PLYMOUTH COUNTY CAN'T AFFORD DISTRICT ATTORNEY TIM CRUZ!
PLEASE SUPPORT JOHN BRADLEY FOR DISTRICT ATTORNEY!
Spending
$2.4 million
to defend the district
attorney was a
mistake
Posted Jan 2, 2018
It was a shocking and inappropriate use of taxpayer dollars for Plymouth County District Attorney Timothy Cruz to pay a Boston law firm $2.4 million to defend Cruz and his office in a wrongful-termination lawsuit brought by a former assistant district attorney.
There may well have been some merit in the case brought by John Bradley, who is now a prosecutor for the Worcester County DA’s office. Despite paying one of Boston’s top-drawer law firms nearly a quarter of a million dollars to fight the lawsuit, Bradley got $248,000 to settle the case, which is a fair chunk of change to shell out in a wrongful-termination suit.
The law firm that collected big time in the case is known in Boston legal circles as Mintz Levin, although there are actually six names in the firm’s full title.
What is particularly offensive in this case is that the state attorney general would have defended Cruz for free. Cruz’s only defense for his extravagant and unnecessary expenditure of your tax dollars is that the attorney general and her ranks of lawyers did not possess the skills necessary to adequately defend his 2012 decision to fire Bradley, then his first deputy assistant district attorney. Assuming Mintz Levin had those skills, we can only be thankful that the settlement was only $248,000.
Bradley said he was fired because he declined to donate to the Cruz re-election campaign back in 2010. Also, he said, he was critical of the way Cruz ran the DA’s office, including the handling of confidential informants.
No way, Cruz replied. He said Bradley was fired because he was incompetent and insubordinate.
The attorney general is charged with defending government agencies in civil lawsuits, but Cruz said Bradley’s firing raised issues of labor law outside the expertise of the attorney general’s office. He wanted Mintz Levin. Then-Attorney General Martha Coakley agreed after Bradley filed suit in 2013, and the bills from Mintz Levin started rolling in. The state did not pay all of the bills; Cruz spent $66,000 from his leftover campaign funds to help with the payments.
There were two failed attempts to settle the case via mediation. There was the somewhat complicated departure of two other prosecutors from Cruz’s office. The lawsuit was filed in federal court in Boston, and Cruz asked a judge there to throw the whole thing out. The judge dismissed some of Bradley’s complaints but said the remaining counts against Cruz and his office should go to trial.
And the bills from Mintz Levin kept coming in. Attorney General Maura Healey finally dismissed Mintz Levin early in 2017, and in November announced a settlement. Bradley would get $248,00, but $98,000 of that would go to his $600-an-hour lawyer. He would himself get $150,000. Cruz proclaimed himself unhappy that Healey had settled the case, but he acknowledged that it was probably the best course of action.
It was only last week, after a request through the state’s public records law, that Cruz’s office confirmed that Mintz Levin had been paid $2,415,194 for its work on behalf of Cruz.
“When people are bringing action against you, you want the best people you can get,” Cruz said in explaining why he had insisted on hiring Mintz Levin. “I think, unfortunately, effective representation costs money.”
That is certainly true, but paying $2.4 million in a losing cause seems like an expenditure appropriate for a self-proclaimed never-give-in billionaire, not from the public treasury.
There are a couple of points worth considering before the matter is relegated to the closed-case file. Why was Cruz allowed to take money from his campaign funds to pay for his legal defense? People donate money to political campaigns to help people they support get elected. They do not give candidates money to help defend them from allegations of wrongdoing once they are in office. There is scant chance that the state Legislature is going to change this practice, since is can work to the advantage of politicians accused of abusing their power in office. Still, it should be changed, and we hope someone on Beacon Hill will pursue it.
The larger issue is that the public got cheated. There will never be a judicial determination about whether the district attorney violated Bradley’s civil right. Cruz and his office admitted no wrongdoing. He can cruise on saying he did nothing wrong, and there is no finding from a jury or judge that he did or did not do anything inappropriate in firing Bradley. After spending $2.4 million of our dollars, that’s a pretty poor settlement.
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