New Man in Blue

The Oak Bluffs Police Department welcomed its newest full-time officer on Tuesday, Dec. 20 when Derek Back took the oath of office in front of family, colleagues and friends.

A superior court judge has dismissed a political operative’s lawsuit claiming he was libeled by news stories in the Vineyard Gazette and The Boston Globe over his behavior, including his arrest, on the Island during the run-up to the 2008 presidential campaign.

She stood up to speak in a hushed courtroom, two decades after she had been attacked by her boss in a darkened Edgartown bedroom. Only now, she was not a 15-year-old girl, but an articulate, educated, professional woman.

Twenty years after Chad M. Edward had been convicted of sexual assault charges, sentenced and served his time, he was back in Dukes County Superior Court earlier this month — and so was his victim.

A Tisbury police sergeant has been dismissed following a disciplinary proceeding with the town selectmen over performance in the line of duty during a domestic assault incident this summer.

Sgt. Robert Fiske had been on paid administrative leave since August pending the result of an internal investigation. Sergeant Fiske was the officer in charge on July 23 when police responded to a call for a domestic assault involving a husband and wife on Spring street.

The Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court’s decision to launch a statewide inquiry into drunken driving acquittal rates by judges drew mixed reviews this week from Edgartown district court’s first justice and questions from the Cape and Islands district attorney.

The state’s highest court has appointed Jack Cinquegrana, a former federal prosecutor and president of the Boston Bar Association, to examine acquittal rates in Massachusetts district courts when a defendant asks for a judge, rather than a jury, to determine guilt or innocence at trial.

Something wasn’t right: a man known to have violated his probation was boarding the ferry in Vineyard Haven and heading for Woods Hole, instead of being in custody.

Oak Bluffs police officer Jeff Trudel spotted Jason R. Willoughby, 26, of Edgartown, because they were on the same 8:15 a.m. ferry last Friday, Oct. 21. Officer Trudel and the black Labrador Buster — the two form Oak Bluffs’s new K-9 drug unit — were headed to the mainland for a training session, a police spokesman said.