Hidden Link

June 11, 2024

By Gintautas Dumcius

More than 60 years ago, four members of a state panel that vets the governor’s judicial nominations and pardons took a trip of their own through the legal system as defendants, after they were charged with public corruption.

The Governor’s Council, as the collection of eight independently elected members is formally called, is often better described these days as a clown car than a packed police van. Rather than facing bribery charges, councilors have squabbled recently over who literally threw a dime at whom. 

Past governors have tried to pull the car over, but some tinkering – like a separate governor-appointed Judicial Nominating Commission that functions somewhat like an end run – has been the best they can do to a panel that dates back to the state’s colonial era. That means it’s still up to voters to determine every two years who gets an annual salary of $36,000 for the part-time post and wields the power to approve or disapprove lawyers looking for a judgeship, or convicts looking for forgiveness through a pardon.

Few voters can probably name the governor’s councilor who represents their district. But with Massachusetts’s pick for the White House a foregone conclusion, and most State House lawmakers expected to coast to reelection, the race for the obscure post may be the most interesting thing on the ballot for voters in the Governor’s Council district that includes part of Boston’s Back Bay reaches out to suburbs north and west, including Billerica, Marlborough, Wellesley, and Woburn.

There, the Democratic primary in September features a rematch two years in the making: Marilyn Petitto Devaney, the incumbent who first won the seat in 1998, is facing off against Mara Dolan, a lawyer and former political aide who lost the 2022 primary to her by just 1,658 votes. “I only need 50 more votes per town to win,” Dolan said this week.

This cycle, Dolan has been essentially campaigning ever since the last election ended, far longer than the five-month campaign she waged in 2022. She defends the council as an important government entity, while castigating the incumbent as unfit for the office and bringing up an incident from 2007, when Devaney – who was also one of the principals in the more recent, 2022 dime-tossing dust-up – was accused of angrily throwing a curling iron at a store clerk. (In a sign of how little-known the Governor’s Council is, at least one local newspaper headline at the time misidentified Devaney as an aide to then-Gov. Deval Patrick.)

Devaney, who has said she treats the post as a full-time job as she meets with all nominees, did not return a voicemail seeking comment, but she and Dolan have traded verbal jabs in public, each accusing the other of lying.

A May 7 forum in Woburn was typical. As it wrapped up, moderator Alan Foulds asked each candidate to state qualities they respect in their opponent, a standard “say something nice” approach often invoked at candidate forums. 

Devaney immediately attacked Dolan, claiming she falsely says she’s a public defender. “It’s like a substitute teacher saying that she’s a public school teacher,” Devaney said.

Foulds politely reminded Devaney what the question was and offered her another chance. This time Devaney took aim at Dolan for being an attorney who would be biased in reviewing judicial nominations. “Lawyers vote for lawyers,” said Devaney, whose campaign website highlights the fact that she’s not a lawyer. “I’ve seen it through the years.”

For her part, Dolan said diplomatically she respects that Devaney “cares a lot about the work of the Governor’s Council.” She added, defending herself, “It’s ludicrous to suggest I’m not a public defender.” (A spokesman for the Committee for Public Counsel Services, which oversees legal representation for indigent people, says that yes, Dolan is considered a public defender.)

Dolan has also touted endorsements from a mix of moderates and progressive Democrats, including Auditor Diana DiZoglio, Congressman Seth Moulton, and state Sen. Jamie Eldridge of Acton.

She’s raised tens of thousands of dollars, while Devaney has continued to largely self-fund her reelection campaign. While she may be low on cash, Devaney does have something else after more than two decades in office: name recognition after winning the seat 12 times.

For close watchers of the Governor’s Council – a group that mostly involves political junkies and state government insiders – the exchange in Woburn may seem par for the course. As the Boston Phoenix’s Michael Gee once wrote of the eight-member council, it’s “little more than an institutional appendix that periodically [becomes] inflamed.”