Deval Patrick

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Deval Patrick, Democratic Nominee for Governor of Massachusetts

Deval Laurdine Patrick (born July 31, 1956 in Chicago, Illinois) is a Massachusetts businessman, lawyer, and the Democratic nominee for Governor in the 2006 Massachusetts gubernatorial race. He received the official endorsement at the 2006 Democratic State Convention on June 3, 2006 in Worcester, Massachusetts, and won the nomination on September 19 against opponents Chris Gabrieli and Tom Reilly. He is currently facing Republican Lieutenant Governor Kerry Healey, Independent Christy Mihos, and Grace Ross of the Green/Rainbow Party in the general election in November 2006. If elected he will be Massachusetts first African American Governor and only the second in U.S. history.

Early life and education

Patrick was born on Chicago's South Side in 1956, into an African-American family living on welfare and residing in a one-bedroom apartment. His father was Pat Patrick, a member of jazz musician Sun Ra's band, who left his wife Emily, son Deval, and daughter Rhonda in order to play music in New York City. While in middle school, one of his teachers referred him to A Better Chance, a national non-profit organization for identifying, recruiting and developing leaders among academically gifted students of color, which enabled him to attend Milton Academy in Milton, Massachusetts.

Patrick graduated from Milton Academy in 1974 and from Harvard College in 1978. He then spent a year working with the United Nations in Africa. In 1979, Patrick returned to the United States and enrolled at Harvard Law School. While in law school, Patrick was elected president of the Legal Aid Bureau, where he first worked defending poor families in Middlesex County.

Career

After graduating from law school, Patrick worked as a law clerk for Judge Stephen Reinhardt of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, then became an attorney for the NAACP.

While working with the NAACP, Patrick met future President Bill Clinton, then serving as governor of Arkansas. Clinton was being sued over a voting rights case, and the two worked out a settlement. Also while working with the NAACP, Patrick married Diane Bemus, an attorney specializing in labor and employment law. In 1986, Patrick went to work as a private attorney for Hill and Barlow, a now-dissolved Boston law firm, became a partner in 1990, and continued volunteer work with the NAACP.

In 1994, Clinton nominated Patrick to be Assistant Attorney General for Civil Rights. In the confirmation process Patrick was given the title "quota king" by activist Clint Bolick, who tried unsuccessfully to defeat Patrick's nomination. As an Assistant Attorney General, Patrick worked on a range of issues, including racial profiling, human trafficking, and discrimination. He also played a key role as an advisor to post-apartheid South Africa during this time and helped to create their civil rights laws, where the Black Economic Empowerment program has helped to shift economic power to the black majority.

In 1997, Patrick returned to Boston to join the firm Day, Berry, & Howard, settled a case for Texaco, and was appointed as a legal executive for the company. From 1999 to 2004, Patrick worked as an executive vice president, general counsel, and corporate secretary of the Coca-Cola Company in Atlanta and New York City. He resigned and returned to Massachusetts in 2004 because he said it was unethical for the company to decline to investigate major allegations of violence against workers in Colombian bottling plants (see Coca-Cola Company Criticisms for details). He was hired again, however, as a consultant to Coca-Cola, and continues to hold that position to this day.

In 2004, he was appointed to the board of directors of the firm that controls Ameriquest, a mortgage company, because of his 20 years of fighting predatory lending, in order to try to fix the problem. Ameriquest subsequently agreed to a $325 million dollar settlement regarding their predatory lending practices in 49 states. Patrick stepped down from the board on July 2, 2006.

Deval and his wife Diane Patrick have lived in Milton since 1989. They have two daughters, Sarah and Katherine.

Political Views

• Patrick opposes the death penalty, saying that "the death penalty does not work. It hasn’t worked in actually deterring crime, and it won’t work for Massachusetts. It’s disappointing to see the governor act like so many other politicians who choose this issue to score political points." This position puts him at odds with Lt. Governor Kerry Healey who would "reinstate the death penalty for felons convicted of killing a law enforcement officer, judge, prosecutor or corrections officer."

• Patrick was an early supporter of the Cape Wind energy project, at a time when prominent Massachusetts politicians from Mitt Romney to Ted Kennedy were working against it. His leadership on this issue was a key turning point in the growing the campaign, and tapped into the then-unknown widespread support held by over 70% of the state (according to recent opinion polls).

• Patrick is a proponent of stem cell research and was critical of current Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney for vetoing a stem cell bill.

• Firm supporter of affirmitive action.

