A retirement announcement, finally

District Attorney Howard Boney, who has been in charge of prosecutions in Wilson, Nash and Edgecombe counties for 30 years, is going to retire. Hallelujah! Boney, who was appointed to fill the unexpired term of Frank Brown (who moved up to a judgeship), might be former Gov. Jim Hunt's worst appointment.

Not that you'd know that by his success at the ballot box. Boney cruised to re-election every four years, often with no opposition. While other judicial districts have featured lively, hard-fought elections for district attorney, Boney was never seriously challenged. Occasionally, an ambitious young attorney would test the waters but would back away. Observers suspected that Boney made sure that any criminal defense attorneys who dared to challenge him would find their ability to make a living sharply curtailed. District attorneys in North Carolina set the court calendar and can decide pretty much arbitrarily whether charges should be reduced or dropped.

In 1984, Boney decided he was ready to leap to the big time and announced that he would run for attorney general. He held an announcement at the Angus Barn in Raleigh and invited the press. I sent a reporter to cover the event, and she returned with her eyes glazed. This guy thinks he should be running law enforcement in North Carolina? A few days later, the Tarboro newspaper took a look at Boney's wife's divorce filing, in which she characterized him as a womanizer. The spicy details kicked the air out of Boney's balloon.

But his scuttled foray into statewide politics didn't hurt his electability in the 7th Judicial District. He kept getting re-elected, despite a very low-profile persona. He rarely prosecuted cases himself, and crime reporters quickly learned that it was useless to try to get a quote from Boney. He was almost never available.

Boney made one more appearance in the news several years ago when he landed in a Tarboro hospital after a traffic accident. He was the passenger in a car driven by another court official when the car went off the road and crashed. The driver was charged with DWI and, if memory serves, had a blood alcohol content in the 0.20s. The joke around the newsroom at the time was that if the "designated driver" was that drunk, imagine what the passenger's blood alcohol must have been. Boney left word at the hospital that no information on his condition was to be released to the public.

Many Wilson residents will associate Boney with the Brittany Willis murder case. Two years after the murder, one of the suspects was still sitting in Wilson County jail awaiting trial. Such a long delay was not unheard of during Boney's tenure, but the state NAACP and others brought pressure on Boney to turn the case over to the attorney general, which he finally agreed to do. The case had become too hot for Boney, and the long delays in the case could not be justifiably explained away.

A couple of years ago Boney announced he was being treated for some health problems. If his retirement plans are predicated on ill health, he has my sympathy, but I'll still be glad to see him retire.

When Gov. Bev Perdue appoints a replacement for Boney, it will be a new day in 7th Judicial District prosecutions. If Perdue chooses wisely, it could be a brighter day for criminal justice.