SPRINGFIELD — On March 1, incumbent Mary Hurley announced she would not run for reelection to the Governor’s Council. Within hours, Springfield attorney Jeffrey Morneau announced he would seek the Democratic nomination to represent the 8th district on the panel that confirms state judges and parole board members. This will be Morneau’s second shot at the job, having lost to Hurley in the 2016 Democratic primary by a margin of 59 to 41 percent.
A graduate of Holyoke High School, Morneau, 51, attended Providence College, where he earned a business degree. After playing and teaching tennis for a couple of years, he worked his way through Western New England University School of Law, then earned a master’s degree in law from Georgetown University Law Center. After graduating Georgetown, he returned to Springfield, where he joined a law firm.
“I worked at a large law firm for about four years,” he said. “Then hung my shingle and started my own practice with a couple of people in Holyoke. Then, in 2011, we joined up with John Connor and I’m one of the founding partners of Connor & Morneau.”
Morneau said the Springfield law firm represents employees, labor unions and consumers “with regard to matters like wage theft, fighting discrimination, fighting for paid family medical leave, and battling against the insurance companies and big businesses that commit unfair and deceptive practices against consumers. That’s really the mainstay of our practice.”
While he ran for the office six years ago, Morneau said he has not sought election to any other post.
“This is the only elected office that I’ve run for and, really, the only one that I’m interested in,” he told the Athol Daily News. “I believe my qualifications, my skill set, my background make me uniquely qualified for this position.”
Morneau said he became interested in the Governor’s Council position during his term as president of the Hampden County Bar Association from 2015 to 2016.
“I became very interested in the judicial selection process,” he explained. “It really occurred around the time when western Mass was concerned, my colleagues were concerned, about appointments to the bench; to positions in western Mass being given to lawyers who were from outside the community, meaning primarily from Worcester County and other counties.
“I helped to rally and bring together the Hampshire County Bar leaders, the Franklin County Bar leaders, and the Berkshire Bar leaders to come together with our Governor’s Councilor at the time, and really tried to ensure that we were getting judges out here who really understood the community in which they were serving. We were really fighting to get western Mass lawyers who wanted to become judges and were qualified to become judges.”
That experience, he said, taught him a great deal about the process. Asked if too many judgeships are awarded as political appointments, Morneau said, “I think for the most part we’ve done a really good job of getting really good judges out here in western Mass and ensuring western Mass lawyers are appointed to those positions.
“Where we can do a better job,” he continued, “is in getting more people to apply, getting a more diverse judiciary, reaching out to the legal community, informing them, instructing them, educating them about the possibility of becoming a judge down the road as a career path. I think we can more applicants, we can get more qualified applicants, and we can get more diverse applicants if we do that. We need to keep politics out of the process and, not being a politician, that’s something I’m very passionate about.”
Asked about the qualifications he’d look for in judges, in addition to education, temperament, skill set and experience, Morneau said, “The thing that really stands out to me is that the judges need to have a real understanding of the community in which they’ll be serving. In this 8th district, there are significant differences in the various communities. Greenfield is different from Northampton that is different than Pittsfield that’s different than Springfield. You really have to have a really good understanding of all the various communities in which you can be sitting.”
Things that would disqualify a candidate for a judgeship, said Morneau, would include the candidate’s “stances on things like Roe v. Wade, a woman’s right to choose. Individual stances on the death penalty. Those are things, to me, which are very, very important.”
Morneau is married. His wife, Kate, is an elementary school principal in West Springfield. His 18-year-old son heads off to James Madison University in the fall and his 16-year-old daughter attends East Longmeadow High School.
His opponents in the Democratic primary are North Adams School Committee member Tara Jacobs, Springfield attorney Michael Fenton, and attorney Shawn Allyn of Holyoke. Palmer resident and U.S. Air Force veteran John Comerford is the sole Republican in the race.
The 8th district consists of Berkshire, Franklin, Hampden, and Hampshire counties.
Greg Vine can be reached at gvineadn@gmail.com