officer Sean Gannon, had a long record of arrests and served a sentence in state prison from 2010 to 2014. Just last year, while already on probation, Latanowich was hauled into court to answer to domestic violence charges for strangling his pregnant girlfriend. The case was ultimately dismissed when the alleged victim refused to testify.
Latanowich, someone with over 100 criminal charges on his record, would soon be out on the streets, a free man.
Last year, an illegal immigrant named Luis Baez was accused of raping an inebriated Boston College student in his Uber car in the fall of 2016. Middlesex Assistant District Attorney Raquel Frisardi told Newton District Court Judge Mary Beth Heffernan that Baez took the student to multiple sites and raped her three times even as she was vomiting and fighting back.
Incredibly, Heffernan set bail at $2,500 and in no time Baez was off the grid.
The system is failing, and the results are shameful and tragic. We’ve had enough.
After officer Sean Gannon was killed, the Yarmouth Police Department posted on its Facebook page, “The Massachusetts Criminal Justice System has let us down and failed to protect our community and our Yarmouth Police Department.”
Weymouth Mayor Bob Hedlund was also disgusted to learn that Emily Murray’s alleged rapist had skipped town. “I’m absolutely irate,” Hedlund told the Herald. “This woman has to endure this kind of assault. The Weymouth police do a great job in investigating and arresting the alleged perpetrator. We have a situation where someone can just walk out of the country — it’s completely absurd.”
There are too many completely absurd instances in our criminal justice system. Some are due to bureaucratic confusion or incongruity in the system, others because of activist or ineffectual judges, and some due to the laws themselves, but this is not acceptable.