Politics, they say, make for some strange bedfellows. Nicole Aloise, the Democrat running for the District Attorney job in New York’s Nassau County, has reportedly invited convicted criminals to apply for a full-time position on her campaign staff. The posting for a “communications director” on the “Nicole for Nassau” campaign appears to state, explicitly, that “[p]eople with a criminal record are encouraged to apply.”
Ms. Aloise’s own campaign website is decidedly at odds with having an ex-con craft her messaging and communication statements. The site touts her 16 years’ experience as a prosecutor and strives to portray her as “tough on crime” – someone who will crack down on violent and nonviolent crime alike, and “pursue justice as a prosecutor, not a politician.” The incumbent Nassau County DA scoffs that the DA’s job requires “holding criminals accountable—not inviting them into the heart of a campaign for Nassau County’s top law enforcement post.”
At this point, it’s completely speculative whether this apparent support of criminal rehabilitation will manifest itself in the hiring of “justice-impacted individuals” or whether the campaign’s job ad is nothing more than a performative nod to the progressive fringe of the Democrat party.
Gun control, though, is part of Aloise’s platform, despite New York State already qualifying as one of the least gun-friendly jurisdictions in the country. Her campaign is endorsed by Everytown’s Moms Demand Action, which lists Aloise as a “2025 Gun Sense Candidate.” In an Instagram post on that “candidate distinction,” Aloise describes her commitment to “keeping dangerous weapons out of the wrong hands while protecting the rights of responsible gun owners.”
As it happens, the Nassau County DA’s Office already has a track record of antipathy towards guns, even when owned by the very employees the state entrusts to enforce its laws.
A decade ago, the DA’s Office prohibited its own prosecutors from having a handgun permit or ownership or possession of a handgun, even in their own homes. UCLA Law Professor Eugene Volokh wrote about the handgun ban for the Washington Post, noting the office’s justification that the policy was “to ensure the safety and comfort of staff, victims, and witnesses, and [was] consistent with other district attorney’s offices” in the New York City area.
Professor Volokh, however, asserted that the policy violated both the Second Amendment and New York state law, and after heightened public scrutiny and criticism from the NRA, the media and others, the then-DA partially rescinded the ban (here and here). Prosecutors remained “strictly prohibited from carrying or possessing a weapon any time they are working, including, but not limited to work in the DA’s office, courthouses, crime scenes, witness interviews, [and] meetings with other agencies,” but were allowed “to own and possess a legally registered handgun in their homes or for legally permitted activity unrelated to their employment and workplace.”
“As best I can tell,” Professor Volokh wrote, “the theory is that the DA’s office is worried that prosecutors will come in to the office in a rage and shoot up the place. What kinds of people is the DA’s office hiring? Are the chances of one of its employees, trusted to make daily decisions about citizens’ liberties and public safety, snapping and turning to murder so high that they outweigh employees’ constitutional rights to protect themselves and their families at home?”
With a new DA potentially on the horizon, one has to wonder whether Ms. Aloise’s professed commitment to protect gun rights includes the rights of the DA’s Office’s employees. If she’s sincere about that and about second chances for convicted individuals, can we even hope that she would support the Trump administration’s initiative to allow individuals subject to federal firearm disabilities to petition the government for restoration of rights?
To even entertain the thought of anyone endorsed by Everytown to hold any office in government local or county or state or federal is contrary to the common sense and the constitution because you know, as they have demonstrated in each and everyone of their endorsements in the past, that they have their hooks in their supported candidate and will push through them for even more unconstitutional infringement and oppression on the second amendment for law abiding citizens knowing that it will be years of going through the courts trying to get their unconstitutional infringements and oppression thrown out.
Quibble — Eugene Volokh was writing for the Volokh Conspiracy, not the Washington Post which was only the host. The VC is now hosted by Reason magazine.
For this article he was writing an opinion piece FOR the Washington Post, although he normally writes for the Volokh Conspiracy.
Look at that URL: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/volokh-conspiracy/wp/2015/09/21/nassau-county-das-office-forbids-prosecutors-from-having-handguns-even-at-home/
I can’t read the article behind a paywall, but that URL includes “volokh-conspiracy”.
All of Eugene Volokh’s ‘volokh-conspiracy’ opinion pieces at the WP were written FOR the WP. Its different with the move to Reason magazine as they are not written FOR Reason magazine but rather appear there as he wants them to. At the WP he didn’t have much editorial independence and could only write FOR them, at Reason magazine he doesn’t have to write FOR them but rather can write for himself with editorial control.
That does not compute. Most VC opinions are opposed to just about everything the woke WaPo stands for. He would not have moved from his own site to the WaPo, and they would not have accepted him, under the condition that he write FOR them. As the VC banner says …
Mostly law professors | Sometimes contrarian | Often libertarian | Always independent | Est. 2002
You are right, but editorial control and ownership of the content belonged to the WP so his opinion pieces were for them because they decided if it could or could not be published and what was in it. Everything at the WP is FOR the WP – they own all the content and exercise complete editorial control. So basically he was their ’employee’ without being an ’employee’ – he was writing FOR them and not for himself.
“Most VC opinions are opposed to just about everything the woke WaPo stands for.”
Which is why the WP would only let it be published as ‘opinion’ instead of a journalistic staff type of thing – it gave the appearance of ‘equal time fairness’ without actually giving it equal time fairness because they controlled what he could or could not write. But that’s the past, lets move on to present day and we find that the WP is worse now. And about the time they went full woke that’s when Eugene Volokh left because its unlikely they would publish his opinion pieces any more and had dropped the pretense of ‘equal time fairness’.