Robert ‘M.A.’ Johnson: a prosecutor’s prosecutor

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Born: Minneapolis, MN (raised in Anoka, MN)

Education: University of Minnesota, B.A., Business Administration, 1965; University of Minnesota Law School, J.D., 1968

Professional Experience: Anoka County Attorney, 1982-present; Chief Deputy County Attorney, 1974-82; Minnesota Attorney General’s Office, 1974; associate, Babcock, Locher, Neilson & Mannella, 1971-73; Anoka County Attorney’s Office, 1968-71

Bar Activities: past president of Anoka County Bar Association; Minnesota State Bar Association Board of Governors, 1998-present; past president of Minnesota County Attorneys Association, 1992; past chair of Civil Law Committee and the Legislative Committee; Board member, 1986-present; Board member of National District Attorneys Association (NDAA), 1987-present (president, 2000-01; vice president, 1993-95; state director, 1989-92; council member of American Bar Association Criminal Justice Section Council, 1991-95

Personal: Lives in Anoka with his wife. Two sons, both of whom are lawyers in the Twin Cities.

Robert “M.A.” Johnson, who has been a staple of Anoka County’s legal community for over 30 years, recently added the title of president of the National District Attorneys Association (NDAA) to his list of activities and honors. The NDAA, which turned 50 years old this year, is made up of approximately 7,000 prosecuting attorneys from across the country. The NDAA Board of Directors elected Johnson as president for the 2000-2001 term in July of 1999, and Johnson began his term on July 1, 2000.

One of the organization’s primary functions is to provide training for prosecutors at the National Advocacy Center (NAC) in Columbia, S.C. The NAC, along with the Department of Justice, spends several million dollars a year to train hundreds of prosecutors at no cost to their local jurisdiction. The NDAA is also heavily involved in the American Prosecutors Research Institute (APRI) and the 30-year-old National College of District Attorneys (NCDA), both of which provide training for prosecutors. The APRI is primarily grant funded, while the NCDA is funded largely by tuition.

As president of the NDAA, Johnson is spokesperson for state prosecutors throughout the United States. He is intimately involved in addressing the mutual concerns of the U.S. District Attorneys and state prosecutors, including state and federal prosecution coordination.

“I want to accomplish something with the organization,” says Johnson. “The question is, what should the organization accomplish for prosecutors?”

Where ‘M.A.’ comes from

Over the past 50 years, the name Robert Johnson has become somewhat of a legend in Anoka County. Robert W. Johnson, who is Robert “M.A.” Johnson’s father, was elected Anoka County Attorney in 1950. In 1982, Robert “M.A.” Johnson succeeded his father as Anoka County Attorney, a role that he fills to this day. As Johnson pointed out, either he or his father has been Anoka County Attorney for the past half century.

Johnson has dedicated almost his entire career to serving in the Anoka County Attorney’s Office. He entered the legal profession in 1968, while the Vietnam War was under way.

“I graduated from law school [at the University of Minnesota] and started the next day at the Anoka County Attorney’s Office,” he recalls. Johnson also joined the National Guard that year and has been active ever since. “[The National Guard] has been a very positive experience for the past 32 years,” says Johnson.

Three and a half years after he graduated from law school and joined the Anoka County Attorney’s Office, Johnson was approached by an Anoka law firm and entered private practice. It was not long before he returned to the public sector. According to Johnson, even though he liked the people and the real estate work he was doing, he found himself becoming consumed by his work.

“One of my sons wondered if I was living at the office and just came home to visit,” says Johnson. “In private practice I could put in a 12-hour day and still have 40 clients that I didn’t get to. I had trouble dealing with that. I looked at a fellow attorney in his 50s — which is younger than I am now — and asked myself whether I wanted to be doing what he was doing when I got to be his age. The answer, for me, was no.”

In the public sector, “there are not as many highs and lows,” continued Johnson. “The lows aren’t as low — and the highs aren’t as high either — but I like doing the public’s work. You work for essentially one client. You can go home at the end of the day feeling that you did a good day’s work.”

After just two years in the private sector, Johnson worked for a year in the Minnesota Attorney General’s Office and then returned to the Anoka County Attorneys Office, this time as the chief deputy county attorney. According to Johnson, his decision was based in large part on his desire to again work with his father.

