Middlesex DA Gerry Leone will resign effective April 29th. County vacancies are appointed by gubernatorial appointment until the next election. Leone had already announced that he would not seek re-election. The Lowell Sun has names of potential appointees, at least a couple of whom would leave vacancies of their own to fill.
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We should have a law banning elected officials from resigning to take private sector jobs, this is ridiculous. This means he searched, lobbied, and interviewed for the position while still in public office. He already wasn’t running for re-election already so why not fill out the term? I like Leone and I’m not arguing that he did anything wrong, I just dislike this kind of thing. Anyway Deval shoul appoint Sullivan or the Sheriff.
He was so good at prosecuting white collar crimes, they’re going to hire him to get those same crooks off. I like to think that people who are involved in the prosecution end actually believe that they are serving “Justice” in the abstract, not just playing a pointless adversarial game. For Leone, going to “the other side” seems to be as consequential as David Ortiz going to the Yankees. Of course it’s all perfectly legal (I guess), but very unseemly and cynical. On the other hand, I guess in America we’re all a little like that, able to excuse almost anything “to feed our families.”
filet mignon.
This is SOP for many public sector attorneys, but it would be nice if elected DAs finished out the term.
Although I relate very much to the David Ortiz analogy, the moral imperative of Red Sox-Yankees is highly dependent on region. In the end it’s two pro baseball teams. The moral imperative of punishing white collar criminals instead of getting them off is real, but the revolving door between prosecution and defense, or between regulation and Wall Street, is so common and banal that we hardly even notice.
That’s actually what I was trying to get at, that it should be much more serious for Leone to switch sides, yet Leone himself has about the same degree of moral reservation that Ortiz probably would if he got a signicantly better offer from New York (sorry, Big Papi). But I out-cuted myself with the analogy- thanks for the help in clarifying.