Daniel F. Conley
It was February 19, 2002.
That was the day on which Acting Massachusetts Governor Jane Swift appointed Dan Conley district attorney of Suffolk County, which includes the city of Boston, to serve out the unexpired term of Ralph C. Martin II, who had resigned to return to private practice.
If Conley—formally Daniel F. Conley—a former member of the Boston city council and before that an assistant DA in the office he now heads, was looking for action in his new job, he got it—more quickly, disturbingly and dramatically than he could have ever expected.
The first reports of decades of sexual abuse of boys by Catholic priests in the Boston archdiocese had been dribbling out in the news media for several weeks. Several days after Conley took office, the scandal that would have worldwide reverberations reaching the Vatican and leading to the resignation of Cardinal Bernard F. Law, archbishop of Boston, landed on Conley’s desk.
Before it was over, Conley, who was elected to a full four-year term in November 2002, would receive more than 1,100 referrals—reports of sexual abuse by priests—from the archdiocese. Many of these involved multiple offenses by a number of priests. Unfortunately, because so many of the cases were so old—some of them dating back as far as 25 years—they could not be pursued because of the statute of limitations. Meanwhile, three cases that could be prosecuted have moved through the criminal justice pipeline, resulting in one conviction and one pending case. A third indicted defendant, John Geoghan, died in prison. “No one,” Conley emphasizes, “has been acquitted.”
During this period, Conley grappled with another sensitive issue: wrongful convictions—five of them, none under his tenure.“It was the last thing I thought I’d be dealing with when I came into this office,” he said. He explained that the tarnished cases were discovered either on his own initiative in reviewing records and finding that exculpatory evidence had been withheld, that eyewitness identifications had been faulty, as a result of DNA evidence, or in response to defense attorneys’ motions.
He did not flinch and addressed the issue head-on, apologizing “on behalf of the entire criminal justice system” to one defendant found to have been actually innocent, and explaining, “Our job (as prosecutors) is not simply to make arrests and preserve convictions at all costs. Our job is to seek the truth and achieve justice. It sounds trite, but it’s not. There is nothing more critical to the integrity of the criminal justice system than to look at the evidence, no matter when it comes, and follow the facts and the law.”
As if these events weren’t enough to focus Conley’s attention, he faced an immediate fiscal crisis: severe budget cuts caused by a sluggish economy. The office’s budget had been slashed six percent in the year before Conley was appointed and was reduced another five percent in his first year as DA. This meant, among other things, layoffs, affecting 10 prosecutors and five support personnel—down from a peak staff of 306 employees, including 150 lawyers.
Conley currently oversees a staff of 265, including 135 attorneys (35 of whom he hired to replace attorneys who were laid off or left for other jobs). It’s the largest prosecutor’s office in New England, serving Boston, one of the smallest, geographically, of the nation’s most populous cities plus the neighboring cities of Revere and Chelsea and the town of Winthrop, bringing the jurisdiction’s total population to a little under 700,000.
The Suffolk County DA’s office is arguably one of the most prestigious and influential public offices in Massachusetts and Dan Conley is the successor of a long line of former ADAs who have made their mark there. U.S. Senator Edward M. Kennedy and former NDAA Executive Director Newman Flanagan worked there as fellow ADAs during the presidency of Kennedy’s brother John F. Kennedy, with Flanagan later becoming DA. NDAA President Paul Walsh worked there as an ADA under DA Flanagan before leaving for a year to study Portuguese in Lisbon and returning to run for and win the DA’s job in his largely Portuguese-speaking home town, New Bedford. DA Conley also served as an ADA under Flanagan. State Attorney General Tom Reilly served as ADA, as did the new speaker of the state House of Representatives, Salvatore F. DiMasi, plus 35 present-day Massachusetts judges—roughly 10 percent of the state’s judiciary—and many partners in prestigious Boston law firms.
Topping the list of Conley’s challenges are tight budgets and youth violence, including gangs.
