Stick to Real Victim in NSTar Case

Letter to the editor
Boston Globe, March 15, 2005

Business columnist Steve Bailey's attack on both the father of and the lawyer for the 13-year-old boy whose dog was executed by stray voltage from an NStar lamppost site ["The best messenger?", 3/11/05, page D1] is utterly gratuitous. The fact that the father has a criminal record is irrelevant since the father's credibility is not at issue. The facts seem clear: The boy's dog was electrocuted in front of the boy and bit the boy in its final agony; such electrocutions have occurred before, and hence NStar was on notice of the dangers posed by its street facilities.

The attack on the boy's attorney, Boston criminal defense and civil liberties lawyer John Swomley, is even more attenuated and unfair. Swomley's character is called into question because "one of his own main lines of business [is] defending alleged sex offenders." In fact, Swomley is one of the few successful lawyers in town willing to undertake one of the most difficult and unglamorous civil liberties tasks in our legal system -- representing prisoners who have served their lawful sentences and who, months before their release dates, face "civil" charges that threaten to keep them incarcerated for life as "habitual sex offenders." Such "preventive detention," until recently thought to be unconstitutional, violates an ancient precept of our criminal justice system -- people should be punished for what they've done, not for what someone thinks they may do. Bailey also disregards another time-honored precept when he visits the sins of the father upon the son. It is the son, remember, who is the victim here.

HARVEY A. SILVERGLATE
Cambridge