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Reform agenda
Mayor Tom Menino must fire Kevin Joyce and audit the Inspectional Services Department. Plus, the state should create an innocence commission to investigate wrongful convictions.

NOTHING GETS BUILT in Boston without developers making a stop at the city’s Inspectional Services Department (ISD). Home repairs don’t happen without a permit from the ISD. Restaurants, nightclubs, and other entertainment venues have to pass muster with the agency to do business. In other words, the department wields a lot of power over the life of the city.

But since the mid 1980s, the ISD has had a troubled history. In 1986, a federal probe into the agency resulted in 15 convictions on bribery, racketeering, and fraud charges. In 1991, with memories of the scandal still fresh, it was revealed that many of the city’s building inspectors worked a second job, hung out in bars, ran errands, or slept in their cars on city time. And now there’s the revelation that current ISD head Kevin Joyce ordered an underling to rig a bid for a contract in order to benefit a friend of Joyce’s. When the employee, Julie Fothergill, refused, Joyce fired her. Fothergill sued. The city settled for $240,000. Although Joyce may have engaged in criminal behavior and, according to a report released last week by Boston’s Finance Commission, cost the city around $400,000 in settlement, legal, and other costs related to time spent on the case by city employees, Mayor Tom Menino refuses to discipline Joyce.

It’s interesting to note that former mayor Ray Flynn fired the head of ISD, Peter Welsh, when it was revealed that city inspectors were sleeping on the job. It’s even more interesting to note that two years later, when he became mayor, Menino hired Welsh and made him his chief of staff, thus resurrecting a career that many thought had been killed by scandal. The move presaged Menino’s treatment of Joyce today. Flynn was never averse to helping out a friend, but he had enough respect for the city to do the right thing.

On the other hand, Menino’s decision to stand by Joyce and have a seven-member commission — a commission, it should be noted, without any real investigative authority — look into the agency and recommend changes is not only a waste of time, energy, and resources, it’s the very definition of management failure.

Menino refuses even to take the minimal step of demanding Joyce’s resignation — something both daily papers have called for. Of course, Joyce would be lucky to get off so easy. He should be fired. And then an investigative agency with the power to subpoena witnesses and make them testify under oath should conduct a widespread probe into both this case and Joyce’s overall management of the agency. And then, if the findings warrant it, Joyce should be referred for prosecution.

Matt Cahill, a management analyst with the Finance Commission who worked on its report, says the question of whether Joyce engaged in criminal behavior "should be looked into closely beyond our office, and we’re certain other entities will be looking into it."

But that’s not all. The FinCom report makes another disturbing finding that hasn’t received nearly enough attention: the managers in the ISD who are responsible for following state law on awarding contracts haven’t been trained in the law. Or, as Cahill puts it, "The right hand doesn’t know what the left hand is doing." The mayor has ordered all employees who handle the complicated task of putting contracts out to bid to undergo training — but how could this situation have been allowed to develop in the first place? Given all this, does anyone really believe that the Fothergill episode is the only instance of improper and possibly illegal contract bidding taking place in the ISD?

What’s it going to take to get Menino to show leadership here? Another scandal? Proof that the ISD is costing taxpayers — via incompetent management of the contract-bidding process — even more than the $400,000 Joyce cost us? Knowing what we now know of how ISD is run, how can anyone have confidence in the agency? And knowing that Menino thinks this is no big deal, how can anyone have confidence in him?

THIS WEEK, Phoenix contributor Harvey Silverglate reports (see "The Criminal-Justice System Messes Up," News & Features) that the Massachusetts Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers plans to petition the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court to mandate the creation of an innocence commission to investigate wrongful convictions in the Commonwealth. That is, it plans to do so only if Governor Mitt Romney, Attorney General Tom Reilly, and the legislature fail to create one on their own. But why wait? In the arena of law, Romney is more interested in bringing the death penalty back to Massachusetts (another obeisance to the Bushies) than in ensuring that innocent people aren’t put in jail. Reilly is more interested in enforcing an anti-miscegenation-era law to prevent out-of-state gay couples from marrying in the Commonwealth than in ensuring that innocent people aren’t put in jail. And the legislature is more interested in locking up the mentally ill indefinitely through civil commitments than in ensuring that innocent people aren’t put in jail.

The need for an innocence commission — with the power to subpoena witnesses, make them testify under oath, probe cases, and make recommendations for reform, including the prosecution of police and prosecutors who’ve committed wrongdoing that sent innocents to prison — is needed now more than ever. In the past 12 months alone, we have seen three men released from prison after being wrongly convicted. Anthony Powell, convicted of rape in 1992, was exonerated and released from prison this year after DNA evidence proved his innocence. Stephan Cowans, convicted of shooting a police officer in 1998, was released from prison this year after DNA testing proved that the fingerprint used to convict him wasn’t his. And Shawn Drumgold, convicted in 1989 of murder, was released from prison in late 2003 after new evidence pointed to police and prosecutorial wrongdoing during the murder investigation and subsequent trial.

That Powell, Cowans, and Drumgold have been released from prison isn’t evidence that the system — eventually — works. It’s proof that criminal justice in this state is meted out in a criminally unjust manner. It’s time to create an oversight body with the power to enact real reform.

What do you think? Send an e-mail to letters[a]phx.com


Issue Date: April 9 - 15, 2004
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