Editorials from around New England

Excerpts of recent editorials of statewide and national interest from New England newspapers:

CONNECTICUT

Hartford Courant, April 20

Allegations of sexual assault of students at Choate Rosemary Hall are shocking, but it’s equally shocking that they were kept under wraps for so long - and that state officials were reluctant to properly follow up.

It took years for Choate officials to notify the state Department of Children and Families of the complaints. In one case, a student had accused a teacher, Jaime Rivera-Murillo, of forcing himself on her in 1999. Rivera-Murillo was fired, but he continued to be a teacher, in Danbury and Newtown, as well as in a high school in New York. He was the principal at Wamogo Regional High School in Litchfield County until April 6, when he resigned.

None of the schools knew about the allegations until Choate notified Wamogo in March.

Even more incredible, when Choate officials finally notified the DCF about the complaints in December, the agency rejected them, believing them to be too old to be actionable. That excuse is weak, and DCF’s initial refusal to investigate is unconscionable.

Choate’s inaction allowed a teacher with a serious sexual assault complaint on his record to continue to teach and mingle with students for years, and DCF’s inaction prolonged it. How many other teachers like that are roaming the hallways today?

DCF spokesman Gary Kleeblatt told The Courant’s Josh Kovner that Choate’s delay in notifying child-protection officials was “egregious.” But so was the agency’s failure to investigate whether subjects of the complaints were still teaching. Nothing prevents agency officials from doing so, no matter how old the complaint, and no matter the current age of the victim.

At this point, the state needs to take a hard look at the mechanics of how teacher misconduct complaints are handled to prevent teachers who behave inappropriately or criminally, or those who are just ineffective, from being shuffled from school to school without anyone being the wiser. And all schools, public and private, must be required by law to conduct full background checks on applicants, including the DCF’s child-abuse registry, before hiring anyone.

State Child Advocate Sarah Eagen said the current state laws “lack clarity regarding the authority and responsibility of DCF to investigate past abuse in circumstances like those identified in the Choate investigation.”

Legislators must fix that without delay. The state should have all necessary authority to investigate teachers accused of assault and must ensure that teachers with that history don’t go from unknowing school to unknowing school.

The Choate investigation pointed out another long-standing problem in how complaints are handled. For 50 years, teachers have been required by state law to report such incidents. But there weren’t any criminal penalties in place for failing to do so until 2013. It would appear that the law was flouted so frequently that someone finally decided to put some teeth in it.

There is some good news: A bill under consideration now would expand to private schools a law that went into effect last year requiring that any applicant for a public school job allow the school to check with former employers to see if there are any black marks in their history. It also requires schools to tell the state if they learn that an applicant - or current employee - has been disciplined for abuse or neglect.

There is no excuse for this systemic reluctance to protect children from abuse.

Online:

https://cour.at/2oSTqiz

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MAINE

Portland Press Herald, April 16

It was “only a bail hearing,” a judge said Thursday, (April 13,) before letting Anthony Sanborn go home to his family.

But she might as well have set off a bomb in the Cumberland County Courthouse, as shock waves of her decision reverberated across the state.

For the first time, someone convicted of murder in Maine is on his way to be exonerated. Justice Joyce Wheeler didn’t just take a step toward undoing a horrible miscarriage of justice for one man, her decision has implications for police, prosecutors, the media and every member of the public who has had confidence in the criminal justice system.

Sanborn had been convicted 25 years ago of the brutal murder of Jessica Briggs and sentenced to spend what would likely be the rest of his life in prison. But because of dogged work by his wife and a court-appointed lawyer, the state’s case was blown to bits, leading Wheeler to deliver one of the judicial understatements of all-time:

“This is only a bail hearing,” she said to Sanborn. “So I cannot apologize to you.”

It’s not an exoneration - yet. But it’s hard to see how Sanborn’s conviction can stand now. Wheeler was presented with evidence suggesting that police and prosecutors withheld information from the defense that would have helped Sanborn, including the fact that a crucial eyewitness had been legally blind.

And when that same witness took the stand in Wheeler’s courtroom Thursday, Hope Cady said that not only was her vision too limited to see what she told the jury she had seen, but that she was not even in the place she testified to being on the night of the murder. She lied, she says now, because detectives threatened to send her to a juvenile corrections facility.

She was only 13 the night Briggs was killed and Cady was questioned by detectives with no lawyer, parent or guardian present.

After hearing the testimony, Wheeler ruled that there was a “reasonable likelihood” that Sanborn would successfully overturn his conviction. A new trial is seemingly out of reach. There has never been any physical evidence tying Sanborn to the crime and with no eyewitness the state could call, its case becomes all but unwinnable.

