{"id":5747,"date":"2009-10-31T15:58:33","date_gmt":"2009-10-31T19:58:33","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.southsidecentral.com\/wordpress\/?p=5747"},"modified":"2009-10-31T15:58:33","modified_gmt":"2009-10-31T19:58:33","slug":"endorsement-claudette-robertson-james-martin-for-danvilles-commonwealths-attorney","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.southsidecentral.com\/wordpress\/2009\/10\/31\/endorsement-claudette-robertson-james-martin-for-danvilles-commonwealths-attorney\/","title":{"rendered":"Endorsement: Claudette Robertson & James Martin for Danville’s Commonwealth’s Attorney"},"content":{"rendered":"

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.<\/p>\n

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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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

Thoughts:<\/p>\n