By Amanda Estes

Staff Writer

Cumberland County District Attorney Stephanie Anderson’s time and opinion have been  hot commodities as of late.

With the Portland School Committee’s decision to make birth control
pills available to King Middle School students, the national spotlight
was turned on school officials, parents and Anderson.

Meredith Vieira spoke to Portland School Committee Chairman John Coyne
and the mother of a King Middle School student from the "Today Show"
studio on Oct. 29. Bill O’Reilly, host of "The O’Reilly Factor" said
“giving sixth grade girls the pill is dumb.”

For her part, Anderson has had to make time in her schedule to field
phone calls from reporters. Last week, "The New York Times" was waiting
for her call.   

“All the major networks wanted me on their morning shows,” Anderson
said during an interview in her office at the Cumberland County
courthouse.

Anderson’s response to all the media attention?

“When’s it going to away?” she wondered. “King Middle School is not the first school in America to face this issue.”

With amusement, Anderson recalled even presidential candidate Hillary
Clinton – “whose liberal credentials cannot be questioned” – 
weighed in on the issue in a televised interview with a local reporter
following an appearance in Durham, New Hampshire. Clinton said she
supports schools making those decisions in consultation with parents.

Anderson, a Cape Elizabeth resident who has been in her current post
since 1990, said she believes King Middle School has received more
attention because of the way the school committee decided the issue
without notifying parents or the school’s attorney. The result has been
school and government officials working out issues with the decision in
the “glare of the public eye,” she said.

“I don’t think it ever dawned on them [school officials] that sex between two 13-year-olds has to be reported,” Anderson said.

According to Maine law, sex involving a person under the age of 14 is
considered sex abuse and a crime that must be reported to the state
Department of Health and Human Services and in some cases, the district
attorney’s office as well. Determining whether two 13-year-olds
engaging in sex is a crime is a decision for the district attorney to
make and not up to the discretion of doctors or nurses, Anderson said.

If the law is ambiguous, it needs to be amended, Anderson said. The
reporting statutes were designed to protect children and if health
practitioners are all operating by their own idea of what constitutes
sexual abuse, children are at risk, she said.

“I feel really strongly a violation of the criminal code is sex abuse,”
Anderson said. “You’d be amazed at how many people think my opinion’s
very important.”

As the chief executive officer of the seventh largest law firm in Maine
and with 27 years in prosecution, Anderson has witnessed the criminal
justice system’s evolution into a “catch basin” for societal problems
including mental illness, substance abuse and bad parenting.

“Back in the good old days, we just used to get bad guys,” she said.
“Now it’s a lot more complicated than that. The old ‘throw the guy in
jail’ just doesn’t work anymore.”

Anderson said there is an expectation that the district attorney will
play a proactive role in the community rather than waiting until
troubled individuals walk through the courthouse doors, but when the
entire criminal justice system is underfunded, rehabilitation can fall
by the wayside.  

“When we can, we ought to at least try to have someone exit the
criminal justice system better than when they went in,” she said.

Anderson said she was tired of seeing the grandchildren of people she
had prosecuted in the past come into the courthouse for their own
trials. She started the first drug court in Maine 12 years ago.
Participants plead guilty and enter drug court where they receive drug
testing and treatment services. If  participants successfully
graduate from drug court, their case may be dismissed or they may get a
reduced sentence.

Currently, there are nearly 400 people in the deferred disposition
program, during which a person’s sentence may be postponed if they meet
court imposed requirements, Anderson said.

Rehabilitation was not a priority while Anderson was working as an
assistant district attorney handling homicide prosecutions in New York
City in the early 1980s. She left Maine the day after graduating from
the University of Maine School of Law. Anderson said she enjoyed those
five years so much, she often couldn’t believe she was getting a
paycheck. She knew, however, that she would come back to Maine to live
out her life.  

Anderson lives with her husband and has two stepchildren. Her stepson
is a third year law student and her stepdaughter had a baby in March,
affording her the title of grandmother.

“Oh God, I hate that,” she said, referring to the title only.

When she’s not in the office, Anderson might spend her time making a
quilt or taking a road trip with her husband on his Harley-Davidson.
She oversees a law firm that handles some 25,000 cases a year, but last
week Anderson was up in the middle of the night, not because of stress,
but to bottle feed the kittens she is currently fostering.   

Although, Anderson knew she wanted to be a lawyer at a young age, she wasn’t without childhood fantasies.

“I was raised Catholic and every Catholic girl, when they’re very young, wants to be a nun,” she said.

Not long after, her interests turned to dance and she wanted to be a ballerina.

As a child, growing up in Eliot, Anderson recalled trips to the library
with her mother and walking out with an arm load of books each week.
She discovered Clarence Darrow, a union and criminal defense lawyer,
who tried several high profile cases in the early 20th century.

Anderson said she was inspired by the way he represented the underdog.
She said Darrow had a “real burn for justice” and believed people ought
to be treated well and enjoy what the constitution affords them.

“The underdog was the victim,” she said. “But that’s not to say I’m not trying to improve the lot of the defendant.”