There is still legal process that needs to play out to determine whether it was willful misconduct, excessive but well-intentioned zeal or something else that led the state to prosecute the case the way they did, but there are lessons already available to anyone who wants to accept them.

First, it’s a very good thing that Maine does not have the death penalty. Sanborn was 20 years old when he was handed a 70-year sentence. It would likely have been the rest of his life if he had not found a lawyer in Amy Fairfield who was willing to fight for him. But had he been sentenced to death in 1992, none of the problems with his case would have come to light.

The second lesson is about the unreliability of memory. When witnesses are asked to reconstruct what they saw months or years after the fact, their recollection can change, especially if they are intimidated by the questioner or they are just trying to please them.

And it’s important to note how social status colors the way we view events. Sanborn and Briggs were both 16 the night she was killed, and part of a culture of street kids who moved from apartment to apartment, committing petty crimes and only drawing attention when they became a nuisance.

Sanborn’s arrest and conviction were not big news, and when he was sent off to prison, he was largely forgotten by everyone who was not a friend or family member. The defendant, the victim and witnesses were “throw-away kids” in many people’s minds. The community needs to ask itself if it was too quick to accept the official story, and if it’s too quick to throw away others, too.

Now the challenge will be for Sanborn, who at age 44 has to try to build a life that is not consumed with bitterness after spending 25 years in prison. No judge can ever give him back what he lost. Still, his joy Thursday about what lies ahead was palpable.

When asked if he wanted to say anything in court, he delivered the second greatest understatement of the day.

“No,” he said. “I’m good.”

Online:

https://bit.ly/2oymBnJ

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MASSACHUSETTS

The Republican (Springfield), April 20

Soaring ratings couldn’t save Bill O’Reilly, whose ride at Fox News came to a crashing end after multiple accusations of sexual harassment.

No one should bleed for O’Reilly, who will be paid tens of millions of dollars in a buyout, according to reports. That he won’t receive as much as he would have been paid, had his contract been fulfilled, is of little consolation to people who are outraged that characters accused of such behavior still get rich.

Bill O’Reilly announced last week he was taking a previously planned trip amid reports the network paid $13 million to keep five women quiet about sexual harassment allegations.

They weren’t satisfied when harassment accusations drove Roger Ailes out as CEO of Fox News. Ailes was paid $40 million to get out.

There is nonetheless a worthwhile message to the stories of O’Reilly, Ailes, and other powerful and famous individuals whose attitudes and actions cause women to come forth in high numbers, accusing them of behavior more likened to Neanderthals than 21st Century Americans. The days of “getting away with it,” just by being rich and famous, are ending.

This is an important signal at a time many Americans are uneasy - to say the very least - at what messages the Trump Administration will send (and those their president has already sent) regarding levels or acceptable (or unacceptable) behavior.

For Fox News, this is a crucial time in its history. The conservative movement and Donald Trump’s election took Fox off the media fringe and into the mainstream.

Fox can remain a conservative network and undoubtedly it will. It cannot serve as a poster for disgusting behavior and expect to retain its position as a go-to network for a mass audience.

As for O’Reilly, he will resurface again, probably sooner rather than later. Somebody will give a chance to a media star.

But O’Reilly is damaged goods for reasons that go beyond his political beliefs and on-air schtick. Advertisers pulled away from Fox in droves, forcing the network to do what it should have done on principle by dumping its scandalized superstar.

If Fox management is smart, it will understand that conservative politics and sexual misbehavior need not go hand-in-hand. Supporting causes from the right is not - or should not be - synonymous with tolerating or even encouraging the “good-ole-boy” or locker room atmosphere for which Fox News is now known.

Whatever happens with O’Reilly, word has been served that some activities are no longer acceptable - anywhere. Even the rich and powerful are not immune, whether they continue to think they are or not.

Online:

https://bit.ly/2oSvR9y

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NEW HAMPSHIRE

Valley News (West Lebanon, New Hampshire), April 15

It’s not exactly breaking news that experts are no longer held in high regard. Donald Trump’s rise to the presidency certainly was fueled by voters who believe that expert opinion has little claim to deference. But they are not by any means the only Americans convinced that uninformed views are every bit as valid as those held by people who have specialized knowledge.

This is not entirely new. Over the years, there have always been people sure that they could manage the Red Sox better or edit the newspaper more skillfully than the incumbents. (Candidly, once in a while they have been right.) And in many realms of life, expertise still holds sway. People generally prefer to have their surgery performed by expert surgeons, their complicated car repairs executed by knowledgeable mechanics, and their criminal defense undertaken by learned and zealous lawyers.

But in social science and public policy, and other areas of knowledge that touch upon them, the distinction between expert and lay opinion no longer carries much weight with many people. (Climate change is but one outstanding example.)

