SUSPENDED CANNABIS Control Commission chair Shannon O’Brien urged a judge to postpone a meeting scheduled for Tuesday with Treasurer Deborah Goldberg, saying the person who tapped, hired, and suspended her is now refusing to give her a fair chance of defending herself against charges of making “racially, ethnically, and culturally insensitive statements.”
“The fact is, we need to have a transparent process, a fair process, and it needs to be open to the public so that people can see the truth of what’s been happening in the job I’m trying to do,” O’Brien said after the Monday court hearing.
Suffolk Superior Court Judge Debra Squires-Lee said she would make a decision prior to Tuesday’s scheduled 1 p.m. meeting.
In a filing with the court, O’Brien’s legal team objected to the private meeting Goldberg is seeking to hold and demanded a “public, name-clearing hearing.”
O’Brien’s legal team said the Tuesday meeting needs to be postponed until she gains access to all of the specific charges against her. She also wants the power to secure testimony from witnesses and an impartial “finder of facts” to preside over the meeting. She also wants the meeting to be open to the public.
“You will see there are only five specific charges against her and if you look at what she’s charged with and look at what really happened, you’ll find that these are laughable,” O’Brien’s lawyer, Max Stern, told reporters. “The very person who has made these allegations is now going to sit as judge, jury, and executioner, and that cannot be consistent with any kind of a fair process.”
Goldberg’s representative from the attorney general’s office told Squires-Lee that O’Brien already has all of the relevant information for Tuesday’s hearing and additional hearings will be scheduled as additional information on other allegations becomes available. He also told the judge that delay could end up costing taxpayers more (O’Brien is currently receiving her salary of $181,722 while on suspension) and continue to leave the Cannabis Control Commission without a chair.
The treasurer’s office insisted the meeting Tuesday will happen as planned unless the judge intervenes.
“We look forward to hearing the court’s decision,” said Andrew Napolitano, a Goldberg spokesperson, in an email statement. “We hope to move forward with tomorrow’s meeting with Chair O’Brien as planned.”
The court hearing on Monday followed a decision by O’Brien on Friday to file a series of documents with the court laying out for the first time why Goldberg suspended her on September 14 and her interpretation of those events. Included in the documents was a letter Goldberg sent her that accused O’Brien of making racially insensitive statements while she was chair of the commission.
O’Brien once occupied the same position of state treasurer that Goldberg now holds and she’s been a mainstay in Democratic Party circles for decades. She was the Democratic nominee for governor in 2002, losing to Republican Mitt Romney.
In her court filing, O’Brien said Goldberg herself asked O’Brien to apply for the position of chair of the Cannabis Control Commission and even extended the application period so that she could do so because of concerns about other applicants, specifically another commissioner, Nurys Camargo.
“During a call in September, Treasurer Goldberg indicated that she was annoyed that Commissioner Camargo and her allies had pressured her to appoint Commissioner Camargo as chair, and further told me that she never would have appointed Commissioner Camargo as chair of the CCC,” O’Brien said in an affidavit filed with the court.
While O’Brien filed with the court the letter she received from Goldberg outlining in broad terms the allegations against her, she did not release a report commissioned by the Cannabis Control Commission looking into the allegations. A second report dealing with her interactions with Shawn Collins, the executive director of the commission, has also not been released.
According to O’Brien’s filings with the court, Goldberg called on O’Brien to resign soon after O’Brien publicly announced that Collins would be going on parental leave and then leaving the agency for good. According to O’Brien, Goldberg called her “hysterical” and alleged that O’Brien had lost the confidence of the commission’s staff.
