IT'S AN OPEN AND SHUT CASE ABOUT DRUG FORFEITURE MONEY

If you are part of a non-profit group of some kind in Plymouth County,
chances are that you've occasionally received a note from the district
attorney to tell you that some drug forfeiture money is available, and
perhaps your group would like to apply for it. Plymouth County District
Attorney Michael Sullivan makes a point of soliciting requests, and then
letting an outside committee review them and make the allocations. It's
quite a contrast to Bristol County, where District Attorney Paul F. Walsh
Jr. again plays the insider's game. While his office does give forfeiture
money to some groups, and does it at a faster clip than every other district
attorney in Massachusetts but Mr. Sullivan, Mr. Walsh won't tell you about
it unless you ask. His staff doesn't have the time or training to review
requests, he says, so his preference is that people come and find him if
they want a slice of the pie.

"You could say it's incumbent upon the fund-seekers to find out where the
funds are," he told our reporter.

This curious lack of outreach, and the following lack of public input on the
decision-making, is typically closed-door of Mr. Walsh. Any district
attorney who will keep the basic facts surrounding a murder secret from the
public, as Mr. Walsh continues to do in the death of Medilia Cunha of New
Bedford, might be expected to keep the existence of a pot of money as
little-known as possible.

If most people don't know enough to ask about it, why then that simply means
there is more available for the insiders who do. What's more, there's no
pesky outside oversight of the distribution of the funds, no
second-guessing, no criticism.

To top it off, the forfeiture law gives the district attorney wide
discretion over how the money is to be spent.

Mr. Walsh insists that while he doesn't advertise the existence of the
funds, he does insist that any group that gets money be non-profit and not
"fly by night." The list of contributions -- let's not call the use of
public money a "donation" -- looks solid enough.

This is not meant to imply any criticism of them.

Even at that, however, Mr. Sullivan's approach in Plymouth County is a far
more satisfactory open-door approach than that employed by Mr. Walsh. We can
appreciate that it takes work and time to process applications, and getting
fewer of them makes the job easier on Mr. Walsh. But Mr. Sullivan doesn't
appear to have a problem with it, and we're certain that his open-handed
methods are putting forfeiture money in many deserving hands that might not
otherwise enjoy connections with the district attorney's office.

It wouldn't be much of a stretch for Mr. Walsh to change his way of doing
business in this regard.

Who knows?

With a little practice, he may get to appreciate that there is a real public
interest in knowing what's going on in the district attorney's office -- up
to and including its murder investigations.