Steve Smith
Age: 41
Occupation: Assistant District Attorney
Residence: Signal Mountain
Years lived in Hamilton County: 38
Family: Married, four children
Education: Red Bank High School, 1992; B.S. Geology from the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga, 1996; J.D. from the Cecil C. Humphries School of Law, University of Memphis, 2001.
Previous Public Office Experience: N/A
Church or Civic Involvement: Administrative Council Member of the Signal Mountain United Methodist Church.
Achievements: I am the first member of my family to graduate from college. Despite beginning with no professional connections, I have built a reputation among my colleagues of being effective, even-handed, and well versed in the law. I have secured endorsements from both law enforcement and the defense bar.
What is the biggest challenge facing the office you are seeking, and how would you address it?
Chattanooga is undergoing the results of the wholesale abandonment of the family unit. Government has been the father of many of the victims and perpetrators named in the stories published by this newspaper. And the call for a remedy to our lawlessness continues to be more government, but in the form of more laws, more regulation, and less privacy for all of us. We can’t arrest our way to civility. It is generational in scope.
The public defender manages the largest law firm, purposed to defend our Constitution, and specifically to provide counsel to the indigent. It houses 13 assistant attorneys and necessary staff. It has been neglected to the point of near irrelevance. The challenge facing the office is to restructure it to question the growing resources and presence of law enforcement in our lives, and the increasing public perception that safety is incompatible with privacy and liberty.
Why should voters choose you?
I am a reluctant leader. I have not sought headlines while a prosecutor. I have not practiced law to gain friends or seek favor. On the whole, I am not comfortable on the campaign trail. It has been possible only because it is a job very few people want, and one I know better than everyone in this county. I am best suited to reform the Public Defender’s Office because I have been in a daily struggle with it for the past eight years.
When I see the working poor neglected and without competent counsel, when I see the office more interested in gamesmanship and pettiness than providing a service for their clients, when judges go so far as to appoint private lawyers in the stead of the Public Defender’s Office, someone has to intervene. Someone has to stand up for those when no one else will.
And I will.