“We as a commonwealth and society need to place a higher value on the work that our prosecutors do,” he declares. “Our prosecutors are starting out at $35,000 a year. They’re carrying enormous debts and we can’t keep them. That’s the real problem, I think, for DAs around the country. It’s not difficult to hire bright young lawyers, but it’s difficult to keep them.
“When they come to us,” he continued, “they usually live either at home or with a friend. But once they marry and start a family, it’s impossible for them to stay, no matter how much they want to remain and how much they’re committed to public service, we eventually lose them.”
On youth crime, Conley says, “There are too many guns, which leads to too much violence. So we spend a lot of our time focusing our attention on street crimes and efforts like our rapid indictment program. Once the police arrest someone (on a street crime-related charge), we try to get them indicted quickly and move the case through the system quickly.”
His special goal is protecting women and children. With the help of a $1.2 million federal grant, he has been able to achieve one of his goals, creating the Suffolk County Family Justice Center (FJC), where victims of child abuse and domestic violence will be able to receive a variety of services at one location. Plans for the FJC are progressing rapidly. When it opens later this year, it will be the second such center in the nation and the most comprehensive.
Conley relishes his role as a community leader and he has become a familiar figure at VFW and American Legion halls, civic group meetings and neighborhood associations, particularly those that have become part of his Safe Neighborhood Initiative (SNI), which focuses on geographically demarcated high crime areas. “We meet monthly in these areas,” he says, “with residents, business owners and the police and ‘round-table’ problems, and then we take action on the problem. We have a great partnership with the Boston Police (his brother is a Boston police officer) and we work together on situations like shooting investigations, something that traditionally was a police function. Now we join them and share information. We also work closely with our sheriff and our juvenile justice system on issues like re-entry.”
When the occasion is appropriate and the mood is right, Dan Conley, a native of the multi-ethnic Hyde Park section of Boston (Mayor Thomas M. Menino was a neighbor), where he attended parochial schools before going off to nearby Stonehill College and Suffolk University Law School, has been known to break into song, belting out a robust rendition of “Danny Boy.” He says, “I’m a prosecutor first and foremost, but I can also carry a note. It has won me a few votes over the last 11 years, so I’m happy to do it, especially in Irish neighborhoods.”
In what spare time he has, Conley spends with his family, his wife Patricia, his son Jim, 9, and daughter Christine, 7; getting in a little golf when he can, and relaxing with the family at their cottage in Maine. But it’s apparent that some of the issues of his office are never far from his mind.
He still frets over his inability to prosecute more priest pedophiles because of the statute of limitations, declaring, “We had victims come to us 20 and 25 years later, some of them successful men, but others down and out because they weren’t able to cope with the problem, which has ruined their lives. It was difficult for me to have to pass up the indictment of these priests, who could have been prosecuted but for the age of the cases.”
He also remains concerned over those wrongful convictions, which occurred before he became DA and which were reversed soon after he took office. Finding that faulty eyewitness identification was a major contributing cause of these miscarriages of justice, Conley and Boston Police Commissioner Kathleen M. O’Toole created a task force consisting of prosecutors, police, defense attorneys and Dr. Gary L. Wells, a psychology professor at Iowa State University and an internationally recognized expert on eyewitness testimony, to study the issue and come up with recommendations. Last July the task force issued a report, offering 25 recommendations for prosecutors and police in handling eyewitness ID. Dr. Wells calls the recommendations “the new gold standard” in handling these types of cases in the United States.
And Dan Conley worries about his responsibilities to those bright young new lawyers in his office, many of whom will move on some day, but hopefully will carry with them a lifelong sense of justice and fairness.
“I tell them,” he says, “that we’re not gunslingers, that we don’t put notches in our belts and we certainly don’t strive to win at all costs. I tell them that we will hold criminals accountable for their crimes, but we will do so in a highly ethical and unquestionably fair way, because it’s all about achieving justice. That’s the job of the district attorney.”
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