JUSTICE. FOR ALL.

When it comes to protecting our communities from illegal gun violence, we can and should do more. I will. 

For years, Middlesex County has been flooded with illegal guns from out of state. But the current leadership of the DA’s office hasn’t made gun trafficking a priority.

Massachusetts has had strong gun trafficking statutes since 2014, thanks to the leadership of then-Speaker Robert DeLeo and John Rosenthal, the founder of the nonprofit group Stop Handgun Violence. But these statutes don’t work unless prosecutors use them. And the incumbent District Attorney has not.

Police in Middlesex County have seized at least 100, and sometimes more than 200 illegal firearms every single year since 2020.

Firearms seized during David Solet's investigation of Malden's Maplewood Gang.

The incumbent District Attorney has refused to put the necessary resources into identifying the source of these crime guns and prosecuting the offenders who bring these guns into the Commonwealth and sell them to criminals. In fact, over the last five years, with hundreds of illegal guns recovered in Middlesex County, there have been just a handful of convictions against gun traffickers. 

Disrupting these criminal networks requires focused, sustained investigative effort. It requires treating gun crime as a priority.

I would establish a Crime Gun Unit dedicated to identifying, disrupting and prosecuting the gun trafficking networks that funnel these illegal weapons into Middlesex County.

When it comes to justice for those who have waited too long, we can and should do more. I will.

Advances in DNA technology have allowed cold case investigators to identify the perpetrators of terrible crimes – crimes from many years past.

But Massachusetts has a statute of limitations of just 15 years for Aggravated Rape – only two states have a shorter deadline and no DNA exception. That means these rapists cannot be legally prosecuted.

The District Attorney of Bristol County, a Democrat, has called for reform of the statute of limitations for cold case
sex assaults – but the incumbent District Attorney of Middlesex County has refused to support that effort. This is wrong.

I would use the power and influence of the District Attorney’s Office to call for the reform that cold case victims deserve.

When it comes to protecting our communities from the most violent criminals, we can and should do more. I will.

Since a 2019 court decision, our state’s dangerousness law has had a major loophole: prosecutors aren’t allowed to seek a hearing to detain offenders charged with serious crimes like bomb-making, cross-burning, or aggravated rape of a child. Members of both parties have filed bills to close this loophole, including Republican Governor Charlie Baker and Democratic Senator John Velis. The editorial board of the Boston Globe has called for reform, lamenting that “five years after an SJC justice called for a legislative fix, the loophole that prevents dangerousness hearings for some types of defendants has still not been closed.”

But the incumbent District Attorney has refused to back reform, even after the loophole cost an Acton girl her life. 

Support Christina's Family Through Tragic Loss

When reporters asked the incumbent Middlesex District Attorney why the girl’s killer had been released after he was initially charged with six counts of Aggravated Rape, they got this answer:

“Under state law, prosecutors may only seek to hold a person without bail if they seek a dangerousness hearing. But child rape is not among the crimes, or limited conditions, in which prosecutors may seek a dangerousness hearing, the spokesperson said. Ryan’s office declined to comment further on the dangerousness law or the delays in the case.”

This is an outrage. I would take the necessary steps to protect our communities from dangerous offenders.

When it comes to drivers operating motor vehicles under the influence of drugs (OUI-Drugs), we can and should do more. I will.

Massachusetts has never been great at controlling drunk drivers. But we are absolutely terrible at stopping people who are under the influence of drugs. And now there are more motorists who are high than ever before.

A Breathalyzer can detect alcohol, but it can’t tell if a driver has drugs in his bloodstream. Police and prosecutors need help: they need better tools to help fight this new threat.

In 2019, the Cannabis Control Commission convened a panel of experts to tackle this problem: the Special Commission on Operating Under the Influence and Impaired Driving. Bringing together stakeholders from across the spectrum, including police, prosecutors, the criminal defense bar, medical and toxicological professionals, and the civil liberties community, the Special Commission worked in close cooperation to study the nature of the problem presented by drugged driving. What they found was staggering: existing Massachusetts laws were largely helpless in the face of motorists who were impaired not by alcohol, but by other drugs.

The Commission made a detailed series of unanimous or near-unanimous recommendations for reform, and Governor Baker filed and re-filed a bill that would put those recommendations into law. 

The bill was dubbed the “Trooper Thomas Clardy Law,” after a Massachusetts State Trooper and Marine Corps veteran who was killed on the highway by a motorist who had just purchased marijuana cigarettes at a dispensary and had THC in his system when he swerved across three lanes of traffic and struck Trooper Clardy’s police cruiser. The Democratic District Attorney of Worcester County supported these reforms. But the incumbent District Attorney of Middlesex County did not.

