UMass Criticized for invitation to convicted terrorist, Ray Luc Levasseur
Governor Deval Patrick today assailed the speaking invitation that a group of UMass Amherst faculty extended to a convicted terrorist, even after criticism from state and university leaders scuttled earlier plans for a speech.
"I am more than a little disappointed about this invitation having been extended,'' Patrick said at a State House news conference. I fully get the point, and respect the idea of free speech. But I think it is a reflection of profound insensitivity to continue to try and have this former terrorist on the campus.
Ray Luc Levasseur, the founder and former leader of the radical revolutionary group United Freedom Front, is scheduled to speak Thursday night. An earlier invitation for him to speak at a library symposium was canceled last week amid pressure from Patrick's office and from family members of victims of his group's attacks, which included the April 1976 blast on the third floor of the Suffolk County Courthouse that injured two dozen people...
... Levasseur was released from federal prison in Atlanta in 2004 after serving 18 years for his involvement in the radical group, which plotted a series of bombings and bank robberies along the East Coast between 1976 and 1984.
In 1989, after the longest criminal trial in Massachusetts history, Levasseur avoided additional jail time when he was acquitted by a federal jury of attempting to overthrow the government by force.
The group's followers were also convicted in the murder of a New Jersey state trooper, Phil Lamonaco, and linked to a 1982 shootout with Massachusetts state troopers. Police groups and the trooper's widow have pledged to protest Levasseur's speech.
Levasseur originally was invited to the university on the 20th anniversary of his 1989 acquittal to speak at a forum discussing response to social and political unrest during the 1960s.
Read entire article at Boston.com
"I am more than a little disappointed about this invitation having been extended,'' Patrick said at a State House news conference. I fully get the point, and respect the idea of free speech. But I think it is a reflection of profound insensitivity to continue to try and have this former terrorist on the campus.
Ray Luc Levasseur, the founder and former leader of the radical revolutionary group United Freedom Front, is scheduled to speak Thursday night. An earlier invitation for him to speak at a library symposium was canceled last week amid pressure from Patrick's office and from family members of victims of his group's attacks, which included the April 1976 blast on the third floor of the Suffolk County Courthouse that injured two dozen people...
... Levasseur was released from federal prison in Atlanta in 2004 after serving 18 years for his involvement in the radical group, which plotted a series of bombings and bank robberies along the East Coast between 1976 and 1984.
In 1989, after the longest criminal trial in Massachusetts history, Levasseur avoided additional jail time when he was acquitted by a federal jury of attempting to overthrow the government by force.
The group's followers were also convicted in the murder of a New Jersey state trooper, Phil Lamonaco, and linked to a 1982 shootout with Massachusetts state troopers. Police groups and the trooper's widow have pledged to protest Levasseur's speech.
Levasseur originally was invited to the university on the 20th anniversary of his 1989 acquittal to speak at a forum discussing response to social and political unrest during the 1960s.