Four Democratic AG candidates’ records go on trial in first TV debate

Rhode Island’s four Democratic candidates for attorney general — State Reps. Jason Knight of Barrington and Joseph Solomon Jr. of Warwick, former Assistant Attorney General Keith Hoffmann and former Cannabis Control Commission Chair Kim Ahern — have sparred before. They’ve even bickered before an audience. But before Tuesday night, they had not yet slung arrows before a live television studio audience — the studio in this case being a classroom at the Roger Williams University School of Law in Bristol.

The classroom, designed to serve as a mock appellate courtroom for law students, proved an appropriate setting for WPRI 12 reporters Tim White and Ted Nesi to pursue an interrogative line of questioning about the candidates’ respective records. The event marked the sixth time AG hopefuls met for a debate or forum.

The attorney general is “one of the most important elected offices in the state,” Nesi noted at the debate’s opening. White and Nesi spent much of the next hour testing how each candidate’s record had prepared them to lead its roughly 120 attorneys.

The four are competing in the Sept. 9 Democratic primary, and early voting begins Aug. 20. The Democratic nominee will face Republican Alan Gordon in the Nov. 3 general election.

Kim Ahern: About that murder trial

A near-decade of prosecutorial experience has provided Ahern a plush cushion on which to rest her campaign messaging. But “it’s not an unblemished record,” White said Tuesday night, opening the debate with a close examination of one line in Ahern’s résumé: a high-profile murder trial in 2017 in which a Superior Court judge declared a mistrial, faulting Ahern and another prosecutor over failures to disclose evidence to the defense.

“He killed his girlfriend. He went to jail, and then he got out and he killed his next girlfriend,” Ahern said. “I’m not ever going to apologize for anything with respect to Andrew Jett, who should never get out of jail.”

“Did you make a mistake?” White asked.

Ahern did not answer directly and kept circling back to the horror of the crime, including that Jett had “killed his intimate partner by stabbing her 14 times.”

White pressed again: “I understand the crime. My question to you is: Did you make a mistake in this case, where it led to a mistrial?”

Nesi, meanwhile, had questions about her tenure as the first chair of the Cannabis Control Commission, noting Ahern had said in 2023 that she hoped retail licenses would be issued in 2024.

Those licenses still have not been awarded and regulations written under Ahern’s leadership became the subject of litigation.

“Why should voters give you a promotion when all that went wrong in your last big state job?” Nesi asked.

It was a new state agency operating under complicated laws and in service of an “extremely litigious industry,” Ahern noted.

“We were sued,” Ahern said of the law which created the commission. “The state was…sued several times related to the law that was passed by the General Assembly.”

Solomon countered that Ahern had ”bragged” about a bill she drafted while working in the governor’s office, “a bill that essentially created a position for the chair of the cannabis commission to earn $200,000 per year,” Solomon said.

“And while she was in that office three years, she got zero retail licenses passed during that time frame, so I’m surprised that she’s blaming the General Assembly because all we heard was crickets that there was an issue with the law.”

Knight agreed that the Cannabis Control Commission “has not delivered for Rhode Island” what the General Assembly intended.

“The bottom line is performance matters, and delivering results matters,” Knight said.

“If the General Assembly wanted the quickest cannabis market in history, that was not the way to do it,” Ahern countered.

Keith Hoffmann: No criminal trial track record

Hoffmann faced a problem inverse to Ahern’s: A lack of criminal trial experience.

As a former assistant attorney general, Hoffmann accrued plentiful experience in civil cases, White noted. But has he ever prosecuted a capital case like murder or rape? White wondered.

“No,” Hoffmann replied.

How about a narcotics case? That was also a no from Hoffmann, who then pivoted to point out that U.S. Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse had worked on the office’s civil side, and that former AG Peter Kilmartin was not a criminal prosecutor when he ran for and ultimately won the office.

Questions about specific case experience were too narrow to encompass all the job’s duties, Hoffmann said.

“I think that that leadership experience is what sets me apart from the others up here tonight,” Hoffmann said. “I’m the only candidate with any level of leadership experience within this office as a unit chief and on the executive team.”

