Trouble Afoot! A Long Term District Attorney Precedent Broken

The summer is here. It’s not the calendar summer but the traffic summer which poured  out on Memorial Day and will continue to pour out from those living in the environs of the city to the lakes and oceans and their beaches and water sports, not least of them fishing. The days of sun and vacation are upon us.

Thus is seems strange to start this season with reading a missive in a local newspaper which seems to have brought out something usually handled in a more discreet manner. It is the unhappiness of one district attorney with the manner in which another one is handling her office.

The district attorney from the Cape and Island has decided to demean the actions of the Suffolk County district attorney in a public forum. This is unheard of among the close-knit brotherhood (sisterhood?) of state prosecutors. They have had their differences in the past but usually kept them in-house. It had always been recognized that people could best settle their differences in that manner since they involved personal approaches to handling criminal matters.

Now the tradition of deference and quiet discussion has been exploded. What has happened I wonder that these matters were not discussed at the district attorneys monthly meetings and resolved in the traditional manner.  This is especially so because the writer of the column in the newspaper is Michael O’Keefe who has been a prosecutor for 33 years.

I’d have to guess that at this time he is the longest serving DA in the state which makes his actions even more curious. O’Keefe started out as an assistant da. He was a highly effective prosecutor. He was given the award as prosecutor of the year in that position. He eventually rose in the office in stature and was elected district attorney when an opening in that job occurred. He has been a very effective district attorney who has performed well in his position.

Why then, I wonder is he taking a shot at Suffolk DA Rachel Rollins.? Especially, when in my opinion, his shot misses the mark by a mile. Did he do it because the old timers comfortable in the way things are done prefer not to have their rocking chairs rattled by the new young ones running around with their different and strange ideas?  Change is resisted by those who think the way things are being done are the only way they should be done for the reason they have been always been done that way.

What Mike O’Keefe seems to miss is that prior to him joining the DA’s office 33 years ago which to my calculation would be in 1986 is that huge changes in the manner in which district attorneys handled cases had been happening and were pretty much set in place when he arrived. Prior to 1975 the district attorney position was part-time. Governor Dukakis signed legislation making it full-time. He did this in light of the Warren Court’s decisions that greatly expanded the rights of criminals which he recognized put part-time prosecutors at a great disadvantage when facing full-time time defense counsel. Among other things Dukakis did was appoint William Delahunt to the position of Norfolk DA when George Burke resigned.

Delahunt waa then to the other DAs as Rolllins is to them now. Delahunt introduces most of the programs that O’Keefe praisingly puts forth as those beyond the traditional functions of a DA which was simply prosecuting cases. He was the first to establish victim witness programs, sexual assault units, and domestic violence  programs designed to aid other affected by criminal activities. (He also added specialized units to prosecute arson, white collar and organized crime.)

Many of these were not appreciated by the old timers who thought the job should be limited to prosecuting violators of the criminal law. Despite fiercely differing opinions their disagreements were handled in-house. That’s what makes it so strange that this matter has gone public in the way in which it has. Is it just the old being rubbed by the new or is it something else?

2 Comments

  1. The amity among the Mass. DA’s Assn. is long gone. Suffolk County joins Berkshire and Middlesex as dissenters. The National D.A.’s Association has criticized the Suffolk DA’s announced policies. The President of the National Association is the Essex County DA.

    Massachusetts’ incarceration rate is 50th in the nation. The “social justice” DAs cant improve on that. “Broken windows” theory has demonstrated that if they don’t prosecute “small crimes,” more serious crime follows. We will see.

  2. william m. connolly

    It’s when the new is radically absurd that Old Timers should speak up. For example, the new Boston area DA says she’s not going to prosecute simple crimes like SHOPLIFTING, goodbye Newbury Street and the Prudential Center Shopping Area and the Malls which are already suffering but making comebacks, AND she says she’s not going to prosecute the “simple” possession of heroin, opiates and other deadly drugs . . .move victims of addiction and overdoses soon to spill out onto the streets in her DISTRICT.
    SO, DELAHUNT DID A LOT OF GOOD, LIKE PROFESSOR ALAN DERSHOWITZ DID A LOT OF GOOD, BUT BOTH ARE RIGHTFULLY CRITIZED FOR THEIR MISTAKES AND LAPSES IN JUDGEMENTS.

    AS for District Attorneys being sacrosanct, I hope someone will discover who in the District Attorney’s Office in the Suffolk County and who in the State Police decided it was good idea to VISIT my LINKED-IN page ON THE SAME DAY. Was it just a coincidence. Do DAs and State Cops routinely visit citizens’ Linked-In pages, which are just social-business connections? What were they looking for? I sent them FOIA freedom of information requests, and they denied having any records of such visitations . . . .are there rogue individuals in DA offices and rogue State Cops spying on private citizens, attempting to intimidate them

    I think this so-called brotherhood-sisterhood of DAs, government servants, should be broken up , , , , ,more DAs should publicly say what’s on their minds . . . . .stop this behind closed doors, backroom dealing . . . .LET THE PUBLIC IN ON WHAT YOU THINK ABOUT THE NEW DAs RADICAL APPROACHES TO LAW ENFORCEMENT . . . .it surely is counter to the BROKEN WINDOWS philosophy . . . .NIP THE CRIME IN THE BUD . . . .like in preventive medicine and like in education, EARLY INTERVENTION, PERIODIC SCREENING, GET THE SYSTEM aggressively INVOLVED WITH THE PETTY OFFENDERS AND YOU’LL PREVENT THEM FROM BECOMING MAJOR FELONS LATER IN LIFE and you’ll make the City more livable, and Newbury Street more pleasant and more shoppable.