Jerry Green will tell you at the drop of a hat that he is the third most powerful person in the State Assembly. In Plainfield, the Courier News called him “King of the Queen City.”
Yet in 2005, 2007 and 2009, Jerry got fewer votes in Plainfield than did his running mate from Fanwood.
Why this seeming disrespect in his hometown?
One reason might be that especially around election time, Jerry’s façade cracks and leadership gives way to mean and petty assaults that show his true nature.
This year, Jerry is unopposed in the June Primary, but the City Council candidates he chose as Democratic Party chairman face a challenge. The challengers are Democrats, but Jerry tries to demonize them as Christie Republicans. Worse, he attacks one candidate’s family and insults another by making fun of her care-giving to elderly parents.
A person who is not even in this fray, but who obviously represents a challenge to his power on some level, receives what Jerry hopes is political mortal blow by exposure of his personal financial situation.
People are disgusted by these personal attacks. The message seems to be, exert your freedom to take a stand other than the party line and Jerry will try to destroy you politically. Behind Jerry’s genial visage is the face of a tyrant and it comes out at election time.
Jerry is running unopposed today. But that does not mean you have to vote for him if you are a Democrat. If you think Jerry has pushed enough buttons to hurt people, don’t push his button today. Show your distaste for his tactics in a symbolic way and in 2011 join the many others who could not stand to give Jerry their vote in 2005, 2007 and 2009.
I’m sure Jerry will attempt to hurt me too in some way for speaking my mind. If so, you’ll hear about it right here.
--Bernice
What kind of person attacks someone for coming home and taking care of an elderly parent? Certainly not someone who is any kind of a human being. I, for one, will be actively campaigning against Jerry and encouraging everyone to vote for Joan van Pelt. Anyone who throws their vote away by writing in or not voting for Jerry, but also not voting for Joan, deserves Jerry.
ReplyDeleteFor Jerry's election, let's stand up and say enough. Joan may not beat Jerry, but how sweet would it be if he lost to Joan.
Come on Plainfield, do the right thing. No one knows how you vote behind that curtain, no matter what the tyrant Jerry says. NO ONE KNOWS EXCEPT YOU!!!
Thanks Bernice for speaking the truth! Jerry is nothing but a big bully whose time has past. He needs to sit down and retire his old self. A question is how come no democrats ever run against him?
ReplyDeleteIf Plainfield help to put him back in office we get what we deserve and you can rest assure it's nothing good.
Jerry got the Truce in Plainfield going .... except for the recent shootings near the school, some knife attacks and normal abusive behavior of some High School students as they walk by me ... that's good enough for me !
ReplyDeleteI assume Anon 8:45 meant to say to vote for Van Pelt in November, which is exactly what I'll be doing. Unless you are a registered republican, you cannot for vote Van Pelt in this primary, where she has no opposition from the republican party.
ReplyDeleteSince Green has no opposition from the democrat party in this primary election, it's best to simply NOT vote for Green.
Jerry is filthy and rotten to the core. He is not ashamed that people see what he really is which is a pathetic never been politician crying in the corner because he is passed over at every opportunity by those with power in the Statehouse of NJ. He takes his inability to move up in the ranks in the democratic party and the state of NJ out on the citizens of Plainfield by treating the city like a slum lord. We'll get what we get when he decides we get it, and not a moment before. He and his Queen of Sleaze Sharon "WHY ME " Robinson-Briggs are a cancer in Plainfield.
ReplyDeleteTo 9:19AM - "Jerry got the Truce in Plainfield going .... except for the recent shootings near the school, some knife attacks and normal abusive behavior of some High School students as they walk by me"
ReplyDeleteSo, the shootings are still happening and there is still abusive behvavior from the High School kids. So what exactly did Jerry do?
To the two anonymous posters, 9:19 a.m. and 1 p.m. I thought the first was being facetious. Jerry had nothing to do with the "truce," as far as I could tell from the articles in The Courier and The Ledger. The gang guys set up the meeting at IHOP, then called a press conference, and enlisted the mayor's platitudes. The real test would be turning in their weapons. I haven't seen anything like that proposed or happening.
ReplyDeleteJust when I thought Green couldn't go any lower, his latest blog proves me wrong. This man has to be stopped. Green is despicable.
