Overview
The Massachusetts District Attorney Association (MDAA) was established under Section 20D of Chapter 12 of the Massachusetts General Laws to provide administrative and technology support services to each of the 11 District Attorney’s Offices in the Commonwealth. According to its website, MDAA’s mission is “to support the eleven elected Massachusetts District Attorneys and their staff, including approximately 785 prosecutors and 260 victim-witness advocates.” MDAA is also responsible for administering various grants and other legislative funding it receives on behalf of the District Attorney’s Offices.
MDAA, located at 1 Bulfinch Place in Boston, has 11 full-time employees, including an executive director who is appointed by the 11 District Attorneys. Each year, 1 of the 11 District Attorneys is elected by his/her peers to serve as president of MDAA. MDAA was appropriated $3,433,000 in fiscal year 2015, $3,133,000 in fiscal year 2016, and $3,721,000 in fiscal year 2017.
MDAA Special Appropriations
In May 2014, the Massachusetts Bar Association Commission on Criminal Justice Attorney Compensation issued a report titled Doing Right by Those Who Labor for Justice. Based on its research, the commission concluded the following:
Assistant district attorneys, assistant attorneys general, public defenders, and bar advocates (lawyers appointed to defend indigents) are grossly underpaid, earning far less than their counterparts in comparative jurisdictions across the country. They are paid less than lawyers of comparable experience employed by the state in non-criminal justice positions. They are paid substantially less than criminal justice attorneys working for the federal government. And they are paid far less than their colleagues working in private practice in small, medium, and large private law firms in Massachusetts.
Based on this assessment, the commission made a number of recommendations, including the following:
- Starting salaries for assistant district attorneys, assistant attorneys general and full-time public defenders . . . [should] be raised immediately to $55,000, which must be fully funded with commensurate increases for more experienced lawyers. . . .
- Budget line items applicable to compensation of lawyers employed by District Attorneys offices, the Office of the Attorney General, and [the Committee for Public Counsel Services should] be increased sufficiently in the aggregate so as to allow for a 20% increase in salaries.
- Steps should be taken to keep the levels of compensation of full-time criminal justice attorneys at least equal to that of other public sector attorneys. Salaries must be indexed to cost-of-living increases.
Recognizing that compensation levels are a key factor affecting retention, for fiscal years 2015, 2016, and 2017, the state Legislature appropriated funding of $500,000, $750,000, and $495,000, respectively, to MDAA for an ADA Retention Fund to be used to improve the retention rates of Assistant District Attorneys (ADAs) with three or more years of experience. According to Line Item 0340-2117 in the General Appropriation Acts for fiscal years 2015, 2016, and 2017 (Chapter 165 of the Acts of 2014, Chapter 46 of the Acts of 2015, and Chapter 133 of the Acts of 2016, respectively), funding was provided for the following purpose:1
For the retention of assistant district attorneys with more than 3 years of experience; provided, that the Massachusetts District Attorneys’ Association shall transfer funds to the AA object class in each of the 11 district attorneys' offices in the commonwealth; provided further, that the association shall develop a formula for distribution of the funds; provided further, that funds distributed from this item to the district attorneys' offices shall be used for retention purposes and shall not be transferred out of the AA object class; provided further, that not more than $100,000 shall be distributed to any 1 district attorney's office; provided further, that no less than 60 days before the distribution of funds, the Massachusetts District Attorneys’ Association shall notify the house and senate committees on ways and means detailing: (a) the methodology used to determine the amount to be [disbursed]; (b) the amount to be given to each district attorney's office; (c) the reasoning behind the distribution; and (d) the number of assistant district attorneys from each office who would receive funds from this item; and provided further, that no funds shall be expended on the administrative costs of the association.
The appropriation required MDAA to submit an allocation plan (see Appendix B) each fiscal year to the chairs of the House and Senate Committees on Ways and Means that described how these funds were to be distributed to each of the 11 District Attorney’s Offices. According to each year’s plan, the retention funds were to be allocated to each District Attorney’s Office in proportion to the size of its annual total legislative appropriations. MDAA did not require the offices to use a specific formula or process to distribute the funds; rather, the plans stated that each District Attorney’s Office should use its share of the funds to provide monetary incentives to ADAs who they believed exhibited a significant desire to remain as prosecutors and who had become valuable to the Commonwealth’s judicial system because of their experience and training.
In addition, for fiscal years 2016 and 2017, the Legislature appropriated $3 million and $495,000, respectively, to MDAA to distribute to increase the minimum starting annual salaries of ADAs statewide to $45,000 by the end of fiscal year 2017. (This appropriation is referred to in this report as the Salary Reserve Fund). According to the plans, the funding was allocated to each District Attorney’s Office based on the average total number of ADAs employed in the office over the previous two years. The allocation plans submitted for these fiscal years indicated that the District Attorney’s Offices would distribute their share of the funding most heavily among the lowest-paid ADAs in order to meet the minimum salary requirement for all entry-level ADAs.
| Date published: | April 24, 2018 |
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