Mitt Romney has been running ads in South Carolina accusing Rick Santorum of being soft on crime because he voted for a bill that would automatically restore voting rights to felons after the have served their sentences and have been returned to society.

            There are very few things Rick Santorum and I would agree on but this is one of them. Once a felon has served their sentence, all of their sentence, their voting rights should be restored. Giving people with felony records their franchise back can only help reintegrate them back into society and groups that are disproportionately affected by felony records should be able to form voting blocks to change laws that they perceive and can argue are unfairly targeted toward them. This is probably a pretty good indication that Santorum is on the wrong side of this issue when it comes to his Conservative brethren.

            Back in 2008, when Mitt Romney first started running for President of the United States, Rudy Giuliani ran ads accusing Romney of being soft on crime because of what happened with Massachusetts murderer, Daniel Tavares, Jr.

            In 1991, 25-year-old Tavares stabbed his mother 16 times in her home in Somerset, Massachusetts following an argument over Tavares being kicked out of a Florida drug rehabilitation facility, killing the woman. A neighbor who came to Ms. Tavares’ aid was also stabbed and severely wounded though he would survive. Tavares’ father would state that his namesake son was “a cocaine addict with a psychotic personality.”

            Tavares pled guilty to manslaughter in the killing of his mother and spent the next sixteen years in maximum security prisons in Massachusetts.

            While in Prison Tavares associated himself with racist gangs and sent death threats to Governor Mitt Romney and other government officials; along with death threats to his own father. In 2000 Tavares pointed officials to where the body of murder victim Gayle Botelho had lain undiscovered for twelve years, across the street from her Fall River home, buried in a shallow grave behind the home where Tavares was living at the time. Tavares denied any involvement in the stabbing death of Botelho and was never charged with that crime.

            “Just because he knew where the body was doesn’t mean he had any complicity putting it there,” Police Chief John M. Souza.

            Shortly before his release Tavares assaulted two guards in separate incidents, charges, which if upheld, could have led to an additional ten year sentence for Tavares but Prison personnel failed to properly write up the charges.

            The District Attorney obtained a warrant for Tavares’ arrest for the alleged assaults and he was arrested and ordered held on $100,000 bail, $50,000 for each charge. Tavares appealed the bail and on July 16, 2007, Superior Court Judge Kathe Tuttman ordered him released on his own recognizance. Prosecutors asked that Tavares be monitored by GPS but that request was also refused by the Judge. The Judge did place Tavares on pretrial probation. Tavares met with his new probation officer once.

            Daniel Tavares Jr. missed his next Court date on July 23^rd a warrant was issued  for his arrest but by then Daniel Tavares Jr. was all the way across the Country.

            While in Prison, despite being locked in segregation 23 three hours a day since 1999, Daniel Tavares Jr. had met a woman online, Jennifer Freitas, through the pen-pal site, Inmate.com. In his listing, Tavares had enticed by posting the question, “Can I get a ‘lil bit of love from a lonely female?” and describing himself as a, “6-foot, 235-pound Albino gorilla with over 40 real nice tattoos.” After his release Tavares wasted no time heading for Washington State where Freitas lived in Graham, Washington. The pair were married on July 30^th and moved into one of a cluster of trailers owned by Freitas’ brother in a rural area under the shadow of Mt. Rainier.  

             About a hundred yards away, down a curvy road that led to a private gravel drive, lived Brian and Beverly Mauck, ages 30 and 28. The Maucks had been married for 18 months and had just recently moved into the tidy ranch style home. Brian worked in heating and air conditioning while Beverly worked for an automobile dealership. The couple was an active pair and loved to travel. In fact, they were planning one last blow-out trip to the Caribbean before trying to have a baby.    

            On the morning of November 17, 2007, Daniel Tavares Jr. broke into the home of Brian and Beverly Mauck. Tavares claimed he was trying to collect a $50 debt from Brian Mauck but police believe Tavares was attempting to burglarize the home when he was surprised by the couple. Tavares shot Brian Mauck three times in the head, killing him. Beverly Mauck tried to flee but Tavares caught up to, grabbed her by the hair and shot her in the head. He dragged Beverly’s body back to where her husband laid and then shot her twice more in the head and then covered both bodies with a blanket. Out of “respect” he said.

            Beverly Mauck’s brother discovered the bodies of his sister and brother-in-law later that morning when he drove past their house and noticed their front door had been kicked in. The next day, Tavares and his wife went to the local police department to offer themselves up as witnesses. Daniel Tavares first claimed that he had awakened at 5:00 a.m. but had drifted off again. He said that he had woken up again at 7:00 a.m. and was enjoying sexual congress with his wife when they heard gunshots. Jennifer Tavares backed up her husband’s story.

            This state of affairs didn’t last long. Tavares story changed as Police questioned him and he soon he broke down and confessed. In addition, Tavares had left not only bloody palm-prints at the scene but also a very distinctive shoe tread which matched shoes found at his house. Tavares confessed and his wife admitted that he had left the trailer for about 20 minutes that morning and when he returned he had confessed to her what he had done.

            Tavares ended up pleading guilty to the Mauck murders in exchange for a sentence of life without parole and the promise that he would not appeal. Jennifer Freitas Tavares, who had supplied her husband with the firearm used in the killings, pled guilty to one misdemeanor charge of “rendering criminal assistance” and received a sentence of one year in jail.  

            When Mitt Romney declared his candidacy in 1988 the Tavares case came back to haunt him because he was the Governor who had appointed Judge Tuttman. Romney at first said he would not apologize for Judge Tuttman’s decision and called for Judge Tuttman to step down from the bench. In truth, neither Romney nor Tuttman did anything wrong.

            Massachusetts has an eminently fair system in place to appoint Judges. An eight member committee reviews the Candidate and then sends the information, sans the candidate’s name, to the Governor who can then choose to pass along the nomination to the committee that makes the final decisions based on the candidate’s judicial record. The Prosecutors seem to have dropped the ball in this case, presenting no evidence of Mr. Tavares’ assaults on guards, his history of threats or that for the past two years he had been saying he was going to move to Washington to be with his girlfriend once he was released.

            Although Daniel Tavares Jr. reflects no more badly on Willard “Mitt” Romney than Willie Horton did on Michael Dukakis it does highlight flaws in the judicial system and flaws in Mitt Romney’s leadership.

            On the campaign trial in 1988 Mitt Romney stated that the Daniel Tavares Jr. case demonstrated why Romney believed Massachusetts should bring back the Death Penalty. If only Massachusetts had a death penalty, Romney reasoned, Tavares would have never been freed to kill.

            Tavares was offered a plea bargain in the first place because of his long history of bi-polar disorder and abuse and there is no evidence that if Massachusetts had a Death Penalty that Tavares would have been considered a good candidate for it. Prisons have become the de facto mental institutions in the United States. Prisoners are held, as in Tavares’ case, in isolation 23 hours a day with no counseling and no rehabilitation and then just let loose on the streets. Prisons are clogged with low-level, non-violent offenders which makes incarcerating those who are a true danger to society for the length of time needed nearly impossible. There is still a great lack of communication across jurisdictions and even within jurisdictions and between different departments and branches. Prison Reform is a subject that needs serious discussion, and more serious action, as the prison path we’ve been on for the past thirty years has failed everyone miserably except for the for-profit prison operators; but instead, all we get from Romney is we just need to kill people faster and, for heaven’s sake, don’t let felons get the vote.