ReplyDeleteGreen is now going after Joan Van Pelt, who has a "stellar" reputation in the legal field. The person who was freed after 20 years of incarceration CONFESSED to the crime. What Ms. Van Pelt did was her best to save him from the death penalty. DNA evidence was not available at the time of the trial. Here is the story that Green is either too dumb or, more likely, too devious, to tell the whole story:
"Since to err is human, to execute is too risky
Joan Van Pelt knows exactly how close New Jersey came to executing an
innocent man. She had a front-row seat.
It was 1988, and she was a defense attorney for Byron Halsey, a slow-witted Plainfield man who had confessed to the horrific rape and
murder of two children entrusted to his care.
Van Pelt pretty much knew that a conviction was coming. Her hope was to avoid the death penalty.
"That was my main focus," she says. "I didn't want my client on death row."
So she did what lawyers do. She tried to raise doubt as to whether the murders were "purposeful and knowing" by introducing evidence that Halsey had been drinking on the night of the killings.
And it worked. Jurors convicted Halsey of felony murder, a charge that does not carry the death penalty.
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ReplyDeleteLucky thing. Because last week, thanks to modern DNA tests of semen samples at the crime scene, we learned that Halsey was the wrong man.
The incriminating DNA, it turns out, matches that of a neighbor who testified against Halsey and is now in prison on unrelated rape charges.
Byron was released from prison last week.
So that is how close we came. If not for the drinking, an innocent man may well have been put to death -- not in Texas or Mississippi, but here in Blue Jersey.
"Everyone in the legal community in Union County was pretty damn sure Byron Halsey was guilty as sin, and it is only by the grace of God that he wasn't sent to death row," Van Pelt says. "There were a lot of people who
were very wrong."
This reminder of human fallibility comes at a perfect time, as the Legislature considers repealing our death penalty statute in favor of life without parole.
Halsey is the 5th convict in New Jersey to be freed based on DNA evidence, and the 202nd in America.
It's not that prosecutors and police wanted to jail an innocent man. They were not careless or indifferent. They didn't fall asleep during the trial, as one defense attorney in a Texas capital case famously did.
But they faced enormous pressure to solve a murder that had horrified their community. That may explain why they questioned a sleep-deprived Halsey for 30 hours in one 40-hour stretch, and why they didn't look hard enough at the neighbor.
"The take-home lesson of this case has to do with the death penalty," says Barry Scheck, co-founder of the Innocence Project, the group that took up Halsey's case.
"Anyone who looks at this case has to have a strong visceral reaction. 2 children sexually assaulted. The girl was strangled. The young man was killed by having nails smashed into his skull with a brick.
"What we've learned from our DNA exonerations is that because these cases arouse such strong emotions, people make mistakes. They didn't go about this saying, 'Let's nail an innocent guy.' But people get angry and upset
and they have tunnel vision. And that's how errors happen."
For some, like Sen. Gerald Cardinale, a Republican from Bergen County, the
minuscule risk of killing an innocent man is not enough to justify a repeal of the death penalty.
"There is no system that's 100 % perfect," he says. "We can only hope for a high batting average."
Maybe that's good enough when we are putting a man in prison. We can't stop enforcing the law. And at least we have a chance to reverse any errors.
But we are talking about strapping a man to a gurney and killing him. No chance of fixing that error.
Halsey is at home now, doing all the things he couldn't do in jail, like eating chocolate when the mood strikes. He couldn't sleep after his release because the absence of guards left him rattled. But he is alive.
And that's a good thing. Imagine what would happen to our batting average if he had been sent to death row."
(source: Opinion, Tom Moran; the Star-Ledger)
And Assemblyman Green was a co-sponsor of the bill to abolish the death penalty in New Jersey and spoke eloquently in favor of doing away with it both locally and in the Assembly. Let's give credit where credit is due, please!
ReplyDeleteIf you don't think Adrian Mapp is "in this fray" you haven't been listening to your robo-calls, getting your mail, or reading the blogs. Come on Bernice, you know better.
ReplyDelete@ anon 5:57. Green is not discussing the death penalty. He is smearing the defendant's attorney purely for political reasons. Green is a vulture. I will vote for Van Pelt in November and encourage every single person I know to do the same.
ReplyDelete