high profile cases going through the county yeah there's there's always a lot going on as i tell people unfortunately in my line of work we don't have to advertise for business we get a lot of work i'm sorry to say you're right yeah  job largely as i view it is it's a position where politics really shouldn't factor into the position what i'm doing with a lot is the facts and the law and whether charges should be filed or the university of pittsburgh from here graduate with a degree in bias by a sigh biological sciences while at pitt i was fortunate enough to be in the band that pit i was a member of the and it's always great to see the how it's grown and how it's been supported over the years and how how well they perform there there's something i'm proud of when i see them i saw last year at the best center band festival and they did a great job veterinary side for several years i've managed to restaurants i've done pretty much every job you can imagine and i went to law school late and it was something i discovered that i thought i would be very good at and unfortunately a thrived with it but i a master's degree in business administration which is obviously benefits me and my position i'm dealing with now and also help the ministration but my background  what i tell the students when i run into a man when i'm talking on the schools is any education you have is going to be a benefit to some point you may not realize the immediate realize the immediate advantage of it at that point in time but certainly as i became district attorney and i learned about the prescription drug problem and the problem we're running into with heroin addiction my advantage in knowing biochemistry and having worked as a drug rep and having worked as a paramedic and actually handled overdose cases really benefits me so that's my background and i want to do kane law school one thousand nine hundred three i had the benefit of being a clerk to then professor maureen langley green who went on to become a superior court judge who's a good friend of mine a mentor and then i started in the campaigning for district attorney but i'm trying to catch as many games as i can and they let me sit on the bench and help out which i appreciate my sons in the worth of baseball association were part of the best the league done in the valley so it's a good group said said well you've touched upon something that has struck and i'm sorry to say this concept of the school district here over the last few months drugs and the problems that they're causing it's probably the number one criminal issue facing us well not as a problem it is it's the number one criminal issue facing us in washington county it's not just washington sure one of the things that surprised me was in two thousand and twelve i knew we had more heroin cases and we used to one point i'm not that long ago you could count the number of heroin cases that we would have any year on a trial list on one  does an annual report on that's in washington county and what's causing the cases he he has and i was immediately struck by one line of that report that indicated that in two thousand and eleven we have forty three over the status now the reason that struck me as something significant was i had been a paramedic for a number of years i had handled you know hundreds thousands of ambulance calls i never had in my time as a paramedic a fatal accidental overdose this was no and that's what these were these were people that didn't intended that they were just accidental because they were using drugs they they overdose  so that we started i talked to tim about it and it turned out a lot of that was due to prescription medications a lot of the prescription medications are opiates they're opioids and they're related  to heroin and if you look at their chemical structures they look very similar and what was happening was a lot of people were getting addicted to the prescription medications and these weren't bad people per se these were people that  you know the worst thing they did was get hurt on the job and they got on prescription medication next thing you know they're walked on the drug and when they came to the drug anymore a lot of these people were using heroin or they were overdosing on the pills  have a significant problem with it i just got done doing a statistical analysis of our twenty fourteen cases just to get a feel for how many how many cases are being driven by drugs and what i did as part of that is i took a statistical valid sample with confidence level and i looked at the criminal complaints and that sample what i want to see is how many of these cases are being driven by a drug well but a third of them were being driven by alcohol which in our experience in washington county that's that's always been true about a third of our criminal docket up in washington the cor drugs that to me translates in to why we've had an increase in the number of criminal cases we have been watching the gotti part of it's due to people being here from out of state as you're working here but the other part of that and i believe this is due to the the heroin the influence of heroin sadness area and how many cases we've run into we spike in two thousand i hope it's i hope it's  t year with overdose that's what people need to realize is that the deaths are only the tip of the iceberg with those deaths comes addiction people being in the treatment people requiring at resources to get into treatment people in my jail are jail or a county jail and people there are also going up to the emergency room the didn't die from an overdose but fortunately due to a medical intervention or them  safety many times we had to deal with injuries and people getting hurt on the job as you mentioned earlier and watch that our companies took a very vigorous approach to make sure that if the doctor had any options other than opiates and things that they used those options first might not be the best thing at that time but we kept a very vigilant watch on what happened students don't understand that if they get on drugs who  but gary told me one time that not too long ago that about one in three families in pennsylvania is being affected by a member of their family being addicted to drugs in my world  the criminal justice order study i just did foley and this is a conservative number because it made no mention in the complaint whether drugs were directly involved i was just looking at compliance with the complaints i looked at seventy five percent of the cases involve drugs so that's what's driving arc our system up there right now and you have to respond to that you can't just you know incarcerate everybody because you can of course rate yourself out of this problem if they're in jail yes they're not getting drugs but they're also not being treated so that they won't become a receipt of this they don't come back because they're committing crimes to feed a habit that's funny  but they're talking with my drug and i'll call friends in washington drug and alcohol or washington drug and alcohol commission was sure they're telling me there seems to be two main pathways to this and it's you know the pathway that you're