DA Leone champions efforts against domestic violence, child abuse
Middlesex District Attorney Gerard T. Leone Jr. entered office quietly, winning election in an uncontested race in 2006, after the five state lawmakers who were considering running for the position dropped out well in advance.
But this first term has been anything but quiet for Leone, a former Middlesex assistant district attorney, criminal chief for the state attorney general, and federal prosecutor and antiterrorism coordinator, whose office of 250 lawyers serves 54 cities and towns in the vast county and handles about 41,000 cases at any given time.
The 46-year-old Leone has overseen the successful prosecution of multiple high-profile murder cases, including the conviction of Neil Entwistle in June in the 2006 slayings of his wife and daughter. Among current cases, his office is prosecuting state Senator J. James Marzilli Jr. on charges that he made inappropriate sexual comments to four women in Lowell in June and tried to grope one, though Leone has said he does not plan to prosecute a case brought by an Arlington woman who alleges that Marzilli sexually assaulted her in April, for insufficient evidence.
Leone has also launched a series of initiatives, creating units to specialize in domestic-violence cases and Internet safety, expanding a high school antiviolence program known as Community-Based Justice to middle schools, and starting a program to prevent shaken baby syndrome.
The prosecutor recently discussed his job and reflected on his first year and a half in a nearly two-hour interview with Globe reporter Eric Moskowitz. The following are edited excerpts from the interview.
Q: You started your career in the Suffolk district attorney's office as a pros ecutor in Roxbury District Court before Thomas F. Reilly hired you in Middlesex. In addition to prosecuting cases, one of the first things he asked you to do was help start the Community-Based Justice program. Tell me about that.
A: A young man was killed at the high school in Lowell and a young man was killed at the high school in Malden, on the premises. So Tom started [the program in] Malden, Somerville, Lowell, and Cambridge. . . . I was tasked over the next couple of years, among others things I was doing for him, to get it started in all 54 towns and cities. So we spread the program in every school system. It had two components to it. One was to partner with the school systems to intervene early to prevent kids from getting court-involved, and the other part of it, which was a very small percentage of it, was making sure the schools knew about court-involved youth so they could plan from a safety perspective.
Q: What changes have you seen between your time as a Middlesex assistant in the 1990s and today?
A: When Tom and I started Community-Based Justice, in the '90s, the focus was high schools. That was the absolute focus of those problematic areas, like violence, that we were trying to curb. Now it's middle schools. Because of what has happened in the last 15 years, because of the explosion of the Internet, because [now younger] kids are exposed to all of those different problem areas that kids were exposed to in the '90s in high school, we have to bring the program to middle schools.
Q: What's the most troubling trend you see among the school population?
A: The most troubling trend I see as far as young people are concerned, other than the continued proliferation of addiction - alcohol or drugs - would be the willingness to carry and use weapons to resolve conflict. That is the most troubling trend, because not only are kids getting hurt but now they're getting seriously hurt and dying because to resolve conflict they are resorting to the possession and usage of weaponry.
Q: Is that specifically an urban problem?
A: No. . . . Granted, the numbers may be different, but we're seeing [violence] everywhere. The issues that arise from the proliferation and usage of electronic-communication devices [instant-messaging], use of MySpace and Facebook, social networking, the use of the Internet, the use of cellphones and pictorial cellphones - essentially what it does is, because of the anonymity, they feel more empowered to say and do bad things to each other, so that bullying has now become cyber bullying. Cyber bullying isn't just student on student. It's [also] student to teacher, student to others. So some of this, the focus, is driven by a particularized priority [on] keeping kids safe, and some of it is driven by developments in society and culture in the last 15 years.
Q: After holding high-level appointed positions in the state attorney general's office and the US attorney's office, what made you want to return to the county level and run for office?
