| Subject: what a joke |
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lo
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Date Posted: 00:19:53 03/16/08 Sun
Gotta Love it -- R&R, 11:25:56 03/14/08 Fri
A bloody fraternity of the state’s most monstrous killer cons are plotting their releases from prison as part of a Department of Correction-sanctioned club whose aim is to shorten its members’ lengthy sentences.
Groomed by two men who murdered their own wives and children, dozens of lifers recognized by the state as the nonprofit Lifers’ Group Inc. convene twice a month at MCI-Norfolk and - according to minutes of their meetings obtained by the Herald - have focused in the last year on:
• Lobbying outside support for abolishing life without parole.
• Starting a Toastmasters club.
• Discussing the biographies of the Parole Board’s seven members.
• Charity work, including a Walk for Hunger in their exercise yard to benefit Project Bread.
Judith Hartnett’s 21-year-old daughter Tara Hartnett was killed by Lifers’ Group Inc. director James Cyr in 1993. Convicted of first-degree murder for repeatedly stabbing the mother of his baby, then setting her ablaze after soaking her with gasoline, Cyr is not eligible for parole.
“Give them an inch, they take a yard,” railed Hartnett, 56, of South Boston. “He doesn’t deserve to live after what he did to my daughter, let alone be free.”
Parole for first-degree murder “is never going to happen,” she believes, “and if it does, (Cyr) will have me to contend with.”
Michael O’Keefe, president of the Massachusetts District Attorneys Association, wonders, “Would they prefer that we go back to the death penalty? Perhaps that could be an agenda item for their next meeting.
“I would suggest there’s no appetite for taking life without parole out of the equation,” the Cape and Islands DA said, “either in the Legislature or the public.”
State Parole Board Chairwoman Maureen Walsh would not comment.
Massachusetts Department of Correction Commissioner Harold W. Clarke released the following statement: “The MCI-Norfolk Lifers Group Inc. has existed since the early 1970s. It is one of many inmate support groups permitted by the Department of Correction. The group has a governing body led by a chairman and it meets twice monthly.”
That chairman is Gordon Haas, a former department store manager who on June 26, 1973, smothered his pregnant wife, Shirley, and toddler son and daughter with plastic bags in their Ipswich home.
Haas’ secretary is Kenneth Seguin, a computer software executive from Holliston who on April 28, 1992, drugged his son and daughter and slit their throats, heaved them in a pond, then went home and split open his wife Mary Ann’s head with an ax.
Seguin was convicted of second-degree murder and is serving three consecutive life sentences, but one day will be eligible for parole. He was given the lesser sentence after his defense attorney argued Seguin was mentally ill at the time of the killings.
Time may not be on the lifers’ sides, but occasionally they see light at the end of their tunnel. By a 5-1 vote, Edgar Bowser III, who serves on Lifers’ Group Inc.’s board of directors, was granted parole in December from his sentence for murdering Shrewsbury police officer James Lonchiadis in 1975. Bowser will be released later this year.
On Jan. 17, 2007, Bowser gave his behind-bars brethren a report on “the physical layout of the Parole Board hearing, where everyone sits and how restraints are used,” according to minutes from that meeting, attended by 72 members.
Lifers found encouraging that former cop Mark Conrad, nominated to the Parole Board by Gov. Deval Patrick, was confirmed by a 5-3 vote of the Governor’s Council, declaring in minutes from their June 19 meeting, “The vote shows that the loud cry to stop making the board a criminal justice only board is being heard.”
But Kurt Schwartz, Patrick’s undersecretary in the Executive Office of Public Safety, said, “We support the sentence of life without parole for first-degree murder. We would oppose any efforts to change that sentence.”
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