kind of talking about you know too much too often you eventually get to this point where you're you know you've got a drug that you can't control you and you don't have control what you're doing the other pathways i want to mention where somebody just gets hurt and they're not appropriately managed or you know somebody is watching to see if they're having a problem with a prescription  opioids they end up needing help or they end up in my jail well we're going to come back after commercial and finish talking about some of the things that you've done and while you've been in office and some other things you're looking forward to do  had one of the highest closure rates ever we we we've worked very hard to improve our administration there i have a great group of people and you know i hear from people throughout the county that you know they'll come up and tell me that we're doing a great job and i certainly appreciate that but the the real it's not about me the office has never been about me the office is about doing the best work you can it's about justice and trying to get cases resolved in an appropriate manner and i'm just blessed with a really good staff we've made some changes and i've tried to bring on the best people i can and my a d a s are top notch i mean my assistants right now my staff is it's never run better bill it's really i'm really proud of how things are run right now as you should be once again the highest rate ever i mean that's an impressive thing for a person who's just been in there for three years well it's also you know when you when you talk about conviction rates and i'm always has an end point to those because a lot of that depends on what evidence you have who's following the charges and we have a very that and say my options are to take a plea and try to mitigate my sentence somewhat or go to trial and if a case is if the evidence is there and it's a strong case they're going  to nine times out of ten make the decision to forego trial and enter a plea yeah that's a tedious process and when you throw the dice in the air you don't know how it's going to land well yeah and that's that's that's the expression you hear up there is we're rolling the dice and sometimes you know you're talking about such big numbers and that's why when you see cases go to trial in washington county and other counties like us a lot of times are the sexual assault cases it carries severe penalties or homicide case way through the system right now in front of judge gilman and that's what i said in that i don't think people sometimes understand the severity of the cases that you deal with i mean they know that it goes to the district attorney if somebody shoots  a like that but they don't understand the the investigatory process and what your office has to do to to bring it to court well yeah and by definition the district attorney of the county is the chief law enforcement officer for the county green gave me some good advice was elected and she said basically you have to temper that power and you've got to make sure you're aware the fact that the power to prosecute is also the power to destroy so it's a power you want to exercise  you want to make sure that you're doing the right thing for the right reason all the time and that's what i've tried to instill in my people that's what how i want them treat cases people who are equal  obviously the higher profile cases the homicides the rapes those types of cases you know they're important but in my mind all cases are important you want to make sure that regardless of what the cases regardless of who the defendant is or who the victim is in the case that it is being addressed in the right manner and speaking addressed in an on political manner and for the right reasons but we are talking about drugs earlier but then we have some other issues gambling baseball and i i was in fire departments for many many years a lot of the smaller organizations their assets of mina cumulated over years and that's been hard work and if you have somebody that gets in there that has a bend towards taking money and using it to gamble you can wipe out assets very quickly and we've seen that happen with a number of smaller organizations of washington county we've seen that with businesses and  washington county but yes gambling's an issue we're trying to one of the things we've been working on is trying to educate businesses and snot for profits this class i did not too long ago with the injury richards was aimed at just making sure they take preventative steps to make sure that people can't have access to the money and they can do things to take the s s of an organization well we say that through the past year i something else i'm sure you want to talk about is with heroin addiction waltzes c and we work very closely or protective services is financial exploitation of the elderly and we've  privileged to serve on a pennsylvania supreme court task force on that issue because we're one of the first areas to have an elder abuse unit we work closely with protective services out of self  are just wonderful people but we meet monthly to discuss cases they give reports a need on people who have been exploited and we try to respond to that quickly so that you know the assets aren't that we're always considered the elderly and now all of a sudden they're they're victims like it in almost anybody else it's really sad we've had cases where people have actually executed powers of attorney to people on they've they've just taken everything they and that's that's a cautionary tale i mean powers with arnie are wonderful thing they're great state toll it's fantastic if you need it but you've got to remember if you're designating somebody as an agent you're basically handing them your wallet and you better it better be somebody you trust there's i mean i said this is this is a good idea possibly for a show later on to deal with our local people well pay you know there are so many other topics i'd love to have you back on the program but i'm going to give you the next few minutes to try to explain to people why they should be voting for you in this upcoming election i've been humbled and honored to serve as washington county's district attorney for the past three and a half years we've assembled a great team we're poised to really move forward at this point in time with a lot of different things to assist the county residents but i'd like to continue the hard work we started the drug task force working constantly it's working out very well for the residents of the county and i'd like to maintain the integrity of the office and i would hope people would respect that and i would ask for their support in the upcoming election well gene it's been wonderful having on the program thanks to having the battery gen once again i had had the opportunity to talk to the principal here today about possibly doing assembly dealing with the i have a drug i love the do this and so we look forward we have been great speakers great they faked it i can talk with him well thank you very much for coming with us today and all look forward to seeing you at the next talking politics western pennsylvania