Review of “The Town”

Not to be confused with the play (“Our Town”) I wrote about yesterday, “The Town” is the 2010 Ben Affleck film about a gang of bank robbers from Charlestown. I ordered it from Netflix, mostly to try to discover why “The Fighter” was winning so many awards while “The Town”…

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Senate Race: Coming-in at #6

Over on the POLITICO blog, David Catanese writes “from the Campaign Trail” about what he sees as the 10 most competitive Senate races for 2012. This will be a posting updated monthly. He ranks the Virginia race (for now) at #1 – coming in at #6 most competitive: 6. MASSACHUSETTS…

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“Our Town” at Lowell High

Last evening I attended an excellent performance of “Our Town”, Thornton Wilder’s Pulitzer Prize winning play, at Lowell High School’s Little Theater. Under the direction of Sharon Bisantz, the Student Theater Company did a masterful job of presenting this classic that is set in a fictional New Hampshire town near…

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Mandatory minimum drug sentences

Back in the late 1980s when I did a lot of criminal defense work, the “war on drugs” adopted minimum mandatory sentences as its tactic of choice. The most onerous and ill-considered was a mandatory minimum 5 year sentence for a second offense of distribution of heroin. In the abstract,…

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