The Legislature refused to act. And six years later, nothing in the law has changed. The result? We are still terrible at responding to drugged driving. We’re bad at identifying drugged drivers, and we lose most of the cases we bring.

According to public data, 71% of Middlesex County’s OUI-Drugs prosecutions brought between 2020 and 2024 were dismissed.

Of the 43 cases that actually went to trial, Middlesex prosecutors won 2 cases, and lost 41. 

The incumbent District Attorney has been content to lose case after case. I won’t be.

Hate crimes in our communities are an outrage that threaten the fabric of our society. But the incumbent District Attorney has been content to treat even serious acts of racial hatred or antisemitism as misdemeanors. I would use the platform of the District Attorney’s Office to call for reform. Serious crimes should have serious consequences.

Our country has seen an explosion of hate crimes over the last ten years: according to the FBI, the number of reported hate crimes doubled between 2015 and 2024, from 5,818 incidents to 11,679.

But Massachusetts laws have remained surprisingly weak. In Massachusetts, acts of racial and religious intimidation are classified as misdemeanors as long as they don’t cause a direct physical injury. As a result, under existing law, burning a cross on a black family’s lawn carries a lower penalty than Advertising an Unlicensed Daycare, or committing a shellfishing violation. This isn’t academic – in 2023 a woman was charged with intentionally leaving swastikas on the lawn of a Jewish family in Stoneham.  

At the time, this crime was classified as a misdemeanor.  Two years after this crime happened in Middlesex County, it is still classified as a misdemeanor.

This is an outrage. But in 13 years in office, the incumbent District Attorney has never called for treating these acts of hate as if they were serious offenses.

She did file a bill to amend our hate crimes statute in 2024, and when it didn’t pass, she re-filed it in 2025: her bill said that people who commit acts of racial intimidation and are convicted should complete a “diversity awareness program.” It would otherwise leave such hate crimes classified exactly the way they are today: as misdemeanors. That isn’t good enough.

Fair pay for defense counsel isn’t bad for prosecutors – it’s good for justice. A strong District Attorney should speak up on behalf of the defense bar, for the sake of both public safety and substantive fairness.

Some people might be surprised to hear a career prosecutor call for increased pay for defense attorneys. But they shouldn’t be.

Our brothers and sisters in the defense bar are a critical component of our justice system. Simply put, there can be no justice in the American system without competent defense counsel. 

This was the holding in one of the most important cases in the history of the United States Supreme Court, Gideon v. Wainwright (1963):

“Lawyers in criminal courts are necessities, not luxuries. The right of one charged with crime to counsel may not be deemed fundamental and essential to fair trials in some countries, but it is in ours. From the very beginning, our state and national constitutions and laws have laid great emphasis on procedural and substantive safeguards designed to assure fair trials before impartial tribunals in which every defendant stands equal before the law. This noble ideal cannot be realized if the poor man charged with crime has to face his accusers without a lawyer to assist him.”

Most criminal defendants don’t have enough money to hire private attorneys – about 80% need to rely on the courts to appoint counsel for them. But in Massachusetts today, many defense attorneys are refusing to take on new indigent clients, because the pay scale for appointed counsel – which will rise over the next two years, but only to $85/hour - is still too low to make business sense. Courts can’t force private attorneys to take cases, and when courts can’t find competent criminal defense attorneys to appoint, case law – what is called the “Lavallee Protocol” - says they have to release unrepresented offenders – even dangerous offenders – from custody after seven days, and have to dismiss the cases completely after forty-five days. In the summer of 2025, there were more than 3000 unrepresented criminal defendants in Massachusetts, including 587 in Middlesex County

The public safety implications are not just hypothetical. Already, a man who was released from custody because the court system could not find him a lawyer has been re-arrested for murder after allegedly stabbing a Boston man to death.

But what the defense attorneys are asking for is not unreasonable. How low is $85/hour for an attorney? In Rhode Island, court-appointed attorneys make $112/hour; in New Hampshire, they make $125/hour; and in Maine, they make $150/hour. 

In a recent argument before the Supreme Judicial Court, Chief Justice Kimberly Budd framed the problem: “People’s constitutional rights are being violated right now. What are we going to do about that?” The answer is for the Legislature to step up and pay a fair wage for defense counsel. And a District Attorney who is committed to public safety and substantive justice should be an ally in that fight. The incumbent District Attorney has acted like this is somebody else’s problem. It is not.

