Endorsement: Claudette Robertson & James Martin for Danville’s Commonwealth’s Attorney

Danville voters have to make a choice for Commonwealth’s Attorney on Tuesday. With three qualified candidates running and no incumbent, it’s going to be a tough choice. SouthsideCentral is ready to make our endorsement in this race.

Michael Newman, Claudette Robertson and James Martin are the three candidates that are looking to replace 10-term incumbent Bill Fuller in the job of Danville’s lead prosecutor. All three candidates have experience as a prosecutor and are all highly qualified to hold the office.

Michael Newman is currently one of three senior assistant Commonwealth’s Attorneys (although he has often said that he is “the” senior assistant… not true) and has served under Fuller for many years. Newman has had the front-runner attitude and confidence for most of this campaign cycle, but we feel there’s a fine line between confidence and arrogance. Unfortunately for Newman, in the last forum (sponsored by the Danville Ministerial Alliance), Newman crossed that line multiple times and sounded like an ass at times to the other candidates. We find that attitude to be hostile and unacceptable.

James Martin has worked in the Danville Commonwealth’s Attorney’s office for many years and currently is in a law firm partnership with his wife. He has ran an “new ideas” type of campaign featuring initiatives like creating a “drug court” to help unclog the court system (which we are in complete agreement) with, and “vertical prosecution” where one assistant CA handles a case from start to finish. “Vertical prosecution” has probably gone over the heads of most voters who have no idea how the inner workings of a prosecutor’s office operate. Before we took it upon ourselves to learn more about the processes, we didn’t know these things either.

Claudette Robertson is the most “outsider” of the three candidates but still brings just as much experience to this race as the other two candidates. She has worked in both Danville’s and Pittsylvania County’s prosecutor’s offices and she currently has her own private practice. Robertson started off the campaign by proposing “open-file discovery” where the Commonwealth’s Attorney’s office sits down with a defense lawyer and tells them exactly what they’ve got against their client. Open-file discovery is used by most of the neighboring jurisdictions (which is enough proof for me that it’s a good policy) and has been shown as a big time-and-cost saver by getting cases cleared out quickly. If the defense attorney sees that they’ve got enough to convict his client, he’s going to go back to his client and say “They’ve got you, it’s time to talk.” Robertson also has talked about the grand jury system procedure that is currently in place in Danville. Six times a year, police officers are pulled off the street or paid overtime to appear at the grand jury when their testimony is not needed. Robertson has proposed that police officers should only be placed on-call and only pulled out of duty if their testimony is needed. The cost savings of this policy would be immediate savings to the taxpayers and makes sense to us.

Thoughts:

• Bill Fuller (the outgoing 40 year Commonwealth’s Attorney) has not made an endorsement in this race and we do find that interesting since Newman has highly stressed his current tenure in the office in his campaign. When asked about this at the DMA’s forum, Newman deflected that direct question by saying he was looking for the endorsement of Danville’s voters. With Newman’s “If you liked Bill Fuller, you’ll like me.” type of campaign, the lack of endorsement from Fuller sets that type of campaign back.
• Although the Danville Register & Bee has endorsed Michael Newman, we find their endorsement to be useless because it seems they have based it on a desire to see criminals continue to be prosecuted. All three candidates (and any other person in the office) would continue to prosecute crimes because that would be the duties of the job. The R&B endorsement did not cover the other candidates’ strengths and ideas. (We’ll have an OpinionCentral on the inanity of the R&B’s endorsement later today.)
• During the DMA forum, the candidates were asked which candidate they would vote for if they were not running. Both Newman & Robertson said that they would vote for Martin. Martin coyly diverted his answer into a vote for Bob Adams (another senior CA). Unfortunately, Martin has turned those sound bites into a TV commercial which promotes himself at the expense of the other two candidates’s praising of his qualification. Although the commercial is cute and humorous, we are disappointed that Martin used a forum question like that to advance his own campaign while his opponents were just saying good things about him. We feel that Jim Martin is better than that commercial.
• We believe that you can bring new ideas into a prosecutor’s office like the drug court and open-file discovery without being labeled “soft on crime”. Newman has not embraced any of these ideas and has been openly hostile to the idea of open-file discovery (with the attitude of “we’ve never used it before and it’s a bad idea”). Open-file discovery is a great idea that is used by most neighboring jurisdictions and has been shown as a very good policy to implement. We applaud Martin & Robertson for introducing new initiatives into a campaign that will introduce a new Commonwealth’s Attorney into the office.
• The job of Commonwealth’s Attorney is more of a management job than an active prosecutor’s job. The Commonwealth’s Attorney will only be in court for the most violent and highest-profile cases, so we are looking for a candidate who brings a managerial attitude as well as prosecutor experience.

Michael Newman is a well-qualified candidate for the office, but we feel that there’s time for a change in the 40-year old “we’ve always done it this way” mentality and Newman does not have that point of view. James Martin is a well-qualified candidate for the office and would bring a refreshing attitude to the office.  Claudette Robertson is also a well-qualified candidate and would also bring a new attitude to the Commonwealth’s Attorney’s office. We are highly impressed with both Martin & Robertson and the way that they have conducted their campaigns and presented themselves along with the issues. That being said, we feel that all three candidates would make an excellent Commonwealth’s Attorney… but we know that voters have to select one at the voting booth. On SouthsideCentral, we’re not restricted to endorsing one candidate and we’re going to use that non-restriction now. It’s going to be a tough decision for us when it comes time to step into the voting booth Tuesday.

SouthsideCentral gives our endorsement to both Claudette Robertson & James Martin because we feel that they are the best people for Danville’s Commonwealth’s Attorney. We strongly support their campaigns and urge our readers to vote for one of them in Tuesday’s election.