Democrats have held the workplace of legal professional common in Maryland for practically 70 years, a successful streak very prone to maintain this yr if Republicans nominate an extremist with previous ties to a racist hate group, which is feasible. Fortuitously for GOP main voters, they’ve a significantly better alternative on the poll: Jim Shalleck.
Maryland
Opinion | The Post endorses Jim Shalleck in the GOP primary for Maryland attorney general
Mr. Shalleck, who was a prosecutor for twenty-four years on the native, state and federal ranges, is a conservative who regards himself as a conventional Republican, that means partly that he has not fallen for the Trumpist fantasy that the 2020 presidential election was stolen. Past that, he’s a lawyer with broad courtroom expertise, a way of decency and a dedication to public service. Earlier than resigning to hunt his get together’s nomination for legal professional common, he was president of Montgomery County’s Board of Elections for six years; he additionally ran unsuccessfully for county government in 2014.
He has our endorsement in Maryland’s July 19 Republican main.
The workplace of legal professional common in Maryland, staffed by greater than 450 attorneys plus help employees, has a broad vary of duties, together with litigation and prosecutions masking antitrust; civil rights; shopper safety; funding and Medicaid fraud; and environmental crimes. It additionally represents the state in an array of issues, from contractual disputes to legal appeals.
Mr. Shalleck’s personal precedence is narrower — to deal with Maryland’s spike in violent crime, particularly in Baltimore and Prince George’s County. That’s undoubtedly a grave concern to residents who, like Mr. Shalleck, are disturbed by the quotidian carnage.
Prison prosecution will not be central to the legal professional common’s transient — in Maryland, as in most states, it’s dealt with on the native stage, by elected state’s attorneys places of work. Nonetheless, Mr. Shalleck says he would redeploy 40 to 50 attorneys from the legal professional common’s workplace to help native prosecutors, one thing permitted below the state’s structure provided that licensed by the governor or the legislature. His plan would divert assets from crucial areas of the legal professional common’s workplace. But given the horrible toll of murder and gun crimes, it might conceivably make sense — significantly in a jurisdiction reminiscent of Prince George’s, the place the state’s attorneys workplace has struggled to handle its caseload.
We fear Mr. Shalleck’s imaginative and prescient of the job is considerably crimped. However there isn’t a denying his prosecutorial expertise, which incorporates stints as chief of the murder bureau within the Bronx, dealing with white-collar crime within the New York State legal professional common’s workplace and federal antitrust work on the Justice Division.
In any occasion, his background, world view and priorities are vastly extra related, and grounded in sanity, than that of his GOP main rival, Michael Anthony Peroutka, a debt-collecting legal professional who served a time period on the Anne Arundel County Council. Mr. Peroutka, who was lively in a racist group known as the League of the South, insists “Dixie” is the true nationwide anthem; thinks public faculties are infused with communist dogma and needs to be dismantled; believes Christian dictates ought to prevail over state regulation; and is an adherent of creationism. He’s unfit for public workplace.