Your humble editors are sitting down with Attorney General candidate Maura Healey on Monday afternoon. As we did with Warren Tolman a couple of weeks ago, we’re soliciting your questions for Healey. What would you like to know? We’ll get in as many of your questions as we can.
Please share widely!
Here is my question:
As you know, MA is supposedly a very liberal state but has some of the most mean-spirited criminal justice policies and legislation in the nation.
What would you do about this? What is your reaction to the long overdue SJC decision that sentencing juveniles to life without parole is unconstitutional?
…of “mean spirited criminal justice policies”?
In the 1990s, MA jumped on the bandwagon with its move to try more and more children in adult court, listening to warnings about “Super Predators” who never actually materialized.
We have repeatedly sentenced children (including one with autism) to life without parole.
We have numerous mandatory minimums. Very recently we passed a “3 strikes” bill.
Other states have recently backed off these kinds of policies, but less so MA.
“It’s very popular on our website to equate the Red Sox with the Ku Klux Klan, and the police with Nazis. Do you still want to be seen speaking with us?”
Let us know how that works out for you.
Given the same facts would indict Tim Cahill and/or John O’Btien et al as martha Coakley did?
Ask her what she thinks of the existing AG office’s record in enforcing the state campaign funding laws, in views of stories such as this:
http://www.bostonglobe.com/metro/2013/11/02/attorney-general-martha-coakley-campaign-funds-disarray/GKIXXSvC3VSrRC0QQuF9MP/story.html
Ask her why this job specifically requires working knowledge of the AG’s verses being a legislator? Seems to me they are vastly different skills.
In the Boston area and other Mass. cities, development seems to seen as the key to economic growth and the rising tide that lifts all boats.
Yet development has the side effect of destroying green space so we lose the vast benefits of trees cleaning our air, diverse wildlife supporting everything we grow food and open space that lifts our spirits and clears our minds. At the same, time new buildings emit carbon and bring traffic and its accompanying pollution. What will you do to help protect our air and water in this zeitgeist of build, build, build?
In December of 1986, the Boston Red Sox reached a settlement with Tommy Harper that ended cases filed with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission and the Massachusetts Commission Against Discrimination. According to published reports (see above, emphasis mine):
The Boston Red Sox organization today is even more white than it was in 1986. What is your stance towards the enforcement of the 1986 settlement cited above? What role do you think the AG should have in addressing apparent racial discrimination on the part of local institutions and companies?
Otherwise your title question is kind of a DUH! I’m sure anybody in 2014 would literally answer that question as, “Of course I’m opposed to it.”
My questions for Ms. Healy were the actual issues addressed in the BMG exchanges so deceptively characterized above.
While of course we all expect a candidate to answer “I’m opposed to it”, the fact remains that the behavior that provoked the successful legal actions from Mr. Harper remains apparently unchanged. The current AG apparently has no interest in pursuing the question.
Do we have evidence that the Red Sox organization actively discriminates on the basis of race?
My question is directed at Ms. Healey. You and I have discussed our differing views about what constitutes racial discrimination at length in other exchanges.
I’m interested in Ms. Healey’s perspective.
Honestly, I have not been following this particular story and just wanted the basic info.
The attorney general’s office oversees some of the most wealthy businesses in the state, and they are nonprofits– hospitals, universities, insurance companies. How can these be properly regulated
In Massachusetts, the Attorney General is the consumer advocate with respect to public utilities. Please highlight both generalities and specifics in comparing how you, as AG, would serve as our consumer advocate when compared to AG Martha Coakley.
I asked this question last last October. I’d like some specifics, please.
I hope you’ll share your vision of what, if any, privacy from government surveillance residents of Massachusetts have a right to expect. As the full extent of NSA surveillance continues to emerge, I am paying more attention to the role state authorities play in either encouraging or discouraging such practices in Massachusetts. I note that European authorities have been far less tolerant of private (see Google) or public invasions of privacy than their American counterparts.
I also hope you’ll share your view of the increasing militarization of police — at all levels, from state police to local cops to MBTA police. In your view, is this something you would encourage, or would you prefer to see it scaled back?
Each of these related issues seem to emerge from the tension between individual liberty and freedom as Americans have always relished them and public safety and security that has been so threatened in the decade since 9/11.
Freedom has always been risky and expensive — people have been blowing up trains for as long as there have been trains. Please say more about how you approach the dilemma posed by these competing interests.
During the late 1980s, a very real conspiracy existed involving the FBI and Whitey Bulger. The AG’s office, during this period, was held by Francis Bellotti and James Shannon. There were widespread indications, during that time, of the existence of that criminal conspiracy. The AG’s office took no apparent action beyond issuing press releases.
Today, there are similar indications that a conspiracy may have existed regarding the FBI and the perpetrators of the Boston Marathon bombing. A key witness in the case was shot, execution-style, by an FBI agent in a Florida residence with Massachusetts state troopers present — Florida and FBI investigators recently found no wrong-doing.
Can you please contrast and compare your view of this current situation with the Bulger conspiracy? What do you know that Mr. Bellotti and Mr. Shannon did not?
What can the AGs office learn from the Bulger conspiracy, especially in light of the events surrounding the Boston Marathon perpetrators?
…the state AG’s office would have any jurisdiction over the behavoir of the FBI? Seems like federal supremacy would come into play.
I am sure that an AG who wanted to know more could learn more.
If a learning from the earlier conspiracy is “The AG’s hands are tied, the Washington office can block and obstruct such an investigation at every opportunity”, that learning could certainly be publicized.
A former AG learned from the sex abuse scandal that Massachusetts needed stricter laws about the disclosure criminal behavior by religious officials. Those laws were changed as a result of those learnings.
The point is that an AG who cares has many options, and not all of them require jurisdiction.
You chose to leave a high paying job as a partner in a law firm to do public service for the last seven years in a job that did not allow you to do anything else and now you want to keep doing public service for four more years? What was your thinking when you first made that choice and what is your thinking now that keeps you making the same choice?