The answer is Judge David Ricciardone.
The question is, who’s the damn-fool hack state judge who released alleged Springfield serial killer Stewart Weldon on $1000 bail after the local cops had arrested him 16 times on 68 different charges.
Does that name Ricciardone ring a bell? Think of him as the Timothy “Touchy” Feeley of the 413 area code, a payroll patriot out of the corrupt Worcester County district attorney’s office who never met a bloodthirsty thug he didn’t want to give a big wet kiss to.
Weldon was arrested late last month and charged with kidnapping and assault to rape after a car chase. Three days later, cops dug up the bodies of three women on his mother’s property in Springfield.
Even before the exhumation of the bodies, it was clear that this Weldon was a real bad actor. He’s had multiple default warrants issued and has repeatedly assaulted police officers. Last October he was confronted by police as he allegedly beat a woman on the street. He duked it out with the cops, biting one of them on the leg.
His initial bond was set at $2500, but Weldon knew who he wanted to get in front of – the judge who swoons over career criminals, and who on July 1 will be grabbing his fourth $6,250 pay raise in the last 18 months, pushing his salary up to $178,000 a year.
Ricciardone cut Weldon’s bail to $1000 and ordered a GPS bracelet. Weldon promptly cut it off and… the rest is history.
I called the Trial Court yesterday and asked if Ricciardone wanted to defend this latest atrocity of his. Through the court flack, he declined to comment.
It’s been a busy year for Ricciardone. In March he had three felons in front of him who had pleaded guilty to a home invasion. They poured gasoline over the head of a 63-year-old woman and then flicked a cigarette lighter inches from her ear, while threatening to rape her.
The prosecutors asked for 30-35 years. Ricky Ricardo Ricciardone gave two of them 8-10 years, and the third 12-14. Hampden County DA Anthony Gulluni, a Democrat, was shocked, especially when the judge said that although the thugs had terrified the woman, she actually hadn’t been “injured.”
“I find that (statement) incredibly offensive,” Gulluni said.
But wait, there’s more. That same month, the judge cut loose an accused murderer on $50,000 bond – after he shot a guy sitting in a car six times. The perp, one Rafael Martinez, is looking at the possibility of life without parole. Can someone say, “flight risk?”
After Martinez swaggered out of the jail, the mayor of Springfield denounced his low bail as a “joke.” The mayor is also a Democrat. When Democrats are appalled by judges mollycoddling criminals, you know the hack jurist must be a serious menace to public safety.
I wrote in March how when Ricciardone was nominated for his first judgeship by Gov. Mitt Romney, he said that he wanted to be “unfettered” in his decisions.
“My own view of the use of discretion,” he wrote to the Governor’s Council, “is that it must be as unfettered as possible to promote the ends of justice.”
Surely he meant to say, the end of justice.
But what can you expect of a career hack who would be starving to death if he ever had to go out and actually get a real job? He worked in the Worcester County DA’s office with another future judge named Tim Bibaud, whose junkie-prostitute daughter’s arrest brought down the entire hierarchy of the MA State Police last fall.
Another graduate of the crime school known as the Worcester County DA’s office: Daniel Bennett, the executive secretary of Public Safety, now accused in a federal lawsuit of engaging in a far-reaching criminal conspiracy to obstruct justice in the failed brooming of the OUI case of his pal Judge Bibaud’s daughter.
Bennett is now the supervisor of Tom Turco, the $160,000-a-year mega-hack commissioner of the Department of Correction. Turco, a former probation officer in that same courthouse, got his job the old-fashioned way – he gave $4250 to Lt. Gov. Karyn Polito, another Worcester hack and a friend of MSP dope dealer Leigha Genduso. Now he has turned the DOC into a massive hack hiring hall – more on that later.
Ricciardone, Bibaud, Bennett, Polito, Turco, Genduso – this state needs an enema.