Tom Nichols, a professor of national security affairs at the U.S. Naval War College, has lamented this situation in a provocative essay and new book.

He writes, “I fear we are witnessing the ’death of expertise’: a Google-fueled, Wikipedia-based, blog-sodden collapse of any division between professionals and laymen, students and teachers, knowers and wonderers … By this, I do not mean the death of actual expertise, the knowledge of specific things that sets some people apart from others in various areas. … Rather, what I fear has died is any acknowledgement of expertise as anything that should alter our thoughts or change the way we live.”

Certainly, as Nichols readily acknowledges, experts are sometimes wrong, occasionally with catastrophic consequences. (Thalidomide and the Challenger explosion are examples he cites.) But the chances of experts being right are pretty good, and we ignore them at our peril.

President Trump, for example, is certainly of the expert-skeptic school when it comes to public affairs, and the failure of the Republican effort to repeal and replace Obamacare demonstrates the limits of his approach.

The historian Michael Beschloss made the case in devastating fashion in The New York Times following the collapse of the Republican health care bill this spring by contrasting the course pursued by Trump with that followed by Lyndon Johnson in shepherding Medicare into law in 1965. The former had little detailed knowledge of what was in his bill, while the latter mastered the detail.

Trump tried to ram the bill through Congress on the fast track, while Johnson patiently orchestrated his legislation through Congress. Trump didn’t know much about the legislators or the legislative process, while Johnson was intimately acquainted with both.

Nichols and other commentators have laid the decline and fall of expertise mostly at the doorstep of the internet and social media, on whose unmediated platforms the rankest ignorance has equal footing with the most informed thinking. There is no doubt a lot to this, but we wonder if that’s all.

A marker pointing in a somewhat different direction can perhaps be discerned in new work, described recently in The New Yorker, by Princeton University economists Anne Case and Angus Deaton, whose earlier research found that mortality has been rising for middle-aged white Americans since the early 1990s while it has been declining for virtually all other demographic groups in all developed countries. They attributed this largely to “deaths of despair” induced by suicide, drugs and alcohol.

In a subsequent attempt to trace the origins of this despair, the economists have found a decline in something called “returns to experience.” This refers to the economic rewards workers normally reap as they age, gain more experience and presumably become more efficient at whatever they do, whether it’s architecture or parts assembly.

It’s a notion of worker value embodied in many union contracts. But as skilled working-class labor has declined over time, the link between experience and economic reward has grown weaker. Case and Deaton hypothesize that there might be a connection between declining returns to experience, which leads to people dropping out of the workforce, and deaths from despair.

Their work also leads us to wonder whether the workplace experience is itself undermining the value assigned to expertise. If a worker who has spent years learning and refining the skills needed to do his job suddenly finds that a robot is replacing him, or that a hedge fund manager who knows nothing about his job has determined that it can be performed just as well by a low-paid beginner, or that the boss is promoting ahead of him an inexperienced young person who is at home with digital technology, it would be a natural conclusion to draw that expertise doesn’t really matter in today’s world.

It’s certainly a powerful, if incorrect, conclusion to draw.

Online:

https://bit.ly/2oyvQUS

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RHODE ISLAND

The Providence Journal, April 19

Bristol County Sheriff Thomas Hodgson, who has spent his career around criminals, called Aaron Hernandez, the former New England Patriots star-turned-murderer, the most charming and manipulative sociopath he had ever met. Corrections officers at Souza Baranowski Correctional Center in Shirley, Massachusetts, had no idea he was thinking of hanging himself, the sheriff said in an interview on WEEI radio Wednesday morning.

But Hernandez delivered a stunning coda to his extraordinary fall from grace around 3 a.m. Wednesday when he evidently strangled himself using a bedsheet. He did so at the perfect time to cast a pall over his former teammates’ visit to the White House, a hard-earned tribute to their historic comeback victory in this year’s Super Bowl.

Even with his death he marred the Patriots’ legend.

The apparent suicide followed another stunner - last week’s arguably preposterous jury acquittal for a drive-by shooting of two people in Boston, in 2012. That was undoubtedly a triumph for his legal team, but Hernandez returned to his prison cell and, at 27, faced life in jail without the possibility of parole for the 2013 murder of Odin Lloyd, who was found in a pit in an industrial park near Hernandez’s North Attleboro home.

It seems possible that that bleak outlook, and the opportunity to be malicious one last time, drove him to kill himself.

One turns to Greek and Elizabethan tragedy for comparable revolutions on Fortune’s wheel.

When he was drafted by the Patriots in 2010, he declared that he was “happy because there are millions of people out there who would love to be in my shoes.”

