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Five vie for attorney general job
Experience makes Demos competitive
By Jennifer McKee - 05/08/2008
HELENA — Democrats Steve Bullock, John Parker and Mike Wheat are in a tough spot. Each Democrat wants to be Montana’s next attorney general. Each has raised enough money and brings enough legal and political experience to make the three-way race truly competitive.
That’s the rub.
They are credible candidates trying to draw attention to themselves in a primary election that has typically failed to draw much of a crowd. Complicating things, they’re all Democrats. So, they’re trying to get an edge over the others without slinging mud and hurting the party or looking tacky themselves.
Steve Bullock: Man of Ideas Steve Bullock, 42, has no shortage of ideas on how he’d run the Department of Justice. A father of three young children and one-time professor at the prestigious George Washington University School of Law, Bullock said Montana’s next attorney general could do much more to protect Montana consumers, children seniors even cattlemen.
Payday loans. These lenders can end up charging up to 400 percent interest to the mostly poorer people seeking small loans to tide them over until payday. About half the states have already banned such lenders. Bullock said the Department of Justice is uniquely situated to offer statewide surveillance to make sure the offices aren’t scamming desperate Montanans.
Agriculture. Bullock said he’d look into a practice already established in the state of Iowa. The attorney general there works to make sure ranchers in the state are getting a fair price when they sell their stock. Consolidation in the meat packing industry has led to allegations of price fixing by packers. Bullock said Montana’s next attorney general could join the fight.
Senior citizens. Older Montanans often fall prey to scammers taking advantage of their pride and willingness to trust people. The consumer protection office needs to take on identity theft and other crimes targeting the elderly.
Such expansions needn’t cost the state a lot of money, he said, because if lawyers prevail in proving consumer fraud, they can win triple damage awards. That money could go to pay for the expanded consumer protection office.
As a deputy attorney general in the late 1990s, Bullock wrote the attorney general opinion that asserted Montanans may access state rivers and streams from public bridges. Such opinions carry the weight of law. The future of that access is uncertain; lawmakers have tried and failed to formally codify such access into state law.
Bullock is most passionate talking about children and how the attorney general can help keep them safe. Fourteen years ago, Bullock’s 11-year-old nephew was shot and killed by a 10-year-old boy on a Butte playground. Bullock said he’d like to see law enforcement and teachers work more closely together with law enforcement helping keep kids in school through truancy officers. Bullock said he’d also develop curriculum at the Law Enforcement Academy tailored to school resource officers.
Bullock said the attorney general needs to take the lead on investigating predators who use the Internet to prey on children.
“We’ve got 200 officers on hour highways, yet we have only two (state) officers on the information superhighway,” he said.
Bullock, who was born in Missoula but raised in Helena, has a varied, 14-year legal background. He’s worked at large law firms in Washington, D.C., and New York City, but also served as a deputy Montana attorney general, defending Montana’s steam side access law. Since 2004, he’s had a one-man practice in Helena doing mostly public interest law, representing labor unions and the Montana cities who tried to buy NorthWestern Energy’s Montana operations.
Bullock was also the author of 2006’s citizen-passed initiative raising Montana’s minimum wage and director of the successful campaign to pass it.
He and his wife, Lisa, a computer programmer, have been married for nine years. They have three children, Caroline, 6, Alexandria, 3, and Cameron, 18 months.
John Parker: He’s Got Prosecutorial Chops John Parker doesn’t have to ask around to know what county prosecutors and local cops need from the next attorney general. As a deputy Cascade County attorney in Great Falls for his entire eight- and-a-half-year legal career, Parker has an insider’s view of Montana criminal justice.
“I’ve been to homicide scenes, I’ve talked to victims,” he said in a recent interview. “I think my intense emersion as a member of law enforcement equips me better for this position than any other candidate.” Parker, 37, has prosecuted 850 felony cases, from murders to failure to pay child support. He has taken a special interest in domestic violence, which, Parker said, often spins out into other crimes if victims are not treated carefully and abusers held accountable.
As attorney general, Parker said he would work to attract and keep qualified investigators in the state’s Division of Criminal Investigation, a 40-person bureau and Montana’s only centralized law enforcement effort. Lower wages and money tied to unstable federal grants has made it harder for the division to hire crack new investigators.