As far as outgoing Attorney General Peter Neronha is concerned, Hoffmann is also the chosen one. The term-limited Neronha endorsed Hoffmann as his successor early in the primary race.

Speaking of Hoffmann’s boss: What did the candidate think of criticism that Neronha had gone too far in publicly releasing and commenting on the findings of the AG-led investigation on Gov. Dan McKee’s involvement in a less-than-ideal procurement process for a 2021 education services contract with the ILO Group? The probe brought no criminal charges but Neronha released it to the public in late 2024, telling reporters he was surprised by the “ham-handedness” of the affair.

Ethics probe could be next chapter in ILO saga

Hoffmann said releasing the information was important to the public and he defended Neronha’s at-times bluntness in doing so.

“I think that’s a good thing that a public official is able to speak their mind and be honest with people,” Hoffmann said. “You know, my social media is a little bit more boring, but I think that’s the core issue here of transparency.”

Jason Knight: Too soft on crime?

After four years as a state prosecutor, Knight became a criminal defense attorney, representing people accused of crimes ranging from drug dealing and domestic violence to homicide, White noted.

White wondered if that would make Knight “soft on crime.”

“The Constitution of the United States demands that any person accused has a fair trial, and in order to get a fair trial, they must have competent counsel,” Knight said. “And if they don’t have that, the entire system falls apart.”

Knight was the first to invoke Trump during the debate, which prompted White to interject and ask what Trump had to do with the AG’s prosecutorial duties.

Knight brought it back around to Neronha’s office — which has filed or joined so many lawsuits against the Trump administration that it started an online tracker — and said the office’s criminal division “needs a little TLC.”

“You simply can’t, while you’re pursuing the Trump administration, you can’t take your eye off the ball on this critical function of office,” Knight said, citing overturned cases, mistrials and acquittals.

“It cannot be a backwater the way it is today,” he added later.

Ahern essentially agreed that the criminal division, which she called “the bread and butter work” of the AG’s office, needs some more love. There are too many cases assigned to each prosecutor, she said, and unit chiefs are tasked with supervising “too many young attorneys.”

“Baby lawyers, as we call them,” Ahern said.

Joseph Solomon Jr.: Legislative record invites scrutiny

“Mr. Solomon, you’re the only person in this debate who has not worked a day in the Attorney General’s Office, yet you want to lead roughly 120 lawyers who have more experience in this space than you do,” White remarked early in the debate. “Why do you see the Rhode Island Attorney General as an entry-level position into this office?”

Solomon rejected the premise, relying on a record he cited at both the debate’s beginning and its end.

“I’m also the only person standing up here who’s seen the justice system from every angle as a prosecutor, as a bail commissioner, and as a legislator,” he said.

“So you don’t feel like you would need to learn on the job?” White asked.

“I don’t need to learn on the job. I’ve been doing this my entire career,” Solomon replied.

Still, a lengthier legislative record also meant more fodder for Solomon’s opponents.

A particular vulnerability was the 2025 semiautomatic weapons ban in the state legislature, which Knight sponsored in the House and which Solomon voted against.

More specific laws — like Rhode Island’s red-flag law, designed to “take guns out of the hands of people having a mental health crisis” and legislation disarming domestic abusers — work better than broader bans on semiautomatic weapons, Solomon suggested.

“It ultimately is probably going to encompass more guns than was originally anticipated,” Solomon said, noting the bill’s definition of “assault weapon” has a stricter definition in Rhode Island’s new law than did the 1994 federal ban.

Nesi then asked Knight about criticisms from detractors of the law he wrote, which cleared the State House not intact but only after substantial revisions from the Senate.

“I could not disagree more,” Knight replied.

“I respect Joe’s service, but I have to tell you that it’s just plain wrong. This bill and all the other bills that we passed save lives, and I voted yes for every single one of them. And I didn’t pick and choose.”

Solomon’s vote against an updated safe-storage law also came within Knight’s range of attack. Solomon countered that Rhode Island already had a safe storage law, which he supported.

“What we need to do is we need to go towards education because we can pass as many laws as we want, but that’s not going to help the problem,” Solomon said.

SUBSCRIBE: GET THE MORNING HEADLINES DELIVERED TO YOUR INBOX.