Patrick Perfetti and Elizabeth McGrath met with Cortland County voters Thursday. And both made the case that each feels deserving to be the county’s next chief prosecutor.
Perfetti, a Republican who was raised in Homer and lives in Cortland, spoke to about 20 people at Access to Independence of Cortland County on North Main Street in Cortland. He discussed how enforcing criminal laws in the county has evolved since he was first elected in 2016, and how some criminal defendants who are 17 or 18 years old can’t simply be prosecuted because of recent limitations to state law.
“Meth(amphetamine) was a particular concern” when I took office in 2017,” Perfetti said. “That has gotten better but fentanyl, another illegal drug, has become a greater problem.”
“That’s one of the differences we deal with here in Cortland,” he said. “Cortland’s proximity to (Interstate 81) means we have 30, or even 60, miles (of highway where people can commit crimes).”
McGrath, since announcing her campaign in early April, has criticized Perfetti’s leadership of the office, and its high turnover, saying she would be a better leader. She had been the chief assistant DA for Cortland County under former DA Marc Suben and Perfetti.
She left to enter private practice after a dispute with Perfetti regarding comments about women in the office she said were inappropriate led to her receiving a $100,000 settlement from the county Legislature. She now represents children and families as a lawyer on behalf of Citizens Concerned for Children, an Ithaca-area nonprofit. She also is a Homer village trustee.
A Brooklyn native and a Bryn Mawr College graduate, McGrath attended law school at Hofstra University on Long Island on a fellowship.
She spoke Wednesday of having spent five years prosecuting child-abuse and special-victims cases in five years at the Bronx County District Attorney’s Office, and having learned to involve the crime victims’ feelings while handling roughly “80 cases at a time,” which “led to a change in my life.” She said she moved to the Finger Lakes to help care for her mother.
Perfetti is a graduate of Homer High School, the College of St. Rose and Thomas M. Cooley Law School. He has a son in his second year of college, and his daughter who is in her final year of high school.
McGrath, like Perfetti a parent of two children, mentioned drug crime. But she said solutions take money and education.
“We cannot prosecute our way out of a drug crisis,” she said.
Because Access to Independence, an advocacy group that provides a number of services to people with disabilities, hosted the forum, questioners asked both candidates about how they would handle cases involving persons with disabilities.
McGrath talked about her experience dealing with a witness with hearing problems, working with the witness to make him familiar with court proceedings and the environment. Perfetti said the court system has rules regarding defendants and witnesses with disabilities, and his office would follow them.
