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June 9, 2005

Yawu Miller

The smirk on Johnny Walker’s face said it all Tuesday morning as he reviewed news of former House Speaker Thomas Finneran’s four-count indictment.

“He needs to go to jail,” commented the retired longtime Roxbury resident while waiting for a bus in the Dudley Square terminal. “He lied and then tried to tell the people he didn’t do any wrong.”

Once hailed as one of the most powerful players in Massachusetts politics, Finneran is now facing charges he lied on three separate occasions during testimony during a November, 2003 trial of a redistricting lawsuit filed by a coalition of voting rights organizations and once during a pre-trial deposition.

Finneran is also facing a charge of obstruction of justice for allegedly seeking to impede the redistricting case by making false declarations. If convicted of all four counts, Finneran, who resigned the speakership last September, could face a sentence of between 16 to 21 months and lose his license to practice law.

The indictments come at the tail end of a bitter dispute that pitted voting rights activists against House leadership, with Finneran and his own Mattapan district at the center of the controversy.

The 2001 House redistricting map saw Finneran’s districts drop heavily black precincts in the Codman Square area and pick up two of the whitest precincts in Dorchester as well as one in Milton. Before redistricting his district was 70 percent people of color. After, it was 57 percent.

“He effectively removed 5,000 people from his district,” said Juan Martinez, executive director of Mass VOTE, a plaintiff in the suit.

The map proposed by the House also packed Rep. Shirley Owens-Hicks’ 6th Suffolk District with 98 percent people of color and whitened the 11th Suffolk, which includes parts of Jamaica Plain, Roxbury and Brookline, dropping the district’s population of color below 50 percent.

Voting rights activists argued that the map drawn by the House discriminated against voters of color. In all, 12 Boston-based seats were majority-white while just five were majority of color, despite the fact that over 50 percent of the city’s population is of color.

Martinez says voting rights is the central issue in the current case against Finneran, noting that his obstruction of justice charge stems from his alleged unwillingness to furnish information that would have helped judges decide the redistricting case.

The judges issued an unusual footnote in their decision on the redistricting case — which forced the House to re-draw the district lines — calling Finneran’s testimony into question.

“Although Speaker Finneran denied any involvement in the redistricting process, the circumstantial evidence strongly suggests the opposite,” the judges wrote in their ruling that the House had sacrificed “racial fairness” to protect incumbents.

When the appeals judges asked Finneran if he knew what was going to be in the plan before it became public, he said, “No, I did not.” And when asked when he first saw the map, Finneran said: “It would have been after the committee on redistricting filed its plan with the House clerk.”

Union of Minority Neighborhoods Executive Director Horace Small said Finneran’s political demise was an unintended consequence of their quest for fair districts.

“We wanted district lines that were fair, that represented the diversity in Boston,” he said. “We weren’t trying to take him down. He did it himself. For him to be so arrogant and drunk with his own power is tragic.”

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