Noone, Ryan face off for DA
Is the glass half-full, or halfempty?
Figuratively speaking, that is a way of looking at the Election Day contest for Chester County District Attorney, the county’s top law enforcement official and the person who oversees prosecutions for crimes large and small across the county.
The race pits two experienced prosecutors who worked as colleagues for a number of years against one another — Democrat Deb Ryan and Republican Michael Noone. Both have significant support, and the ultimate results of the race could be the slimmest of margins, many observers say.
Ryan has stressed that fundamental changes need to be made in the way the District Attorney’s Office is run to re-establish its reputation among victims, community members, and police, a reputation she claims has faltered in the eight years in which current District Attorney Tom Hogan has led the office.
“We need new leadership,” Ryan said in an interview last month. “Tough on crime doesn’t work. Smart on crime does.”
Noone, on the other hand, maintains that the office in which he serves as second-in-command is among the leading prosecutor’s offices in the state and that the policies and programs put in place under his watch have proven successful in both punishing and preventing crime — illustrated by a historically low homicide rate in 2019.
“I have the experience and qualifications to do the job successfully and effectively,” he told a reporter in an interview. “What we do is a cooperative effort. Law enforcement is the ultimate team effort.”
Ryan, 48, of Birmingham, served as a prosecutor in the DA’s Office for nine years, from 2008 to 2017. As a deputy district attorney, she headed the DA’s Child Abuse Unit, prosecuting sexual and physical crimes against children, and was named “Prosecutor of the Year” in 2014. She is a graduate of Boston University and the University
of Pittsburgh School of Law. She now works as coordinator of the Safe and Healthy Communities Initiative at the Crime Victims’ Center of Chester County.
She has been endorsed by the Chester County Fraternal Order of Police Lodge, as well as the State Police FOP. She is being supported by former District Attorney Joseph Carroll, and, if elected, would be not only the county’s first Democrat to serve as DA but also its first female DA.
Noone, 44, of West Chester, graduated from Wilkes University, where he was class valedictorian. He earned his law degree from the Villanova University School of Law and then worked as a trial prosecutor in the office from 2003 until 2007. He took over as first assistant district attorney when Hogan took office in 2012. In addition to overseeing the trial prosecutors and staff in the DA’s Office, he has also handled several high profile cases, including murder and sexual assaults.
He has been endorsed by the Chester County Chiefs of Police, the Phoenixville Police Association, and the County Detectives Association of Pennsylvania. Hogan promoted his candidacy when he withdrew from the race in July citing a desire to devote more time to his family.
Neither have run for public office previously.
In highlighting the advances the office had made in the past eight years as reasons why he should be elected, Noone pointed to the internal training procedures for trial prosecutors begun in 2012. “That had never been done before,” he said. The training allows new attorneys in the office to become more effective litigators in the courtroom, he said, even without counting “wins and losses.”
Noone also praised the effort to install “best practices” in local law enforcement procedures, including the use of body and vehicle cameras, recorded interviews, scientific eyewitness identification techniques, and policies for investigating officer-involved shootings.
“We want to have the policies in place to preserve the integrity of the criminal justice system,” he said.
His work on the county’s Opioid Task Force is also an important part of his work, he said, helping the office bring a multidisciplinary approach to fighting the epidemic. “It is important to reduce the stigma that addiction carries with it. By talking about it and learning about it we can help prevent future additions.”
For her part, Ryan’s call for change in the office centers on its work with crime victims, the policies and police. For the first group, she contends the DA’s Office engages in a “hit and miss” effort with victims, sometimes failing to consult them on the resolution of cases until they read about it “in the paper. That’s unconscionable.”
She called for an increase in treatment courts that keep people from reoffending and working with community organizations to reach out to atrisk groups with education prevention techniques that she has been using in her work at the Crime Victims Center. “We need to prevent crime from happening, and we are seeing a difference,” she said.
Ryan also maintained that the DA’s Office had too many times during Hogan’s tenure tried to “micro-manage” local and state police departments, dictating how they should run their investigations.
“There is a fractured relationship with law enforcement,” she said. “The office too often oversteps into police work. We each have our own respective roles, and I believe that law enforcement is ready for a change in leadership. They are the ones on the streets dealing with these issues.”