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| Mass. Inmate Says Parole Board Member Is On Illegally |
| By Boston Globe |
| Published: 03/27/2002 |
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In a lawsuit filed recently by one of the state's most celebrated prisoners, Joseph R. Yandle is challenging the legitimacy of the Massachusetts Parole Board, charging that one of its members has sat on the board illegally for the past six years. The lawsuit, filed in Suffolk Superior Court, names Acting Governor Jane Swift, the Parole Board, board chairman Michael J. Pomarole, and Robert Murphy as defendants who allowed Murphy to continue serving on the board even though his term expired in 1996. Murphy was appointed by Governor William F. Weld in 1995. His appointment, which followed the resignation of another Parole Board member, was to expire less than a year later, on June 2, 1996. Murphy has continued to serve on the board - surpassing his given term, as well as the normal five-year term for parole board members - despite a state law requiring the governor to submit candidates to the Governor's Council for approval whenever a board member's term ends. Now, five months after Murphy cast the deciding vote denying parole to Yandle, Yandle and his attorney, Jonathan Shapiro, are asking the court to bar Murphy from the board, order Swift to immediately fill the six-year vacancy, and essentially void all actions taken by the Parole Board after June 1996 - potentially thousands of cases. ''The burden is on the other members of the Parole Board to say, 'We can't have people sitting on this board who are not lawfully in the position which they are occupying,'' said Shapiro, who called Murphy's continued tenure an outrage. But a letter written by Parole Board legal counsel Lisa Prescott last month argues that Murphy is authorized to serve on the board as a ''holdover'' appointment and will continue to serve until Swift ''expressly'' revokes his appointment. The lawsuit marks another turbulent chapter in the decade-long saga of Yandle, a convicted murderer and purported Vietnam War hero whose storybook rehabilitation led Weld to commute his life sentence in 1995. Yandle had been serving life without the chance of parole for his role as the getaway driver in the 1972 murder of Medford liquor store merchant Joseph Reppucci. He served 23 years before he was released. Three years after he won his freedom, an investigation into Yandle's claims of Vietnam valor led the Charlestown native to admit that he fabricated his war record. Although the decision to commute Yandle's sentence was based on his role as the getaway driver and his extensive volunteer work with other veterans and the disabled, as well as his war claims, Governor Paul Cellucci revoked the commutation, and the Parole Board revoked Yandle's parole, sending him back to prison. |
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