He favors newer programs like drug courts to keep low level drug addicts out of the criminal justice system and would use the Law Enforcement Academy to offer regional trainings for officers and prosecutors.
“I want to make sure local agencies have the opportunities to learn cutting edge techniques, particularly in areas of child abuse and sexual abuse,” he said.
Parker is not just a prosecutor. Since 2002, he’s also been a state representative from Great Falls who has risen the ranks of Democratic leadership. Since 2005, Parker has led the House Democrats in two deeply divided Legislative sessions.
Parker said his legislative career helps balance out his legal career, which he’s spent entirely in law enforcement. As a lawmaker, Parker carried the bill that transferred consumer protection under the Department of Justice and another outlawing the ability of felons to profit from their crimes. He also carried a bill that made it illegal for sexual predators to list a post office box as their address in the state’s sex offender registry.
A Great Falls native, Parker grew up mostly in Whitefish. He said he always had an interest in politics and earned a bachelor’s degree in political science from Georgetown University in 1993. A Russian speaker, Parker worked for a Department of Energy national laboratory before returning to Montana to go to law school in 1996.
“I’ve always been troubled by the problem of crime and wanted to do something about it,” he said.
He also stresses his relationships with tribal leaders and said he would work more in partnership with tribal law enforcement to make the entire state safer.
Parker and his wife, Carrie, have been married for two and a half years. She is an elementary school teacher.
Parker said it’s vital that the next office holder know his way around a crime scene and criminal court room, as he does. No other candidate, Democrat or Republican, has as much criminal legal background.
“We need someone with a prosecutorial background to maintain the quality of the Montana Department of Justice,” he said.
Mike Wheat: Vietnam Battlefields, Montana Courtrooms State Senator Mike Wheat’s message is clear: He can beat the Republican in November; he’s done it before. In 2004, the longtime Bozeman attorney and one-time Butte-Silver Bow deputy county attorney unseated a popular Republican state senator in a Republican-leaning district. It was Wheat’s very first political race.
As a lawmaker, Wheat has a solid Democratic record but will be the first to tell you he is a moderate and often works with Republicans. He was one of the architects of Montana’s statewide public defender system and worked closely with Republican Sen. Dan McGee of Laurel to get the complicated, expensive bill passed. The bill avoided a pending lawsuit and is one of Wheat’s proudest legislative accomplishments.
“We recognized a problem that had to be solved and we solved it,” Wheat said in a recent interview.
As attorney general, one of his first priorities would be to take on Internet predators who target children. Right now, Wheat said, there is no statewide effort to take on the problem and just three law enforcement officers in the state investigating those crimes. Even those efforts have no stable money behind them, but rely on a private grant.
Wheat wants to create a child predator unit within the state Justice Department.
“You can’t expect a lot of these (smaller) communities to foot the bill for these offices,” Wheat said. “That’s why I think this is the perfect opportunity for AG’s office to provide a resource to local law enforcement.” Wheat has other ideas, too:
Help county prosecutors stay sharp by offering free continuing legal training courses to all county attorneys offices and their staff.
Examine the state Law Enforcement Academy curri-culum to make sure the classes all deputies and officers in the state take are relevant to Montana’s emerging criminal scene.
Work to protect senior citizens from investment and other scams that disproportionately hit older people.
A father of four and grand-father of two, Wheat has a 30-year legal career, most of it representing people at the Bozeman firm he co-founded with a law school friend in the early 1980s. In one of his standout cases, Wheat represented the family of a young girl who drowned after her hair was sucked in a hot tub drain, pulling her under. Hot tubs sold today no longer have such drains, he said, because of that case.
Before that, he spent three years prosecuting crimes in Butte in the late 1970s.
Wheat also spent 13 months as a combat Marine in Vietnam in 1968 and 1969 and still has shrapnel in one shoulder from the experience, which earned him a Purple Heart. A machine gunner, then a rifleman, Wheat volunteered for the Marines, in part, he said, because his father and grandfather had also been in the military.
A native of Superior who spent some of this boyhood in Nevada, Wheat said he wanted to put the war behind him “and get on with life” after he got out. He started at Montana State University shortly thereafter, where he met his future wife Debby, now a speech therapist, before both transferred to the University of Montana for graduate school.
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