“I enjoyed working for him for three and a half years [before I went into private practice], and I knew my dad wouldn’t be county attorney forever,” he says. “If I wanted to work with him again, that was the time. I learned everything I know from watching [my father] work.”

It was through working with his father that Johnson became referred to as “M.A.” With two attorneys named Robert Johnson in the Anoka County Attorneys Office, their coworkers needed some way to tell them apart.

At first people referred to the younger Johnson as “Junior,” a practice that was quickly ended when the father and son pointed out that they do not share the same middle name. It wasn’t long before the older Johnson was referred to by his first and middle initials, “R.W.” (for Robert Wesley), and the younger Johnson was referred to as “M.A.,” which stands for the initials of his two middle names, Maurice and Allen.

According to Johnson, the nicknames worked quite well — until he was referred to as “ma” (rhymes with “baaa”) during an office holiday skit. But once the laughter died down — and the correct pronunciation of each letter was embedded firmly in his co-workers’ heads — the two Robert Johnson’s were again comfortable with the distinction. In fact, to this day M.A. often refers to his father as R.W.

“R.W. is enormously respected in this state,” boasts Johnson, adding that his father remains active in the community. “I’ve been [Anoka County Attorney] for 18 years and people still send mail to R.W. or come to see R.W.,” says Johnson.

There is a lot of overlap in the activities that the two Robert Johnsons have been involved in, and most of the time, the younger Johnson doesn’t mind being confused with his father. Still, Johnson recalls an American Bar Association (ABA) Criminal Justice Standards Committee meeting that he attended not too long ago that made him think twice about the comparison.

Wayne LaFave, a widely known au
thor of legal works, had met R.W. many times over the years, but had not seen him for some time. R.W. was not at the ABA meeting, but M.A. was.

“LaFave came up to me and said, ‘Bob — it’s been a long time,’” says Johnson. “But I had never met [LaFave] before! I realized that [LaFave] thought I was my dad. Now, I look something like [my dad], and have some of his same mannerisms, but I’m not 83 years old!”

M.A.’s philosophy

During his 18 years as Anoka County Attorney, Johnson has tried to create an environment where people can come to work each day with smiles on their faces, and believes that he has been successful.

“The staff in the office is very senior,” says Johnson. “A couple of people are working past retirement age. That’s a measure of running an office that people like to work in.”

Johnson’s philosophy is as follows: Treat everyone — including victims, witnesses, defendants, and other attorneys — like you would want to be treated.

“A lot of the frustration in being a prosecutor comes from believing that a person is guilty, but knowing that you can’t convict because of judicial rulings or because the police made a mistake,” observes Johnson. “Criminal prosecution is difficult, certainly. You see people that are deeply hurt, and you see truly evil people and you want to protect society from them. But most people are not inherently evil. They’ve done something wrong, but they’re not evil. Our job as prosecutors is not to convict people — it’s justice,” explains Johnson.

Sometimes that means that a good prosecutor may decline to charge a defendant, or fashion a result that punishes the defendant yet gives him or her the opportunity to lead a productive life, continues Johnson.

Johnson recognizes that he could have made more money had he stayed in the private sector, but says he has no regrets.

“Part of [a prosecutor’s] salary is doing the right thing,” observes Johnson. “You don’t have to worry about the business aspects of your decisions. I come to the office each day and believe in what I’m doing — that’s worth a huge amount.

“What is it worth to be the person people come to for a sense of peace and closure? What is it worth when you can create a result that satisfies the victim yet lets the perpetrator have a productive life? What is it worth when you can take a truly evil perpetrator off the streets so that [he or she] never hurts the public again? To me it’s worth everything. [As a prosecutor, I’m] doing the work that is the very heart of what government is supposed to do.”

A prosecutor’s major issues

Johnson identifies three major issues that face the modern criminal justice system: cybercrime, more effective use of DNA evidence, and race and bias.

“DNA is the silver bullet in law enforcement,” says Johnson. It can be used to prove that a particular defendant came into contact with a particular victim. But perhaps more importantly it can be used to prove that a particular defendant did not commit the crime of which he or she is accused.

Johnson points to a recent case combining cybercrime and DNA evidence in which a man communicated with a 13-year-old girl in an Internet chatroom. Eventually, the man drove to meet the girl and sexually assaulted her. The police conducted a photo lineup and an in-person lineup, and the victim identified the defendant as the man who had molested her.

