Is public defender/Dem candidate breaking ethics rules to run?

By Rubashov

We live in very strange times. There is a kind of well-to-do, suburban street gang that visits itself upon people today – people who are exercising their right to have a voice in the way their government is run. People speak up, say something, and then the street gang descends upon them and almost always finds something to be offended about. Never in the history of mankind have so many people worked so hard at being offended.

We owe it to a Democrat candidate for providing us with a name for this street gang – the bleached bunghole brigade. They were operating last evening at a public meeting working to get needed aid from the Biden administration to taxpayers and small businesses. The bungholers showed up, led by an economically privileged millennial and a corporate executive from one of the more despicable New York firms. They were there to try to hang a blue-collar union worker – the only representative of his economic class on that public body – over the use of a single word that everyone uses, but over which the bungholers expressed “offense”.

And so, it goes. On any given day, in towns and byways across America, the bleached bunghole brigades are at work. Being offended. Causing the democratic process to grind to a halt. Making it about them and… their sore bungholes. But it is amazing what they miss while they’re trolling the social media pages for some new “end of the world as we know it” to be offended over.

Meanwhile, we have been keeping track of the local politics in a handful of “bellweather” towns across New Jersey. These towns are representative in some way of a segment or idea about New Jersey and are a good indicator of trends and such. One of these towns is Ringwood, in Passaic County. You might say the place is beset by bungholers.

The town is lovely, as are most of its residents, but Ringwood is a place where people count the political signs on your lawn… and they better be the right ones. If not, there is a busy social media “community” of bungholia ready to pounce. At the weekends, there are people who will spend a perfectly serviceable autumn day – warm and sunny – indoors, nursing grievances. They could be out walking, teaching the kids how to trap live animals, or at the very least getting drunk.

Some of them appear very excited about a certain candidate for borough council and have anointed her with the word, “idealistic.” How this word can be applied to a lawyer, we do not know, but apply it they have. And it caught our attention.

It seems this attractive idealist is a deputy public defender. A press release, issued by the New Jersey Attorney General’s office on July 23, 2021, notes that this “Assistant Deputy Public Defender” was the defense attorney on a case involving a man who attempted “to lure a 14-year-old girl he met on social media for a sexual encounter. The ‘girl’ in reality was an undercover detective participating in ‘Operation Home Alone,’ a multi-agency undercover operation… that targeted individuals who allegedly were using social media to lure underage girls and boys for sex.”

And then we remembered: Lawyers who serve as public defenders and prosecutors are not supposed to run for public office. We Googled can public defenders run for office in new jersey, and came up with this:

(a) All State officers and employees within the Office of the Public Defender are prohibited from becoming candidates for election to any elective public office and from accepting appointment to same (e.g. to fulfill the unexpired term of an elected public official).

A little further digging and we found this, from the OFFICE OF THE PUBLIC DEFENDER CODE OF ETHICS:

According to the New Jersey Election Law Enforcement Commission, she has been a Democrat candidate for borough council since March 18, 2021. So, what’s up?

Is there anybody out there who can clear this up? Can a public defender run for public office? Please let us know.

“Hypocrisy is the vaseline of political intercourse.”
Billy Connolly