Last week, lawmakers on Beacon Hill heard some powerful testimony on an issue which doesn’t receive much attention.
"My name, for the record, is Deborah M. DiMasi. I live in Melrose and my husband, inmate 27371-038 is incarcerated at the Butner Correctional Facility in North Carolina, where he is now serving the fourth year of an eight-year sentence---an inmate struggling to overcome stage-four cancer of the tongue, struggling not only against a horrible disease, but against a stark institutional indifference."
That inmate is Sal DiMasi, the former Speaker of the Massachusetts House. And the woman advocating for a change in Massachusetts law, even though it won't affect him, is his wife Debbie DiMasi , who is pleading to his former colleagues for the compassionate release of prisoners dying from terminal illness.
