From the Boston Globe:

Former governor Michael S. Dukakis said Patrick was handling the situation well.

“You have to deal with this kind of stuff quickly, which I think he is doing, and then you’ve got to make sure that you and the other candidates are talking about the real issues,” Dukakis said. “He’s got a terrific field operation out there. I think what will happen here is that folks out there walking the streets and knocking on doors will be energized even more.”

By real issues he means anything but Deval’s past support for violent criminals. If anyone should know about that it’s Dukakis. Here is just some of the convicts Dukakis put back on the street according to Howie Carr:

But in his first term, the Duke couldn’t let killers out of prison fast enough. Those who do not remember history are doomed to repeat it, so let’s go back to the last time the state elected a Deval Patrick-type liberal, in 1974.

Here are the Duke’s first-term commutations:

• 1975, four first-degree murderers, 11 second-degree murderers
• 1976, five first-degree murderers, one heroin dealer.
• 1977, six first-degree murderers, two second-degree murderers, one rapist-kidnapper.
• 1978, six first-degree murderers, 10 second-degree murderers.

Here’s just one example of a Dukakis-era commutation. Remember Norman Porter, the “street poet” who took his alias from the name of an Irish whiskey - Jameson? Dukakis commuted one of his two murder sentences, which meant he could go to a lower-security prison, from which Porter then escaped. He wasn’t recaptured until last year.

We’ll have more case histories in the coming days, but just remember that Deval Patrick, in an interview with Channel 4’s Jon Keller, refused to rule out even weekend furloughs for first-degree murderers.

Forget Willie Horton. During the Dukakis era, 10 other first-degree murderers never returned from their furloughs. One of them was Vincent “Jimmy the Bear” Flemmi, brother of Stevie Flemmi, Whitey Bulger’s fellow serial killer and partner in crime.

That’s a little peek at what we can expect under a Deval Patrick administration.