Boston Mayor: Sorry About Torture Rant

Boston Mayor Tom Menino apologized today for an off-the-cuff rant in which he said he’d like to “torture” the three people accused of murdering a deliveryman in Hyde Park. “If I saw these guys in a dark alley, I’d like to have a fight with them,” Menino said in a talk at Emerson College. “I’d do some things that would be worse than the death penalty. Because it wouldn’t happen in a second. I would slowly torture them.”

The Sept. 15 chat was recorded, the Boston Globe reports. When Menino was asked about it in a radio interview today, he replied, “I will never say that again. I just said what I really felt about it, but I would not torture anybody. I do regret it, yes, I do.” You can hear the audio here. The mayor has been particularly outraged by the killing; he’s recently described the perpetrators as “animals” and “scumbags.” (More Thomas Menino stories.)