Gov. Deval Patrick ousts two, with the motive partly personal -Does Deval Patrick Mind Sex Offender's If they aren't His Brother-In-Law?

The Boston Globe reports:

It was one of the most brutal hits of the 2006 governor’s race: A month before the election, the Boston Herald reported that Deval Patrick’s brother-in-law was a convicted rapist who had failed to register as a sex offender.

Patrick, who had been battling accusations that he was soft on crime, was infuriated. He accused his Republican opponent of playing “dirty politics” by planting the story in the press. Then Patrick won the election, and the story became a forgotten footnote in the annals of bare-knuckled politics.

But not for Patrick. On Monday, Patrick, still seething over the story eight years later, explained his recent decision to remove the top two officials at the state Sex Offender Registry Board, saying they improperly tried to force his brother-in-law to register as a sex offender.

In his first public comments on the shakeup at the agency, Patrick blamed the officials, his own appointees, for a number of other problems, including failing to update regulations and fostering an unproductive work environment. But he made it clear, as he prepares to leave office, that he is still nursing wounds from his first political campaign.

Blaming the Herald and the Republican Party for the revelation, Patrick said the disclosure that his brother-in-law had been convicted of raping his wife, Patrick’s sister, more than a decade earlier in California “nearly destroyed their lives.”

Will Deval Patrick stand up for college males on campuses who are accused of much less?