Boston Globe – July 15, 2009

Thirty-seven red, blue, and green balloons sailed across a clear sky above Beacon Hill yesterday afternoon, 10 of them representing the years that Melissa Gosule would have and should have lived.

The 27-year-old teacher from Jamaica Plain was raped and fatally stabbed in July 1999 by Michael P. Gentile, a man who had offered her a ride home when her car broke down on Cape Cod and who had been convicted of at least 20 previous violent crimes.

Yesterday marked another step in the Gosule family’s 10-year struggle to rally legislative support for Melissa’s Bill, which seeks to impose harsher penalties on habitual offenders like Gentile.

“I think we need to be proactive, not reactive,’’ Representative Bradford Hill, a Republican from Ipswich who filed the bill, said at a hearing yesterday before the Joint Committee on the Judiciary. Hill and Middlesex District Attorney Gerard T. Leone Jr. urged lawmakers to vote on the newest version of the bill and move it forward to the House floor.

Previous efforts to win passage of Melissa’s Bill have been unsuccessful.

The new bill, which expands the habitual offender statute, requires that defendants convicted of a third Superior Court felony or a third felony punishable by more than 10 years in prison receive the maximum sentence allowed for the third crime. Legislators had said that an earlier version of the bill, which called for mandatory life sentences for third-time felons, was too harsh. That bill also included misdemeanors and other felonies that are now excluded.

Though mandatory maximum sentences already exist for third convictions in which the defendant is sentenced to three or more years in state prison, the new bill targets the defendant’s crime, not the previous judge’s sentence.

Repeat offenders convicted under the new Melissa’s Bill would not be eligible for early parole. The bill would also end the so-called package deals that allow defendants who commit crimes while out on bail to combine the charges and receive concurrent sentences. The sentences imposed for new crimes would run consecutively.

The bill also states that both federal and state convictions would apply toward the habitual offender statute.

Gosule’s sister – Heidi Lyn Gosule, who is a prosecutor in Leone’s office – appeared before the committee yesterday to request legislators’ support for the revised bill. It was imperative, she said, to keep repeat dangerous criminals off the streets and away from unsuspecting victims like her sister.

If such a bill had existed 10 years ago, Gentile would have been behind bars and would never have met Gosule, she said. Gentile is now serving a life sentence for the murder.

Before the hearing, the family gathered with nearly 50 relatives and friends near the State House at the Garden of Peace, a memorial commemorating homicide victims, where a stone engraved with Gosule’s name lies among many others.

They remembered her contagious laughter and her free spirit. They wore white T-shirts with her smiling face on the front and her motto “Pura Vida,’’ which roughly translates to living life to the fullest, on the back.

Even after 10 years, they said they couldn’t believe she was gone.

“Melissa never got a chance to fall in love,’’ Heidi Gosule said as many wiped their eyes. “Melissa never got a chance to get married.’’

Trouble had a tendency to follow Gosule wherever she went, Heidi said, like when she got burned and robbed in Costa Rica.

But she would often say, “Something good always follows my something bad,’’ Heidi said yesterday. “Together, let’s make sure something good comes out of Melissa’s bad.’’

Leone praised the Gosule family for their commitment to the bill. “It’s been their constant love and devotion over the course of the last 10 years that have led us to where we are today,’’ he said.

Before the hearing, Heidi Gosule said she hoped the bill would finally make it out of the Judiciary Committee this legislative session, allaying some of the family’s frustrations with the long wait.

“I am cautiously optimistic,’’ she said. “Hopefully, this year will be the year.’’