It was a quiet afternoon in the Dutchess County District Attorney’s office in December 2022 when retiring DA William Grady summoned Anthony Parisi to his office for a chat. “If you’re going to throw your hat in the ring,” Grady said in a conversation that was taped, “you’ll have to put your resignation on my desk.”
The ostensible reason: Parisi’s Republican opponent and hand-picked successor, Matt Weishaupt, also works in the DA’s office. A matchup that engaged two of his senior prosecutors, Grady argued, would create tensions with colleagues and staff.
“Can you imagine such a request?” Parisi told The Daily Catch in a wide-ranging interview. “This office should not revolve around politics – ever. And bullying has no place here.” The DA, in Parisi’s telling, also intimated that Parisi’s wife, senior assistant DA Sinead McLoughlin, whom he met 19 years ago in the office, might similarly be asked to resign, according to published reports at the time.
Though Grady reversed himself several days later – Weishaupt, who lives in Red Hook, told The Daily Catch he, too, thought the threat was improper – the situation throws into stark relief a question that informs the most unusual 2023 race for Dutchess DA. To what degree should party affiliation dictate who wins the senior prosecutorial role in the county?
With Grady’s retirement after a 56-year career in the DA’s office, this is the first time in more than 40 years that an incumbent is not on the ticket for DA, leaving voters with a choice of two novice politicians. Yet, the race comes at a time when partisan politics have informed even seemingly banal conversations.
“In the DA’s race, this is a watershed moment for voters,” Parisi, 54 and the father of two daughters, ages 2 and 4, told The Daily Catch. “And there is a real choice this year.”
While the two most senior leadership roles in the county, County Executive and District Attorney, have been held by Republicans for decades, voter registration data suggest a tight race is plausible, with independent voters likely to decide the race.
Of 196,944 voters county-wide registered as of Friday, Sept. 15, 37.2 percent are Democrats, 29.1 percent are Republicans or Conservatives, and 28.3 percent do not declare a party, according to Dutchess County Board of Elections data.
Parisi’s Platform
Parisi, who was raised in Millbrook and now lives in Beekman, frames the issues in the race not around who to prosecute and how tough to be on crime but rather around how the DA’s office should work with law enforcement to reduce violence. He supports what he calls intelligence-led policing (ILP): working with the county’s 27 police departments to use rigorous data collection, including information about the people, places and problems driving crime. “This will allow us to determine where crime is likely to strike next and effectively prevent it,” Parisi said.
The county has 295,685 people in an area of 796 square miles, so there is one police department for every 10,951 people and every 29 square miles, ranking Dutchess County 42nd of 62 counties in police departments per capita, and 15th of 62 counties in Police Departments per square mile in the State, according to CountyOffice.org, a national database.
Parisi said he led a multi-year effort in 2013 to use ILP strategies with federal law enforcement partners against two rival gangs in the Poughkeepsie area. “We were able to create a crime vacuum there,” Parisi told The Daily Catch. “And that cleared a lot of crime off the street.” The ILP efforts did not continue, however, and crime returned. “Intelligence-led policing and prosecution is not a one-time strategy,” Parisi said. “It needs to continuously be utilized to prevent future crime.”
Parisi also supports a fully digitized paperless office, an idea his opponent dismisses as impractical in a world where juries still like to touch evidence and peruse documents. Parisi says technology must be utilized for efficiency and security, especially in an office with 40 assistant district attorneys and 30 additional staff that has more paper to process than ever with the 2020 reform of discovery laws. Those laws mandate that prosecutors release more documents more quickly to defendants.
The new laws require the prosecution disclose a witness’s grand jury testimony to the defense within 15 to 35 days after arraignment, depending on the defendant’s custody status. In addition to testimony, witness name and contact information must be turned over in the short time frame.
Previously, these disclosures were required only regarding witnesses whom the prosecution intended to call to testify at trial, and only concerning statements that related to the subject matter of the witnesses’ testimony, according to an analysis of the new laws by the Manhattan Institute, a conservative think tank. Further, the prosecution was not required to turn over this information until the commencement of trial.
Parisi declined to comment on the laws, saying the topic is too complex to cover in the setting of a newspaper interview. He does, however, disagree with his Republican opponent and does not feel that the changes in the discovery laws are dangerous for witnesses or interfere with the office’s ability to do its job effectively.
“I’m a technology guy,” says Parisi, who double-majored in computer science and political science at Fordham University, from which he earned his B.A.He said he led the rollout and system design for the DA’s case management and digital evidence management systems in 2019. “We need to use resources smartly, so the office can run more efficiently.”
Technology also should be used, Parisi said, to create a database and public-facing online portal that shows the status of every case in the DA’s office. He said this can be especially useful to victims. “Victims have a right to understand what’s happening with their cases,” Parisi said. “It goes to transparency, as well. The more we can share about what we do, the easier it is to heal distrust.”
Parisi, like his opponent, also seeks to raise the profile of the DA’s office in the community. If elected, he said he plans to host Zoom meetings in the two cities, 20 towns, and eight villages that comprise Dutchess County, both to educate citizens about the work of the office and to encourage citizens to step forward with information.
“We need to approach crime more from the community perspective,” Parisi said. “When citizens are part of what we do to prevent crime, they become stakeholders and are invested. “That will go a long way towards repairing relationships between law enforcement and the people we serve.”
Biography
Parisi attended Millbrook public schools, graduating in 1987, and after college attended Western New England Law School in Springfield, Mass. His father worked for IBM for more than 50 years in East Fishkill, managing semiconductor production at the end of his career, and his mother started a career as a kindergarten teacher before raising her son and three daughters.
Parisi started his career as a public defender, a path he said he found frustrating because he struggled to obtain information from prosecutors to steer his clients. “I found being a defense attorney very frustrating,” Parisi said. “I found it very difficult to get from prosecutors fair and just resolution for my clients.” He said he was in a better situation to do that as a prosecutor. “I wanted to be the decision-maker so I could do what I felt was fair.”
He has kept in close touch with his first boss, retired judge David Steinberg, who ran the Dutchess County Public Defender’s office for more than 20 years. “He’s always come across to me as a knowledgeable and fair prosecutor,” said Steinberg, who was the town justice in Hyde Park and also worked as a law clerk for State Supreme Court Justice Lawrence Ecker. “Anthony came to court occasionally and appeared to me before more serious cases. We worked closely together. That’s why I kept in touch.”
As the race heats up, with a barrage of lawn signs for both Parisi and Weishaupt dotting the Dutchess County landscape, Parisi said he is “willing to speak to anyone who will listen” and wants the chance to help.
“The mark of a good district attorney is one whose decisions you can hear about and have no idea if the DA is a man or a woman, a Democrat or Republican, a Christian or a Jew, you just know he or she is a good district attorney,” Parisi said. “I seek to be that person.”
September 19, 2023 – Source: The Daily Catch