A: One of the things about the AG's office and US attorney's office is, in prosecutorial circles people think of it as moving up the ladder and chain. To me, it pulled me further away from victim crimes and communities, which is really the essence of what I love doing here. So, I thought about it. I talked to Tom [Reilly] a lot about it and I had always really admired Tom and his wife, Ruth. [My wife] Wendy and I used to joke about it, if Tom and Ruth can deal with the electoral politics, maybe we can, too. Then it started to become more serious. I said, "You know what? I'm going to do this. I'm going to endure what electoral politics brings because I want that job."
Q: The last three people to hold this office, including Reilly, all left to run successfully for attorney general. The first two also ran for governor. Are you going to follow them?
A: I get asked the question a fair amount, but I think part of that is, once you're in electoral politics, people oftentimes ask what's next, what else do you want to do, because so many people move up within electoral politics or at least try to. But for me, I have the job I wanted. It was never about electoral politics, it was always about the job. . . .
I can't even think about wanting to do anything else, because as I told our executive team a week ago, when we got together for a retreat, "If you could have any job in the world" - I asked them this question as an icebreaker - "what would you do?" It ranged from wine taster, to beer taster, to football coach. I said even though I always wanted to be a coach, I'm the coach of the best team possible right now. I truly and sincerely told them all, I've got the best job a person could have.
Q: What's a typical day like for you?
A: Eight in the morning, I'm at a high school [attending a Community-Based Justice meeting]. I come back to the office and I'd be sitting in a case strategy meeting with a pending case. After that, I may be working on my own case. After that, I might have a meeting with an outside group of people that I'm partnering with, like healthcare providers, to try and create a creative partnership around prevention, like shaken-baby or domestic-violence matters.
That evening, because I'm the DA, I get the opportunity to use the mantle of the district attorney to send very important messages about how we do what we do, or I'm talking to a Rotary Club, or I'm talking to a domestic violence prevention group like REACH in Waltham. These are things that you only get to do and do at the level I do because you're the elected [leader]. You really see that there are so many different ways and so many different contexts that you can help people, and advocate for, and serve and protect victims, that it makes this job a great job.
Q: Tell me about the shaken baby syndrome initiative you started at Winchester Hospital, that you hope to expand across the county.
A: The issue of child abuse and particularly shaken baby is extremely important to me. The biggest thing about shaken baby is, of all these tragedies I deal with all the time and what we deal with as an office, it's purely preventable. Just don't shake the kid.
It's something that sounds fairly simple as a concept, but we still see the statistics and the instances and the incidents of shaken baby growing. . . . The shaken baby [initiative] came together around Winchester Hospital and Massachusetts Citizens for Children and our ability to put some money together, so that we train nurses to then be able to train parents of children, before they leave the building, right after their child is born.
We're hoping that the education and the training component will prevent these types of abuses. It's a start. We intend to grow that program and grow the consortium of hospitals and healthcare providers into other areas of child abuse and domestic violence. It's a focus on preventing it before it happens.
Q: You have personally prosecuted multiple child-abuse and shaken-baby cases, most notably the case a decade ago involving British au pair Louise Woodward, in the death of baby Matthew Eappen. As lead prosecutor on that case, you secured a second-degree murder conviction and life sentence, only to see the judge later downgrade the sentence and set her free. Does it frustrate you that she's not in prison?
A: No. [The Eappens] and I talked a lot about it, as did Martha [Coakley, who was Middlesex DA before Leone]. . . . It was never about her going to jail, per se. It was never about how much time she would do in jail. It was the fact that she be held accountable for abusing their child. Make no mistake about it, with everything that surrounded that case, it was a case of child abuse. She was held accountable. She was convicted of second-degree murder by 12 people, who never met each other, beyond a reasonable doubt.
Despite all of the different outside influences on that case and who was saying what, the jury that was focused on the case and the evidence and what was going on in that case, convicted her. I've never looked at that case as anything but a successful prosecution and the fact that we spoke for Matty and held someone accountable for abusing him.
Eric Moskowitz can be reached at emoskowitz@globe.com. 
