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The election for Bristol County District Attorney is an open race, with candidates from both major parties, for the first time since 1974.
State Rep. Chris Markey, a Democrat, is touting his experience prosecuting high-profile felonies. Former Fall River City Administrator Seth Aitken, a Republican, is calling for structural changes to the office’s roster that he says would help prosecutors better hold criminals accountable. Both candidates previously worked as supervisors in the district attorney’s office.
The seat is open because incumbent DA Thomas Quinn III decided not to seek a fourth term.
In separate interviews with The Light, Aitken and Markey outlined what they would do as the county’s top prosecutor. Here’s what to know about their plans.
Aitken pitches staffing changes
A pillar of Aitken’s campaign is his plan to add more assistant district attorneys in district courts, which he says will make for more speedy and effective prosecutions.
In Massachusetts, criminal cases can be tried in either district courts or superior courts. District courts, which each cover a handful of communities, generally hear misdemeanors and some lower-level felonies — the vast majority of criminal cases. County-level superior courts are used to try more serious felonies, such as murder and rape.
The candidate said a small team of young prosecutors struggle to triage a firehose of criminal cases in Bristol County’s four district courts. He says the result is that cases take longer, prosecutors fall out of touch with critical witnesses, and the charges fall apart, which means criminals aren’t always held accountable.
His solution is to hire more district court prosecutors, which he says will help the DA’s office handle the large caseload.
“I feel like we have most of the people we need; they’re just not in the right spots,” Aitken said. “So, it’s really a reevaluation of our priorities and how we are using our resources.”
To find the funding for his new hires, Aitken says he would eliminate high-paid management positions that don’t have direct roles in prosecutions. But he doesn’t plan to lay off any workers — he says some positions are currently unfilled and he expects that some current supervisors who disagree with his vision will decide to leave the office if he’s elected.
Key election dates
- The Massachusetts general election is Nov. 3, with polls open 7 a.m. to 8 p.m.
- The voter registration deadline is Oct. 24.
- The vote by mail application deadline is Oct. 27 at 5 p.m.
- The early voting period is Oct. 17 to 30.
Markey wants more training and mentorship for young ADAs
Markey said he wants to provide the best training he can to the “hungry” young lawyers who choose the DA’s office over higher-paying private-sector jobs.
“We want to see all these people develop,” he said. “And if they develop and they leave in five years, and they become great defense attorneys, the system works. We need good defense attorneys and we need good prosecutors for the system to work.”
He likened young prosecutors to medical residents, who benefit from more experienced doctors looking over their shoulders as they treat patients. Supervisors in the DA’s office can’t debrief on every case, Markey said, but they can be present early in the morning and late in the evening to ask questions and give advice.
On a more formal level, Markey wants to hold training sessions outside the office, gathering assistant district attorneys to study a stack of cases and talk through how they would prosecute them from start to finish.
Training would also aim to help prosecutors develop trial skills and use tech-heavy evidence, like cell phone data and DNA, to their full advantage. Police should be part of the training too, Markey said, because they need to be prepared to testify and be cross-examined by defense lawyers.
Aitken wants to hire a team of financial investigators
Aitken said he wants a new team of prosecutors and investigators to concentrate on fraud and financial crimes.
The DA’s office used to have three prosecutors concentrating on these crimes and elder abuse, but just one prosecutor does that work now, Aitken said. The new team would include three to four people, he said.
Crimes against businesses and the elderly tend to have a financial component, he said. That’s why he wants to hire investigators with expertise in financial records.
“If the leaders in our community are saying, ‘Hey, we want to attract a certain group of people who are going to have disposable income and who are going to frequent our businesses and our restaurants,’ then you’ve got to be prepared to protect those businesses and restaurants when they’re the victims of crime,” he said. “And right now, we’re just not.”
When Aitken announced his campaign, he alleged widespread corruption in local governments, claiming he saw evidence of it as Fall River city administrator. Investigating corruption would be one duty of this new unit.
Markey has called attention to financial crimes carried out with cryptocurrency, enabled by ATM-like devices in convenience stores that allow people to convert dollars into crypto. He wants to partner with the state attorney general and FBI rather than trying to tackle the problem entirely in-house.
Markey wants to hire a forensic psychologist
Markey proposes hiring a forensic psychologist as a full-time staffer in the DA’s office. Some defendants commit crimes because of a serious mental illness that makes them act erratically. The current process for diverting those defendants away from the criminal justice system and into treatment is “useless,” Markey said.
That system includes a “perfunctory” interview with a forensic psychologist who works for the court system and an evaluation at Bridgewater State Hospital, which is managed by the Department of Correction, he said.
“That’s not going to help,” he said. “That’s not the type of place where you’re going to get the proper treatment and diagnosis of what is an ever-changing mental status.”
Without a full assessment and proper treatment, defendants are likely to have another mental health crisis and break the law again, Markey said.
