With an assault conviction now added to his resume, Hiram Monserrate should leave the state Senate.
No, state Sen. Hiram Monserrate isn’t required by law to relinquish his seat after being found guilty of misdemeanor assault against his girlfriend. Mandatory expulsion would have come only from conviction on the felony assault charge lodged against him in an incident last December in which the woman’s face was slashed.
It’s instead a matter of common sense and decency that Mr. Monserrate should be forced to resign.
Nothing less than whatever dignity is left in an institution that ground to a halt last summer is at stake. For Mr. Monserrate, a Queens Democrat, to stay in the Senate, on the grounds that he’s merely guilty of misdemeanor third-degree assault for dragging his girlfriend through his apartment lobby while she was bleeding from a cut around her eye and to her skull, would be an assault on the sensibilities of the people of New York in the first degree.
If Thursday’s acquittal of the second-degree assault felony of intentionally slicing her open during a bitter fight is enough to keep Mr. Monserrate in the Senate, then that’s an institution lacking any standards and any decency whatsoever.
“We respect the decision rendered by the justice system,” says Senate Democratic leader John Sampson.
So do we. Such respect for the law, and the people it’s intended to protect, requires demanding so much more of the people entrusted to make law, as other senators have noted. Mr. Monserrate has to go.
The admittedly lesser charge he’s guilty of is a very serious one all the while. Mr. Monserrate still could be sentenced to a year in jail.
What would he be inclined to do then?
Stay in the Senate, only to pretend that another partisan stalemate has kept it from actually convening?
Would he collect his $79,500 salary yet forgo his per diem expenses?
The questions mount already, from the alarming to the surreal. The state Senate is about to confront its biggest scandal yet, unless Mr. Monserrate leaves very quickly.
“The Senate will continue to move forward and fulfill its duty,” Mr. Sampson promises.
Not with a criminal in its ranks it won’t.
No comments:
Post a Comment