Five years ago, he had a strong showing in the Super Bowl as one of the Patriots’ star tight ends. Although New England lost that storied game to the New York Giants, 21-17, Hernandez caught eight passes and scored a touchdown.

That year, he signed a $41 million contract with the Patriots, and donated $50,000 to the Patriots’ charity. Team owner Robert Kraft called that “one of the most touching moments since I’ve owned the team.”

He was 23, set for life, admired by millions of football fans.

But he chose to stay immersed in the world of his youth, marred by drugs, gangs, tattoos and a macho mentality that could not abide any shows of disrespect. He chose to ruin lives, including his own, with gratuitous violence that escalated to killing. On June 26, 2013, he was arrested and charged with first degree murder. He spent the rest of his young life, with the exception of trips to a courthouse, behind bars.

Many have wondered how this plays into the culture of football and celebrity worship. Did the Patriots overlook clear and compelling signs that he was bad news (one reason that, despite first-round talent, he remained in the draft until the fourth round), putting their insatiable desire to win above any other consideration? If so, the team’s reputation has certainly suffered for it. Or were the Patriots duped by what Sheriff Hodgson describes as his sociopathic charm? Did they really believe he had turned his life around?

Either way, the end was sordid and sad, and the path of destruction Hernandez left behind was long and bloody.

His fall serves as a cautionary tale about investing too much admiration and hope in pampered celebrities, including those on the football field.

Online:

https://bit.ly/2oynOv2

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VERMONT

Rutland Herald, April 19

Sen. Bernie Sanders is asking his supporters to contribute money to his campaign for re-election in 2018, but he and his staff refuse to say whether he is running for re-election.

Sanders has become one of the nation’s leading political figures, heading out on a national tour with the new chairman of the party, Tom Perez, to promote the Democratic agenda. It comes at a time when Republicans are reeling from the dysfunction of the Trump administration and the inability of the party to formulate a coherent agenda.

That Sanders plans to run for re-election next year comes as no surprise. That he refuses to say so publicly also comes as no surprise. It is a form of anti-gamesmanship gamesmanship that he has perfected over the years, posing as a politician who is above the grubby realities of running for office and focusing instead on the business of the people, who, he says, are not interested in petty questions about who is running in the next election.

Except the people are interested. Why else would the Sanders campaign send out an email appeal seeking contributions of $ 27 for his 2018 campaign? He wants to tap into voter interest in the next election to help pay for his trip around the country with Perez.

Sanders is famously scornful of the emphasis placed by the media on what has been called the horse-race side of politics: Who’s running? Who’s ahead? Who’s behind? Who’s raising the most money? It is part of why he has been able to attract a large national following: He genuinely cares about the issues related to economic inequality that have been his life’s work, and he has little patience for the political games that the media tend to focus on.

Sanders, too, is playing the political game, but he is playing it more effectively than most. He is helping to shape a Democratic program that could address the disaffection and frustration that fueled his campaign in 2016 and became diverted toward the Trump campaign in the general election.

In 2017 Republicans are beginning to reap what they have sown. Large, angry crowds have gathered to confront Republican politicians in deeply conservative states such as Arkansas and Utah about the way the GOP agenda threatens the welfare of the American people. Even Sen. Tom Cotton of Arkansas, a Republican golden boy, has had to face angry constituents who oppose Republican efforts to take away their health care coverage.

During the past six years, as the Republicans have promoted the Tea Party’s antigovernment agenda, an undercurrent of doubt has shadowed their efforts. That doubt has taken the form of questions: Do the people really want to wreck Obamacare? Do the people really oppose abortion rights? Do the people really want to hand over billions in tax breaks to the wealthy few? Do the people really want to kill environmental protections? Some Republicans may be surprised to learn that for many the answer to those questions is no. It is what Sanders has been saying all along.

There is rising wave of other issues that ultimately could sink the Trump administration, and Republicans are hearing about those issues as well. These include Trump’s unwillingness to release his tax returns, imperiling the entire Republican effort at tax reform. They also include Trump’s connections with Russia. At the least, Trump exercised poor judgment in placing people in high positions who were paid agents of foreign governments. Michael Flynn and Paul Manafort were two. More than likely, Trump has also been compromised by his connections to Russia.

Sanders is perfectly positioned to address the voters’ mounting concerns about all of these issues, and that includes voters, not only in Vermont, but in Texas, Kansas and all those other states where patriotic Americans are beginning to realize that their hopes for change under the Republicans are coming to naught. It would be shocking if Sanders were to undercut his own influential position by taking himself out of the running in 2018. That’s why it’s interesting that he is appealing to his supporters for campaign money.

He is still in the race.

Online:

https://bit.ly/2oyumKd