BOSTON — The internet has named the judge.
Within hours of Tyler Brown spraying bullets from an illegal rifle into oncoming traffic on Memorial Drive in Cambridge on Monday afternoon, Dave Portnoy of Barstool fame opened up on X to his 3.8 million followers.
That post racked up 688,000 views. Five minutes later, in a follow-up tweet, Portnoy aimed at a person:
By Monday night the follow-up had 234,000 views, 5,889 likes, 509 reposts and 261 replies. The replies were not subtle. And they all pointed at one name.
The judge
The Suffolk District Attorney's office asked for ten to twelve years. The bench shaved it to five to six.
The bench was Janet L. Sanders.
According to the Suffolk DA's office, Sanders is the judge who in August 2021 sentenced Brown — the same man now charged with the Cambridge shooting — to five to six years in state prison after Brown opened fire on two Boston Police officers in the South End in May 2020. Suffolk Assistant District Attorney Andrew Kettlewell asked Sanders in open court for ten to twelve years plus five years' probation. She handed down half the years and bolted on a mental-health evaluation.
Brown served less than five. He was paroled. Monday afternoon, he was back behind a rifle.
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Sanders has been a jurist for 28 years — twenty-two on the Massachusetts Superior Court (2001-2023), six before that on the Massachusetts District Court. From 2014 to 2020 she served as Administrative Justice of Suffolk County's Business Litigation Session. Her JAMS biography, where she now mediates high-stakes commercial disputes from a private practice, calls her "the gold standard."
That is the resume. That is the math. That is what the audience saw before it picked up its phone.
What the audience said
The thread reads like a roll call.
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Other accounts surfaced Sanders' JAMS headshot under captions like "the picture of the judge that let Tyler Brown loose" and "here is the judge that let it happen."
The union weighs in
It wasn't just random accounts. The Boston Police Patrolmen's Association — the union representing the officers Tyler Brown allegedly fired on in 2020 — posted its own verdict Monday night.
"Talk about a ball drop," the BPPA wrote. "The fact that the judicial system thought it prudent to show leniency to a wannabe cop killer 5-years ago is not only the definition of insanity but an undeniable insult to those who put their lives on the line everyday."
A pattern that keeps putting Massachusetts residents at risk
Massachusetts benches have been handing the receipts to anyone willing to read them.
In March, a Healey-appointed judge set $0 bail for two men who allegedly drove to a Lowell-area hotel to meet a 15-year-old girl. Both walked free the next day. Massachusetts residents erupted, and "fire her" trended on local feeds.
Last fall a Cape Cod judge set a $500 bail in a human-trafficking case. Earlier this year, the Supreme Judicial Court ruled that Massachusetts district attorneys can no longer detain armed robbers pre-trial because armed robbery is, in the SJC's reading, not violent enough. MDN asked readers back in December whether judges who dump violent offenders back on the streets should face consequences when civilians get hurt. The answer was a thundering, near-unanimous yes — comment after comment, reply after reply, the audience said punish them.
The Sanders sentence on Tyler Brown is the same pattern wearing a different robe. The Suffolk DA's office asked for ten to twelve years for a man who emptied a magazine at two Boston Police officers. The bench shaved it to five. That is the math that put a rifle back on Memorial Drive at 1:30 p.m. on a Monday.
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