The garden of good, evil

Joe Quinlan has been putting bad guys away for as long as some of the young lawyers who sat listening to him yesterday have been alive.

He is one of those guys who wouldn't want to work as a defense lawyer. It's not that he doesn't respect them. He does. He understands the importance of an adversarial system. It's the difference between a real democracy and a police state.

But he is a prosecutor, and so there he was, in the exquisitely named Cole Porter Suite at the Sheraton in Leominster, teaching a bunch of young assistant district attorneys, some of them just out of law school, the rules of the road.

"You have to put your ego aside," he was saying. "The case isn't about you."

He told them you don't win trials acting like a know-it-all, a smart aleck. You win trials because you know the answer to every question you ask. You win trials by making witnesses answer questions with a yes or a no. You win trials not by eliciting dramatic, TV show admissions. You win by pointing to the evidence, over and over, by pulling out the truth, painstakingly, repeatedly, like you'd pull weeds. Being right doesn't mean being self-righteous. Being zealous doesn't mean being a zealot.

Watching Joe Quinlan, chosen by his peers as prosecutor of the year, it was hard not to think of another Joe, another prosecutor of the year, Joe Gaughan. Years ago, after he prosecuted the state's first murder case using DNA evidence, you could have handed Joe Gaughan a million bucks to work defense, and he would have laughed and handed the money back. Joe Gaughan locked up bad guys. That's what he did. And he taught more young lawyers how to lock up bad guys than probably anybody in the state.

Gaughan died three months ago, and the state cops and prosecutors in Plymouth County still talk about him the way hitters talk about Ted Williams. He was an original. Like Joe Quinlan in Worcester County. Quinlan won't wow you. He doesn't have a fancy wardrobe. He looks nothing like the guys on "Law and Order." But he does his homework, he reads his case law, and he goes to trial and locks up bad guys. He speaks for the people, and sometimes he speaks for the dead.

There are more than 700 prosecutors in Massachusetts. By statute, they can't be paid less than $37,500, but almost half make less than $50,000. Massachusetts pays its toll takers more than its prosecutors. The state representatives and senators who set these salaries pay themselves a base salary of $46,410, and that's not counting the per diems and extras. Many of them have law practices on the side.

When Quinlan cut his teeth as a young prosecutor in Hampden County, he had a second job, too. Unloading trucks.

"Live simply and drive an old car," he told his protégés. "You don't do this for the money. But victims will thank you, even if the case goes down the tubes, if you've done your best. There's a satisfaction you get in this job you can't get anywhere else. And you get it sticking up for victims of crime."

What he didn't tell the young prosecutors is that one of the reasons he empathizes with victims so much is that he was one of them. Nineteen years ago, as he prepared for his first trial with a reluctant witness, he stayed after work at the courthouse in Springfield to read up on case law. He stumbled upon a state cop who was stealing confiscated money to feed a gambling habit. The crooked cop stabbed him over and over again, but Quinlan fought him off, pulled a fire alarm, and lived.

Joe Quinlan sat on the witness stand and pointed at the crooked cop, and then, the day after that cop went to prison, Joe Quinlan was on the other side of the courtroom, gently leading a witness through the evidence, pulling weeds, looking for the truth.

Kevin Cullen is a Globe columnist. He can be reached at cullen@globe.com.