A liberal lawyer spoke to more than 100 people at the Tempe campus Wednesday about his experiences in justice and the lessons he learned from the 1960s.
The School of Social Transformation hosted the lecture as part of its Seeking Justice in Arizona series.
From the beginning, Pinal County Attorney James P. Walsh asked the audience not to connect liberalism in the ’60s with hippies.
“I am not and was not a hippie,” he said.
Walsh discussed important events that occurred during the 1960s, such as the assassinations of President John F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr., and how they impacted the era.
He used these events, and his experience as the former chief deputy to the Arizona attorney general, to discuss how to be a good prosecutor.
A prosecutor must be fair and have compassion, he said.
“I mean compassion for all the parts, whether it be the victim, or the person who has been accused of the crime,” Walsh said.
A prosecutor must also have integrity and imagination.
“If you don’t have imagination, you won’t be able to engage in other activities and relate them together,” Walsh said.
His department in Pinal County works with crime and gang prevention.
“I would much rather spend the energy and the money to prevent crimes than to try cases and put people away,” he said.
A prosecutor needs to have good judgment, courage, a vision of the community the prosecutor is serving and no personal political agenda, he said.
“You might want to run for re-election and you might want to run for a higher office, but I think it’s still possible to avoid having a personal political agenda in the operations of your office, particularly in the prosecutors function,” Walsh said.
In the 1960s, he said, his quest as a liberal was jutice and public service.
“Any of my politically conservative peers may well have traveled the same road with different signposts and arrived at the same destination: a commitment to do justice and public service to the community,” he said, and urged the audience to also engage in the pursuit of justice.
Justice studies freshman Kristin D’Souza said she attended the lecture to learn a perspective on law.
“He said he’s a liberal kind of guy, which is interesting to me because I’m liberal,” she said.
Marjorie Zatz, director and professor at the School of Social Transformation, said the series was designed to discuss major issues that divide the country with a focus in Arizona.
It’s important for new prosecutors to learn and understand the past and its scholarly lessons, and to engage in the community by volunteering, Walsh said.
“In that learning process, throw in a dash of skepticism [and] be bold enough to challenge conventional wisdom,” he said. “If the poverty around you offends you — offends your sense of justice — do something about it.”
Reach the reporter at rachel.jimenez@asu.edu.