The Middlesex District Attorney’s Office enjoyed a long and productive relationship with a nonprofit organization, Middlesex Partnerships for Youth, focused on protecting school-age children, until it was abruptly ended in 2017. I would restore the close working relationship between the District Attorney’s Office and the nonprofit group now known as Massachusetts Partnerships for Youth.

MPY Student Leadership Event, Spring 2025

Beginning in 1988, and for more than twenty-five years, under District Attorneys Scott Harshbarger, Thomas Reilly, Martha Coakley, and Gerard T. Leone Jr., the Middlesex District Attorney’s Office had a close working relationship with a nonprofit organization that helped connect prosecutors from the DA’s office with teachers, school administrators, and school kids across Middlesex County. Originally called “The Middlesex Criminal Justice Institute, Inc.,” and later “Project Alliance,” this organization eventually developed into Middlesex Partnerships For Youth (MPY), an organization that was dedicated to educating students about how to protect themselves and their classmates from harm, and helping teachers and school administrators to navigate the legal requirements as they sought to protect their students and staff.

This relationship continued during Marian Ryan’s first term in office. In 2013, for instance, MPY launched “Navigating the Cyber World,” a program to teach students in middle schools and high schools how to protect themselves from online exploitation. Then-ADA David Solet, at that time the Chief of the Middlesex County Cyber Protection Unit, spoke to thousands of students in dozens of schools across Middlesex County. Other prosecutors taught students about the dangers of drug use, or teen dating violence. School officials and parents raved about MPY’s presentations, and its Executive Director was honored for her work. 

But in the spring of 2017, the close connection between the Middlesex County District Attorney’s Office and MPY was ruptured. The connection between the Middlesex District Attorney’s Office and the school systems of our 54 cities and towns has never fully recovered. I would renew and reinvigorate the close relationship that once existed between the Middlesex District Attorney’s Office, MPY, and the school districts of Middlesex County.

Protecting our seniors from exploitation is one of the most solemn duties of the District Attorney’s Office. But too many people are taking advantage of our elders and getting away with it – including a home healthcare aide who took more than $1.4 million from an Arlington man and never faced any prosecution.

Dr. Louis Braida of Arlington was a brilliant scientist and MIT professor, but as he aged he suffered a series of strokes. 

A home healthcare aide moved in with him and began to consolidate her control over his finances.

As part of a lawsuit filed by Braida’s family, the home health aide admitted to having a sexual relationship with Braida, taking $1.4-million from him, which included a $300,000 annual salary, and admitted she "improperly exercised undue influence and control over Dr. Braida for personal gain."

Braida died in 2022. No criminal charges have ever been brought by the Middlesex District Attorney’s Office.

Florida law makes it a crime for a person to obtain or use the funds of an elderly or disabled person if the accused “knows or reasonably should know that the elderly person or disabled adult lacks the capacity to consent.”   

But Massachusetts law has no such language, making prosecutions for elder exploitation far more difficult.  

If the incumbent Middlesex District Attorney thinks that our current law is sufficient to protect our elders, then she should take action when people like Dr. Braida are exploited. If she thinks that our current law is insufficient to protect our seniors, then she should use her power and influence to call for reform.

She has done neither. I would call on the Legislature to provide the same protections for Massachusetts seniors that Florida provides for its elder population.

The ethical duty of a District Attorney is not just to obtain convictions, but to do justice. That means scrupulous attention to the integrity of a prosecution not only prior to trial, but after conviction. A wrongful conviction is not only a miscarriage of justice for the wrongfully convicted, it also ensures that the real offender goes free.

As Chair of the Middlesex District Attorney’s Office Conviction Integrity Committee, David Solet presided over the committee that scrutinized past convictions to ensure that justice was done.

And in June of 2025, his cold case investigation identified the real killer in a 1980 Ayer homicide that had led to the wrongful conviction of a man named Kenny Waters – a conviction that led to 18 years in prison for a crime he did not commit.

Joseph Leo Boudreau, identified as the true killer of Katharina Reitz Brow  

Prosecutors must always have the humility to acknowledge that human error can impair the integrity of our justice system. That means being willing to engage in good faith with evidence of actual innocence – even after a conviction has been scrutinized for legal errors. The case of Kenny Waters, and the ongoing work of groups like the New England Innocence Project should remind us that a prosecutor’s office must always remain vigilant in the search for justice.