The son of a member of VP Joe Biden’s Gun Control Task Force served time for conspiracy to commit murder in connection with a planned school attack.
The Task Force member is Thomas Nee, a Boston cop and president of the National Association of Police Organizations . According to Town Hall columnist Katie Pavlich , Nee’s son Joseph was convicted in 2008 for planning a Columbine-style attack on Marshfield, Massachusetts, High School. He was found not guilty of promotion of anarchy and threatening to use deadly weapons at a school. The younger Nee served about nine months in jail on the conspiracy charge.
The Boston Globe provided background information at the time of the conviction:
“Authorities learned about the plan in September of that year [2004], when Nee went to police with two classmates and told officers that Kerns was planning a massacre at the school. Nee told police the plan involved taking ammunition and explosive devices into the school, securing the school’s exit doors with bicycle locks, and shooting students and staff.
“Police arrested Kerns the following day.
“Police didn’t arrest Nee until a month later, after friends of Kerns implicated Nee as the mastermind of the plot.”
Nee’s lawyer claimed that he should have been exonerated because he was the one who blew the whistle on the plan. But the prosecutor disagreed:
“The defendant’s motive for going to police was to save himself. The defendant did not have intimate knowledge [of the plan] because he had overheard Mr. Kerns; the plan was as much his as it was Kerns’s.”
In 2010, the Massachusetts Supreme Court upheld Nee’s conviction on the conspiracy charge. The state’s highest court found that “in this case, the Commonwealth presented sufficient evidence to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that the defendant entered an agreement with (Tobin) Kerns with the intention to commit mass murder” according to the Patriot Ledger . At the time of the ruling, Joseph Nee said in part that “It’s definitely a disappointment. If nothing else, the situation has taught me to take things in stride and look at the positive. The only thing I can do is move forward.” He added that “I made poor choices in my teenage years. I was hanging around with the wrong kids.”
As the time of the original arrest, investigators were trying to determine if a.40-caliber Boston police service pistol might have been potentially used in the planned attack, the Boston Globe reported.
