Paul F. Walsh, Jr.

Paul F. Walsh, Jr. likes to say that he is “just a country lawyer from a little fishing village in New England.”

If you believe that, you don’t know Paul Walsh, NDAA’s new president. More than a few inmates of Massachusetts’s prisons can testify that under-estimating him can be a critical mistake. And judges in his jurisdiction have learned that Walsh doesn’t stand mute in the face of what he considers “soft” sentences, inappropriate judicial statements or failing to schedule sufficient criminal trial sessions in his district.

Incidentally, that “little fishing village” to which he refers is the bustling city of New Bedford. Population: 95,000.

Now in his fourth four-year term as district attorney of Bristol County, Walsh supervises a staff of close to 160, including 55 assistant district attorneys in a jurisdiction of some 600,000 population (principal city: New Bedford) on Massachusetts’s south coast, where the fishing and maritime industries predominate.

If Paul Walsh’s life and prosecutorial career are any indication of what kind of NDAA president he will be in the year ahead, you can count on this: he will be determined, he will be goal-oriented and he will accomplish those goals.

Some examples of the Walsh approach:

• After a year of fruitless attempts to persuade the state Trial Court Administration to assign more criminal trial sessions to his county’s overloaded criminal courts, Walsh “went public” against the advice of colleagues in the legal community, by suing the state’s highest trial judge and purchasing, with his own funds, full-page advertisements in five daily newspapers. He got his additional criminal trial sessions, later explaining, “I’m not in the habit of vociferously criticizing trial court administrative judges. But if that is what it takes to get their attention and to begin to correct a serious wrong against the people of Bristol County, then so be it.” A former judge of the state superior court commented: “In my experience, taking such action is unheard of, because most public officials in the district attorney’s position would fear retribution by the court system.”
  
  
• When the sensitive issue of sexual deviancy by Catholic priests was becoming a public issue, Walsh was the first prosecutor in Massachusetts to put a priest behind bars for child molestation.
  
  
• While he was working as an assistant DA in Suffolk County (Boston), he decided to return to his hometown of New Bedford, get a little private practice experience and run for DA. But there was one problem. The population of New Bedford is largely of Portuguese extraction and the incumbent DA was of Portuguese descent and spoke Portuguese fluently. So Walsh spent a year at the University of Lisbon learning to speak Portuguese, returned to New Bedford and announced he was running for DA. Walsh was elected in 1990 by a two-to-one margin and has been re-elected handily ever since.

Born January 21, 1954, in New Bedford, Walsh attended local schools and graduated from Holy Family High School, where he was captain of the 1972 state championship basketball team. Walsh was a dean’s list student at Providence College where he received a B.A. degree in 1976. After living in Ireland, Walsh returned to Massachusetts, attended Suffolk Law School at night, graduated with honors in 1982, and then began his prosecutorial career in Boston.

Despite his administrative responsibilities and a heavy caseload, Walsh is a hands-on DA, personally prosecuting cases, often taking on the more difficult ones. He considers it important for him to remain on the front lines and keep in touch with all the court system employees. But mostly, he does it because he loves the drama and challenge of the courtroom. “If I could have any other job, besides being DA, I would be an ADA,” he says, adding jokingly, “with the same salary, of course.”

Walsh says that during his year as president of NDAA, his principal goals will be education, communication, legislation and reorganization.

“Education,” he declares, “is the single most important issue facing prosecutors that is totally within our control. We train young prosecutors at the National Advocacy Center, APRI and the National College of District Attorneys. Now we need to coordinate those activities to get a ‘better bang for our buck’ and for our efforts.”

On communication, Walsh says, “Most of the news that America hears comes out of New York City and yet we never go there and we never meet with the people who produce the news programs. The news coverage of homicides has increased 800 percent in the last 10 years, and we need to get to New York and talk to the people who report the news and produce the news programs, so that they will cast the news in a light that’s fair and informs the public accurately of what prosecutors do.”

On legislation, Walsh says, “When interviewing representatives of various firms on the issue of helping us on loan forgiveness legislation, (then NDAA president) Bob McCulloch and I were surprised by the lack of clout we have on Capitol Hill. I want to go back up there and be aggressive about it.”

Finally, Walsh, who is not reticent about expressing his feelings, commented, “Like many other prosecutors, I’m sick and tired of watching all these news programs where former federal prosecutors with little or no local criminal trial experience expound on local criminal cases. I’m also sick and tired of watching TV films and series about so-called wrongfully convicted individuals by over-aggressive or dishonest prosecutors, and I think we have to do something about that misrepresentation of DAs. Even Hollywood is taking a run at this theme and it goes back to the Perry Mason programs, in which the character Hamilton Burger (who played the DA) never seemed to have a guilty person in his sights. So if we can go out and aggressively take on this kind of distortion and present an accurate image of local prosecutors, it will be to our benefit.”

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