Dan Riehl on Coakley, Amirault, Woodward And Souza
by Dan Riehl
After reading a post by Michelle Malkin that mentions the issue of an over-zealous prosecution by Martha Coakley in the Amirault case, and also following up on a link by Instapundit to a Radley Balko item, I first went digging around to see if Coakley had ever commented on the Amirault case. Coakley declined to be interviewed for Dorothy Rabinowitz’s recent damning article in the WSJ dealing with Amirault.
That’s when I stumbled upon an extensive cached Boston Globe article from 1999. While perhaps a glowing portrait of Coakley at the time, in hindsight, it details how Amirault was not the first ultimately flawed case that taught Martha Coakley what a high-profile, over zealously prosecuted case could do for a prosecutor’s career. Enter Louise Woodward, the case of an au pair accused of shaking a baby to death. It gained international attention for Coakley and all but launched her career. But it has not held up over the years, despite serving Coakley and not justice well at the time. Oh, and she already had a PR guy in tow wherever she went way back then, too, it appears.
