Cicilline

BOSTON — Looking about 50 pounds slimmer and wearing khaki prison garb, disgraced lawyer John M. Cicilline blew a kiss to his family Thursday morning, moments before a federal magistrate heard his arguments for why he should win early release.

His father and former law partner, John F. “Jack” Cicilline, told Magistrate Judge Robert B. Collings that the U.S. Bureau of Prisons violated his son’s due-process rights by failing to consider his personal struggles in deciding when he would be released to a halfway house.

“What we’re talking about is current conditions. It’s about saving his residence, saving his kids,” the elder Cicilline said in U.S. District Court in Boston.

John M. Cicilline and Joseph A. Bevilacqua Jr., a former state Supreme Court chief justice’s son and also a disbarred lawyer, pleaded guilty in June 2008 to engaging in an illegal shakedown scheme to gain money from people accused of drug crimes.

That October, Cicilline, the brother of Providence Mayor David N. Cicilline, began serving an 18-month sentence at Fort Devens for conspiracy, obstruction of justice and making false statements to federal authorities as part of a plot that was hatched at the Barking Crab, a restaurant just down the street from the federal courthouse in Boston.

Cicilline, 52, is due to be on supervised release in Rhode Island on Feb. 8, 2010, after he serves 41 days in a halfway house in Massachusetts. He is being held at a federal medical center in Fort Devens, Mass., north of Worcester.

The U.S. Attorney’s office in Massachusetts has opposed Cicilline’s bid. Assistant U.S. Attorney Mark Grady argued that Congress has dictated that the courts don’t have jurisdiction over how the U.S. Bureau of Prisons places prisoners. “What is clearly at issue here is Mr. Cicilline’s dissatisfaction with the 41-day sentence he received,” Grady said.

Cicilline cast himself as an anguished father on the brink of losing his home in asking the court for immediate release to a halfway house. He argued that he had a job opportunity that would be available only for a short period and that it would be better to situate him to save his Narragansett house from foreclosure and provide for his three teenage daughters.

He complained in his filing that his blood pressure had risen because he was not given medicine and that he had to be moved to the prison hospital, where security is tight. He also said his daughters were consuming alcohol, staying out late and doing poorly in school due to the pressure of their parents’ divorce and their father’s incarceration.

“He wanted to get back in control of the kids, keep them on the straight and narrow,” Jack Cicilline told the court. Cicilline’s daughter, Brittany, who joined her aunt in the courtroom, cried as her grandfather recounted the family’s hardships.

Jack Cicilline said he wasn’t asking the court to review the Bureau of Prisons’ decision, but argued the bureau needed to give its reasons for rejecting his request under federal law.

“It sounds like you are asking for a judicial review and that’s precluded,” Collings said, adding that it seemed to him that the bureau had given reasons.

Grady detailed factors the bureau had considered, such as Cicilline’s resources, the nature of the offense and his history. The bureau, he said, just needs to show it evaluates each prisoner individually and has “exclusive authority” to determine when and if a prisoner transfers.

Collings will make a recommendation to U.S. District Judge Joseph L. Tauro, who will issue a final decision. It remained unclear when the recommendation and ruling would come.

Before leaving the courtroom, “Jack” Cicilline kissed his son.

kmulvane@projo.com