Criticism and Controversies

• Patrick, along with many public figures and legal experts, has advocated on behalf of Benjamin LaGuer, who was convicted in 1983 of binding and violently raping a 59 year old Massachusetts woman for 8 hours, in a very controversial trial. In the trial, the police lost all of the physical evidence and the jury was entirely comprised of white people, including one juror who has been accused of racism. Experts from around the country called the case into question, which relied on the schizophrenic victim's testimony, for having a lack of evidence and being an unfair trial. In a letter to the parole board he wrote: "I receive a crushing volume of mail, much of it from prisoners in facilities all over this country. None of it is as thoughtful, insightful, eloquent, or humane as that I receive from Mr. LaGuer. … I urge you and your colleagues on the Parole Board to act favorably on his application.” When questioned in the course of the Massachusetts gubernatorial campaign in 2006, Patrick recalled his involvement was limited to a single letter "15 years ago", and after reviewing the current status of the case, including the 2002 DNA testing which found LaGuer's DNA on the victim, Patrick announced he now believes that justice had been served. An ongoing correspondance has since been uncovered by the press: he petitioned the parole board on Laguer's behalf as recently as April, 2000. Patrick said that he was not trying to mislead the public about his ties to LaGuer, but that he simply did not remember that he had written two letters to the Parole Board seeking his release or that he donated money to help pay for DNA testing of LaGuer in 2001. LaGuer has also confirmed Patrick donated $5,000 toward the DNA test which further indicated LaGuer as the perpetrator. Several DNA experts including Harvard University Biologist, Daniel L. Hartl, have called LaGuer’s DNA test into question.

• Mr. Patrick came under fire for meeting in a diner with William Bulger the disgraced former President of the Massachusetts State Senate and brother of fugitive serial-killer James "Whitey" Bulger. People found this meeting to be hypocritical as Patrick had been running on platform touting change and that he wouldn't be vulnerable to Boston's political powerbrokers and insiders.

• Patrick has sometimes been criticized by some for his decisions regarding affirmative action. One prominent example is the 3rd Circuit Court case Piscataway v. Taxman. Sharon Taxman, a white woman with a Masters degree, was fired rather than Debra Williams, a black woman with a Bachelors degree, due to budget constraints and in keeping with the school's diversity policy. Both teachers were hired on the same day and each had the same amount of seniority, but the school declined to flip a coin as it usually did to settle these matters. Taxman sued and prevailed in US District Court, but then Patrick encouraged the Justice Department, which had already agreed to support Taxman, to switch sides, citing that the Civil Rights Act of 1964 had not been violated. Taxman eventually dropped her suit after Jesse Jackson and others raised upwards of $400,000 to cover a settlement.

• Patrick's corporate work has also been called into question. Despite his leaving Coca-Cola over alleged human-rights violations at their bottling plants, some critics have said that he should have taken a more active role in the issue. Patrick Deval maintains he did play an active role and that he worked to convince Coca Cola's chief executive, Doug Daft, to conduct an independent outside investigation into allegations of the company's involvement in labor violence at Coca Cola facilities in Colombia. When Daft reneged on the deal Deval brokered, Deval left the company in protest.

• Some gay rights activists have criticized him for his tenure on the United Airlines board; during this time, the company fought a San Francisco ordinance requiring companies to offer domestic partners benefits. Patrick has claimed that he was not involved in this particular decision and that he encouraged UAL to offer domestic partner benefits (which it eventually did, becoming the first airline to do so).

• A recent TV ad by Republican candidate Kerry Healey criticized Patrick for serving as the attorney for a Florida man accused of killing a police officer. “While lawyers have a right to defend admitted cop killers, do we really want one as our governor?” the ad asks. In 1985, Patrick, then a lawyer for the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, successfully reversed on appeal the death sentence imposed on the 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. “The federal appeals court agreed with him that (Songer’s) death sentence violated the Constitution of the United States,” said Patrick spokesman Richard Chacon in a statement.“He is proud of his work on the matter and believes justice is served by Songer spending the rest of his life in prison.” In response, Patrick’s campaign pointed to an unsuccessful 2004 effort by Healey’s running mate, Reed Hillman, to seek a gubenatorial pardon on behalf of friend and former Senate candidate James W. Mitchell. Mitchell was arrested two times and convicted once for operating under the influence and once arrested (never convicted) for assaulting a police officer. Furthermore, many people have pointed to Healey's criticism as hypocritical since the Romney/Healey administration employed a convicted cop killer at the State House

External links

• Deval Patrick for Governor - Deval Patrick's Campaign Site
• Deval Patrick TV - Deval Patrick's Internet TV Site
• The Source - Deval Patrick's Campaign Blog
• Students for Deval Patrick - College Student Site Supporting Deval Patrick
• The Deval Experience - a pro-Patrick blog
• Killer Coke: Deval Patrick Exposed - criticism of Deval Patrick
• MassCops: Deval Patrick Discussion - What Massachusetts Cops really think of Deval Patrick