A forensic psychologist working for the DA would interview defendants and help prosecutors make deals that require the defendants to get the treatment they need, Markey said.
The psychologist would advise prosecutors on how to handle cases where mental health may be a factor. The idea was on Markey’s mind as he watched the Lindsay Clancy murder trial, a case where a Duxbury woman claimed she was experiencing postpartum psychosis when she killed her three children.
“Before I made a decision on charging, before I made a decision on any of that stuff, I would want to sit down with someone I trust and say, ‘What do you think?’” he said.
Markey didn’t have a specific plan for funding the new position, but said it “saves money in the long run” by preventing repeat offenders with mental illnesses from bogging down the court system.
Aitken promises to partner with federal agencies
To help police investigate serious crimes related to gangs, guns, and illegal drugs, Aitken said he wants to build closer relationships with the state police and federal agencies such as the FBI, the Drug Enforcement Administration, and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives.
“I don’t think those resources have been fully made available, or been fully accessed, by this DA’s office and our local police departments,” he said. “And in some situations it’s because there’s little turf wars, and that’s a leadership problem.”
The larger agencies can provide more advanced technology and expertise to investigate serious crimes, Aitken said, which would save smaller police departments the trouble of sharing limited resources among themselves.
Aitken said he would also deepen relationships between the DA’s office and police departments to help officers write better reports and help prosecutors better understand the investigation process.
Markey wants to add new evidence tech in courthouses
Markey said he would add “digital forensic labs” to DA offices in courthouses.
That means bringing in computers that can save a phone’s data in a way that makes it usable as evidence in court. Right now, if a victim has cell phone evidence, like threatening texts from an abuser, they might have to set a separate date to download those texts at a police department.
“During the hearing, she’s waving the phone around saying, ‘Hey, he’s texting me these things.’ The judge looks at it. She puts it back in her pocket and walks out,” Markey said. “Well, the DA’s office should be there, saying, ‘Let’s download that phone right now.’”
Putting the labs in every courthouse expedites evidence collection, speeding up cases, Markey said.
Candidates agree Flock is a useful tool with the right guardrails
Both candidates backed the use of controversial Flock cameras and similar technologies, which track the movement of cars en masse by collecting data on license plates and other identifying characteristics.
Some residents have strongly objected to the cameras. They say the technology creates an unsettling panopticon and point to recent high-profile instances where police in New Bedford and other communities have abused their search privileges. New Bedford recently joined a growing group of Massachusetts communities suspending their use of Flock cameras.
Proponents of the technology say it helps police quickly solve crimes like kidnappings and shootings.
Aitken and Markey said license plate readers are an important law enforcement tool, as long as safeguards are in place to prevent abuse. They both supported limiting its use to officers above a certain rank and setting internal standards that only allow searches when there’s enough reason to believe a crime was committed.
Markey went one step further. He said he’s concerned that Flock could be selling the data, which he believes should only be accessible to law enforcement.
Candidates differ on immigration, but would comply with PROTECT Act
Immigrants convicted of a crime may find themselves at higher risk of deportation, depending on their legal status. The candidates answered differently as to how this would affect their decisions as prosecutors.
Markey said immigration status “could be one factor that you look at” when making prosecution decisions, but not a “deciding factor.” He said he may soften a minor charge, for example, if a defendant with a family is close to achieving citizenship — as long as the person is still held accountable.
Immigration enforcement can stand in the way of justice, Markey said. He cited an example of a defendant being arrested by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement during his criminal trial, leading to a mistrial.
“That guy could walk and not be accountable for this,” he said. “Whatever happens, I don’t want it to interrupt the administration of justice.”
Aitken said, in his experience as a prosecutor, he never dismissed concerns that someone could be deported to a dangerous home country. But he said there are hundreds of collateral consequences that come as a result of a criminal conviction, from losing a driver’s license to being barred from financial aid scholarships.
“You can literally drive yourself crazy worrying about all the other stuff, when you have a single job, and the single job is to prosecute the crime in front of you, to protect the public,” he said. “It’s never to disregard what those consequences were, but to try to prosecute the crime as fairly as I could.”
District attorneys don’t regularly work with the federal agencies that enforce immigration law — sheriffs are more closely involved in the controversial decisions of when to hold and release inmates sought by immigration authorities.
But prosecutors are still subject to a new state law that limits immigration enforcement in Massachusetts, known as the PROTECT Act. The law limits state cooperation with ICE and prohibits immigration arrests in certain areas, including courthouses.
Markey voted for the PROTECT Act as a state legislator. Aitken says he opposes the law because it seeks to limit ICE’s authority to enforce immigration laws, but he committed to complying with it at a recent candidate forum.
After an inmate has posted bail, state law prevents agencies from holding them at the request of ICE. But Aitken said in an interview that he believes that honoring requests from ICE to notify the agency of an inmate’s upcoming release is “within bounds” — something Bristol County’s sheriff has declined to do.
Email Grace Ferguson at gferguson@newbedfordlight.org.