“The defendant had an alibi, but it was provided by his family and friends, and with all of the other evidence we could have convicted him,” observes Johnson. However, there was some DNA evidence left on the young girl’s clothing. After DNA testing showed that the defendant was not the girl’s assailant, he was not convicted.

Johnson views that case as indicative of the power of DNA evidence. “When they were told the results of the DNA test, the parents of the victim reacted by saying, ‘Thank goodness we didn’t convict an innocent man,’” says Johnson.

The importance of public faith in the criminal justice system is paramount to Johnson. He believes that even the perception of racial bias in the criminal justice system is harmful. “When the public stops believing in us, we have failed,” Johnson notes.

The election

As president of the NDAA, Johnson will have a say in how these major issues will be addressed in Congress. According to Johnson, the circumstances of his election as president of the NDAA rivaled last year’s heated presidential race.

During the summer of 1998, Jeff Sullivan, Attorney General in Yakima County, Wash., announced his candidacy for the position ultimately won by Johnson.

“He is a very outspoken man, and I didn’t think he was the right person to lead the NDAA,” recalls Johnson, who announced his candidacy soon after Sullivan’s announcement. It wasn’t long before a third candidate, Joe D’Alessandro, state’s attorney in Fort Meyers, Fla., announced that he would also run.

The president of the NDAA is elected by the NDAA Board of Directors, which is made up of about 90 prosecuting attorneys from across the country. When the ballots were initially cast in the most recent election, none of the three candidates received a majority of the votes. D’Alessandro withdrew his candidacy and the ballots were cast a second time.

But the process did not end after the second vote either — when the votes were tallied it was found that Johnson and Sullivan had each received 41 votes. By the time the votes were cast a third time, one of the directors had left the meeting. In the end, Johnson won the election by a margin of one vote.

The race for the presidency of the NDAA lacked the mudslinging so common in organizations’ presidential elections. According to Johnson, the process of running for the presidency of the NDAA actually brought him closer to his opponent, and he named Sullivan to the executive committee as one of his first official acts as president. Sullivan is well qualified to continue to participate in creating policy for the NDAA, says Johnson.

Johnson and Reno

As president of the NDAA, Johnson is a resource for attorneys and the media, and is responsible for disseminating information to prosecuting attorneys around the country.

His duties as president of the NDAA also include spending time in Washington, D.C. championing the issues important to the nation’s prosecuting attorneys. Johnson is involved in securing grant money, working on legislation such as the medical records act and ensuring that the work Congress does “makes sense on a local prosecution level.”

As the representative of the NDAA in Congress, Johnson has had the opportunity to meet with many high-profile individuals, including U.S. Attorney General Janet Reno. Johnson describes his relationship with Reno as “superb.”

Referring to Reno as incredibly courteous, Johnson relates one of his first discussions with the attorney general: “I received a phone call and the voice on the phone asked me whether I could hold for the Attorney General. ‘Of course I could,’ I thought. [Reno] was soon on the line and said to me, ‘I
want to work with you and the NDAA on ethics matters in the next few weeks.’ I spoke with someone from her office to schedule the meeting and they asked me when I wanted to meet with the attorney general. I said, ‘I think her schedule is busier than mine,’ but they said she wanted to accommodate my schedule!”

Johnson ended up taking a Friday flight to Washington, D.C., this past January with his wife (because it was a cheaper fare, he jokes) and Reno came into the hallway outside her office to greet them. “She has an extraordinary sense of humility,” says Johnson. “She shows everyone enormous respect, whether you’re a receptionist or a head of state.”

After a 45 to 50 minute meeting discussing how state and federal prosecutors can work together more closely, Reno offered to fund a two-day ethics symposium, which will take place Jan. 17-18, 2001, at National Advocacy Center in Columbia, S.C. Since the January 2000 meeting, Johnson has received six calls from Reno’s office checking how the planning for the symposium is progressing and asking whether the Attorney General can help out further. “[Reno] is very cooperative to work with, and she follows up to be sure the work is being done,” observes Johnson.

“I could not name a person, outside of family, that I respect more than [I respect] her — she is truly incredible,” says Johnson of Reno. “We as a nation have been truly blessed for the last eight years having a person like [Reno] as Attorney General.”