Galluccio resigns after prison sentence(updated)

On January 5, 2010, in Uncategorized, by The News Staff

By Tom Nash

State
Senator Anthony Galluccio resigned from his seat late Tuesday after
receiving a one-year prison term for violating his probation on a
hit-and-run conviction.

Galluccio appeared in Cambridge District
Court on Jan. 4 to testify he did not have alcohol in his system when
he failed a breathalyzer test on Dec. 21. He had been under 24-hour
house arrest since Dec. 18 following a guilty plea on an October
hit-and-run charge.

On Oct. 4, Galluccio injured a 13-year-old
Cambridge boy when he rear-ended a minivan. According to a police
report, he had been driven home by police early that morning after a
gas station attendant determined he was too drunk to drive.

The
former Cambridge mayor initially blamed the failed sobriety test —
administered during the third day of his six-month home confinement
sentence — on his toothpaste. He told Judge Matthew Nestor in the
courtroom that he had not consumed alcohol.

In a resignation
letter sent to Senate President Therese Murray on Jan. 5, Galluccio
apologized for his actions while maintaining he did not have alcohol in
his system when he failed the Dec. 21 test.

"My decision today is not out of hopelessness but rather hope and opportunity," he wrote.

Galluccio, 42, had been convicted of drunken driving charges twice before, in 1984 and 1997.