The first time I met Perman Glenn was not long after I started working as a reporter for the Advocate. Glenn was representing a family who was suing in the city of Springfield after their elementary-school aged son was allegedly handcuffed to a chair by one of the police officers assigned to the city schools, and I went to Glenn’s office to interview him and the family.
Over the years, I got to know Glenn, and his work, fairly well. I’d see him at the Hampden County courthouse, conferring with clients in the hallways, and I’d hear from him when he was looking for some media coverage of one of his trademark cases, typically involving charges of police misconduct. Like many in Springfield, I was shocked to read in this morning’s Springfield Republican that Glenn died earlier this week, in an apparent accident while on vacation in the Dominican Republic.
Glenn was a defense attorney, a lucrative but not always publicly revered profession; our society might believe, in theory, in the universal right to legal representation, but that doesn’t mean that the public’s collective heart bleeds for criminal defendants.
But Glenn offered no apologies for his work, and in fact, was best known for controversial cases involving the police. Among his higher-profile cases, he represented Douglas Greer, the school principal who filed a complaint alleging that he was roughed up by city cops who found him in the midst of a medical seizure and apparently thought he was on drugs, and Louis Jiles, an 18-year-old Springfield kid who was shot by city police during a traffic stop in 2008. (Greer eventually won a $180,000 settlement from the Mass. Commission Against Discrimination; the Jiles case was settled last year.)
Glenn was outspoken in his criticisms of the official response to brutality allegations, and in calling for the city to establish an effective civilian review board. “The issue is that the city of Springfield is turning a blind eye to what the police are doing,” he told the Advocate a couple of years ago. “When you have that kind of indifference, that could amount to a civil rights violation.”
While Glenn’s fierce, fearless criticisms of the police department and City Hall didn’t especially endear him to many in Springfield’s establishment, he had plenty of admirers among the city’s legal and activist communities. Today’s Republican article also includes words of respect and condolences from one person with whom Glenn bumped heads on a regular basis: SPD spokesman Sgt. John Delaney. “He always had a smile on his face, always went out of his way to shake my hand,” Delaney told reporter Stephanie Barry. “He respected that I had a job to do and I respected that he did.”
