The Dysfunctional Attorney's Office

DA Rich McNally may work for Rensselaer County, but his mind is, undoubtedly, somewhere else.

After McNally fired 6 Assistant District Attorneys with a combined total of 39 years of prosecutorial experience, McNally declared he was hiring Art Glass as 1st Assistant and that Glass required a $5,000 raise before he'd even start the job. This might be reasonable if McNally were hiring Rudy Giuliani or Thomas Dewey, but Glass has precisely no experience prosecuting cases, so we're not quite sure why paying him more taxdollars is quite necessary. And as McNally told us during his campaign, we certainly can't have someone without prosecuting experience as one of the county's top prosecutors.

This last part is something McNally seems to have gotten over pretty quickly. Now only is he ignoring the argument he made against his opponent in hiring Glass, he seems to have thrown it out entirely. Two of McNally's hires to replace the six veteran attorneys were 2 young lawyers with no experience. We haven't had a chance to ask McNally how that's working out for him, but we hear that not even one month into his administration, one of the 2 young attorney's has already resigned.

All this considered, what's Rich McNally supposed to be doing for us, again? Hiring experienced attorneys? Clearly not. Prosecuting indicted murder suspects? Screwed that one up too.

Maybe when the DA's office starts doing deeds and wills, Rich McNally can start doing something he knows something about.