Name: Sheldon Whitehouse
Position: R.I. Attorney General
Background: Special Assistant Attorney General, 1985-1990; Executive Counsel to Gov. Bruce Sundlun, 1991-92. Director of the Department of Business Regulation, 1992-94. U.S. Attorney for Rhode Island, 1994-98.
Education: Yale University (1978); The University of Virginia Law School (1982).
Age: 44.
Family: Married, two children.
Residence: Providence.
ATTORNEY GENERAL WHITEHOUSE: ‘I’m hoping to pull together a group to discuss Internet privacy, Internet crime, Internet fraud and how we can improve the laws and help protect the consumer.
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PBN: Where does the Lifespan/Care New England merger now stand?
Interesting question, where it now stands. We have received close to all of the materials we have requested. I have indicated that I want to decide it before the end of this summer. We are getting some signals from the parties themselves that they may be having second thoughts, and that makes for a very interesting dynamic. But we’re presuming at this point that they will continue to go forward and we’re right now trying to resolve the last of the document disputes.
Did you say Lifespan and Care New England officials are having second thoughts?
It’s an impression at this point that we’re getting but when you’re dealing with people very regularly and very intensely, like we are in this merger, you get ‘signals,’ and we’re getting some very strong ones that they’re at least having second thoughts. We’re ready to go forward and we’re sort of waiting right now to see, are they really serious, and are they willing to abide by the conditions that we’re going to require. We have, counting myself, seven lawyers working on it. It’s by far the biggest assembly of legal resources that we’ve deployed on any case or issue.
Does the growing opposition, for example, the Coalition for Responsible Health Care, influence your decision-making at all?
Not really. To the extent that the coalition has presented useful evidence to us, that is important for us to add to the calculation, to analyze and to assist our decision-making. But just the mere fact of it is not something that we would base the decision on. I need to be careful that I’m not swayed by either support or opposition that has been fermented or ginned up by somebody who’s got kind of a structural interest in it one way or the other. We’re very attentive to what people tell us but we’re attentive from the point of view of we have to make a reasoned decision, what can you tell us that contributes to the reasoning process that we need to go through.
How do current events like nursing labor problems at Rhode Island Hospital affect your decision-making process?
Those can be important, because the way in which the parties who propose to merge go about doing their business is one of the standards by which we can judge the credibility of the promises about what they can or wish to accomplish through the merger. And if they’re having trouble getting through labor negotiations in a sensible, smooth and efficient way, then that not only says something about their ability to manage their labor issues, it speaks a little bit to the whole question of management in general. And so I would say that the manner in which the labor issues have come up around Rhode Island Hospital recently and around Women & Infants less recently, has not been helpful to the merger application. That puts us in a slightly more concerned mode.
What’s the status of your suit against lead paint manufacturers, and what do you think of the General Assembly’s failure this year to pass a lead paint mitigation bill?
Our lawsuit is in the Rhode Island Superior Court. We filed our complaint. The defendants have filed motions to dismiss our complaint. We have filed memoranda explaining why their efforts to dismiss our complaint are not sound from a legal point of view and the arguments on those motions will be heard in August by Judge [Michael A.] Silverstein. This is obviously the first suit of its kind and I would never say that it was a slam-dunk, but we do have confidence in this litigation that it is meritorious. We are looking forward to surviving the motions to dismiss and going forward to trial, with any luck relatively quickly, I hope within a year. As to the General Assembly process, it’s not unusual for legislation to take more than one term until an agreement is reached and something that can pass emerges.
What is the role of the health care advocate – Maureen Glynn – who joined your office last year?
Right now she’s the leader of the merger team, so an enormous amount of effort is being dedicated to that. We are also looking at quality of care issues, and how we set things up so that people are measured on the quality of health care they deliver. It’s an amateur’s judgment at this point but all of the information I’ve read shows that cost comes down when the quality of medicine goes up. We certainly saw that in the worker’s compensation reform when good protocols for medical care went into effect and cost came down. So that’s an area where she’s going to be focusing extensively once the merger application is off our table.
How diversified is your staff?
I think we’re about 6 or 8 percent minority attorneys in the office. So we’re well ahead of the Rhode Island Bar and of most law firms. I’m particularly keen to recruit not only Hispanic and African American but also Southeast Asian attorneys. We’ve accelerated our recruiting so that we pick people right out of law school before they’ve passed the bar and promised them the job on passage to be able to outreach more effectively and it’s coming along.
Besides white-collar crime, what are the key business issues facing the state?
From the point of view of my office, one is white-collar crime, which you’ve identified already. Another and probably more important one is the regulatory role of this office [regarding] utility, telephone and other areas where there can be very substantial costs to businesses, particularly big energy users. The third is an emerging area, Internet commerce. I’m hoping to pull together a group to discuss with me issues about Internet privacy, Internet crime, Internet fraud and how we as the attorney general’s office can improve the laws of the state and adopt appropriate enforcement policies that help protect e-business in Rhode Island, help protect Rhode Island consumers from fraud and at the same time protect the privacy of people who are trying to do business over the Internet without letting the whole world know their personal information.
How have you improved your Consumer Protection Unit?
We put a lot of the paperwork on the computer so that people can spend time with clients. We changed the attitude so that when your problem came here we didn’t just look to see if it was our problem and if it wasn’t, pushed you back out the door. We decided to take responsibility to the extent that we legally could, no matter whose problem it was. Anybody reading this article will be familiar with what I call the ‘bounce around syndrome’ when you try to call somebody in state government. I wanted our consumer unit to be the place where that stopped. We’ve reached out in particular to senior citizens.
Back when you were U.S. Attorney you wrote a report for RIPEC recommending that parole and probation officers be put into the field. What’s the latest on this?
Just this summer, three years later, the first probation officers were assigned to the Providence Police Department on non-standard hours, not 8:30 to 4:30, to go out into the community, where the people are who need their help and oversight. I’ve asked and the General Assembly responded by passing legislation to create a commission to study taking that to scale. We call it The Commission to Reinvent Probation and Parole.
Why is this so important?
We spend about $300 million dollars on incarcerating people and on patrolling our streets, a year, and we spend about $ 6 million on probation. And yet the people in prison, they’re all locked up, they’re not a problem. The average law abiding person is not a problem. The people who are committing most of the crimes are the criminals who are out, and they’re the ones who are on probation or parole. I’m hoping that it’ll come first here in Rhode Island where every person who’s on probation has a chip or a beeper that is clipped around their wrist or their ankle or somehow stuck to them in a way that cannot be removed and a satellite is tracking wherever they are.
How closely does your office monitor the Plunderdome investigation?
The access to the federal grand jury is very, very limited, ordinarily only to the witnesses who come in and testify, the members of the grand jury, the agents and the prosecutors who are directly involved. Even people in the United States Attorney’s office who aren’t directly involved don’t get to find out what’s going on until it’s made public in some fashion. So we are not following it. There have been a few occasions where we have been in the position to offer to contribute or to provide some resources or work in a cooperative way, but it’s their case.
How are you trying to help businesses in the areas of cable and utility regulation?
The one thing that we can do and are doing is trying to support the application for certificate of convenience and necessity of American Broadband, which wants to come into Rhode Island and compete with Cox one on one. I think we need as regulators to try to encourage that competition and so we view the arrival of American Broadband into the marketplace here in Rhode Island as a positive for the Rhode Island consumer.
Will you run for governor in 2002?
I haven’t made any decision whatsoever in that regard. Right now I find myself quite busy enough being Attorney General.
