Criticism
Following the primaries, a TV ad by Healey criticized her gubernatorial rival Deval Patrick for serving as the lawyer for the killer of a Florida highway patrol officer gunned down on a rural road. In 1985, Patrick, then a lawyer for the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, worked to reverse the death sentence imposed on killer Carl Ray Songer. “Her approach is to protect the victims and Deval Patrick’s approach is always to protect convicted criminals,” said Healey’s campaign manager Tim O’Brien. Now, under Florida law, Songer is eligible for parole.
The "Cop Killer" campaign ad was featured on a segment of the Opie and Anthony radio show about negative campaign ads. The ad was criticized on the air for its lack of information about the case. She also criticized Patrick for having written to the Massachusetts Parole Board on behalf of Benjamin LaGuer, who proclaims innocence for a 1983 sexual assault, and for corresponding with the inmate. During the heat of the campaign two unidentified men visited LaGuer in prison and allegedly offered him $100,000 if would turn that correspondence over to them.
Critics of Healey's ad argued that it confused the proper role of criminal defense lawyers in the judicial system. Patrick argued that Songer hadn’t been sentenced fairly because he wasn’t able to present evidence of his good character during the sentencing hearing. “The federal appeals court agreed with him that death sentence violated the Constitution of the United States,” said Patrick spokesman Richard Chacon in a statement. Patrick’s campaign also pointed out that Healey’s running mate, Reed Hillman, lobbied a parole board on behalf of friend James W. Mitchell, who was accused of assaulting a police officer.
Deval Patrick also criticized Healey's campaign for leaking details of the 1993 rape of Patrick's sister by her husband. The Healey's campaign denied any involvement in the leak, and in turn accused Patrick of initiating a "smear campaign" over the issue.
Read more about this topic: Kerry Healey
Famous quotes containing the word criticism:
“Good criticism is very rare and always precious.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“It is the will of God that we must have critics, and missionaries, and Congressmen, and humorists, and we must bear the burden. Meantime, I seem to have been drifting into criticism myself. But that is nothing. At the worst, criticism is nothing more than a crime, and I am not unused to that.”
—Mark Twain [Samuel Langhorne Clemens] (1835–1910)
“The critic lives at second hand. He writes about. The poem, the novel, or the play must be given to him; criticism exists by the grace of other men’s genius. By virtue of style, criticism can itself become literature. But usually this occurs only when the writer is acting as critic of his own work or as outrider to his own poetics, when the criticism of Coleridge is work in progress or that of T.S. Eliot propaganda.”
—George Steiner (b. 1929)