For Palm Beach County, a new prosecutor: Sam Stern | Endorsement

State attorneys are very powerful figures in Florida’s criminal justice system. They decide who to charge with crimes and whether to accept a plea bargain. The best ones know that suppressing public corruption is as integral to their duty as locking up street criminals.

In Palm Beach County’s 15th judicial circuit, someone new will soon exercise that vast discretion for the first time in more than a decade. State Attorney Dave Aronberg is retiring after 12 years. It’s the most important local office on the November ballot.

We strongly recommend Republican candidate Sam Stern. The office needs new direction, and it is less likely to get it under the Democratic nominee, Alexcia Cox, 45, a long-time deputy chief assistant there who has Aronberg’s endorsement. Voters should shake things up.

Stern, 44, a Palm Beach Gardens lawyer, has experience as a federal and state prosecutor in New Jersey and in the Palm Beach state attorney’s office. We’re confident that he would pursue public corruption aggressively.

A third candidate, Adam Farkas, has no party affiliation. Farkas, 40, a defense lawyer who was an assistant state attorney for 10 months, makes a good point: A state attorney should be nonpartisan. We agree in concept. But it es partisan, and his campaign is not competitive.

A well-balanced prosecutor

We endorsed Stern in the Republican primary, saying he would be “the kind of well-balanced prosecutor the public deserves — competent, forceful but compassionate, tough on crime but also mindful that some people accused of crimes are innocent.”

Miscarriages of justice are inevitable in a process so dependent on human judgment. The National Registry of Exonerations now lists 3,588 cases over the past 35 years of people whose innocence was eventually proven after they went to prison. Florida accounts for 96, including 30 who had spent time on death row.

Conscientious prosecutors create conviction integrity units as a last resort for people with credible innocence claims. Florida has five such programs — those in Broward, Hillsborough and Jacksonville have had notable results — but Aronberg’s unit has not recommended a single wrongful conviction case.

Cox, who established the Palm Beach unit, told us it reviewed 120 pleadings before she left it. She was pleased that it hadn’t found any case that went wrong. Coupled with her de ella expressed pride in the office’s conviction rates, that suggests an unrealistic belief in its infallibility.

“Conviction rates are not an end to themselves,” Stern said our interview. “Pleading down to a misdemeanor scores as a conviction.”

Let’s make a deal

One example is a 2021 plea bargain in which former Boca Raton Mayor Susan Haynie pleaded guilty to misdemeanors to dispose of four felony charges, including a perjury count, relating to misconduct in office. She was sentenced to pay court costs and a fine of $1,050 and serve 12 months on probation. She avoided prison and kept her right to vote.

On his campaign web page, Cox boasts 76 endorsements from present and former elected officials, including Aronberg, four Democratic members of Congress, Broward State Attorney Harold Pryor, an assortment of nonpartisan local officials, two police unions and a dozen other organizations.

Such political endorsements carry less weight than Stern’s support from the two Democrats, Gregg Lerman and Craig Williams, who lost the primary to Cox.

Williams, a chief assistant state attorney, wrote that “while I am a Democrat, I put public safety before party politics. …No office is more important to the safety and the quality of life of our community. “I also know well the professional qualifications of all the candidates, having served with all three.”

Lerman wrote to Stern that while he agrees it should not be a partisan office, “there are times when partisanship must be set aside and your candidacy … is clearly one of those times.”

A family law pedigree

Stern has a distinctive crime-fighting family pedigree.

His father, Herbert Stern, was a crusading prosecutor in New Jersey and later a federal judge. The candidate graduated from Fordham Law School and passed up private practice to be an assistant prosecutor in Hudson County, NJ, and for then-US Attorney Chris Christie, before becoming an assistant state attorney in West Palm Beach. He practices white-collar defense and teaches trial advocacy at the University of Miami and the National Trial Advocacy College at the University of Virginia.

His platform calls for a task force to deal with felons who commit gun crimes and for protecting the elderly from fraud and financial crimes.

Through Sept. 6, Cox reported $268,432 in contributions and Stern reported $283,253, including $175,000 in loans from himself. Farkas listed $16,585 in contributions, including $11,000 in loans from himself. The office salary, set by the Legislature, is $218,939.

The Sun Sentinel Editorial Board consists of Opinion Editor Steve Bousquet, Deputy Opinion Editor Dan Sweeney, editorial writers Pat Beall and Martin Dyckman, and Editor-in-Chief Julie Anderson. To contact us, email at [email protected].