Former Attorney General Martha Coakley of Massachusetts

8/26/2015

Attorney Martha Coakley

c/o Foley Hoag LLP

155 Seaport Boulevard

Boston, MA  02210-2600
USA

Dear Attorney Coakely,

My name is Matthew Winick from Ann Arbor, Michigan and I have a huge strong interest in studying with learning history, criminal justice system, and social justice. The main reasons I am interested in learning these subjects is to learn the need to advance on Civil Rights to help protect people who are different from discrimination, find ways to reduce crime to improve public safety while protecting people’s civil liberties, protect the environment from pollution, and the need to combat against special interest groups from abusing their power on the people.  Attorney Coakley, I find your work as Attorney General of Massachusetts to be very inspiring to me with your common sense with finding ways to make the system fair.

When you were Attorney General of Massachusetts from 2007-2015, I liked your commitment to be a strong supporter of protecting Civil Rights and being an advocate to protect minorities, women, people with disabilities, and people with sexual orientation from being discriminated.   On helping protect people with disabilities rights including finding ways to have technology be more access to them, I liked on how you used your role as Attorney General to work with Apple Inc. on finding ways to make their Apple I-tunes store, their software, and educational software be more accommodating for people who are blind, people who are deaf, people with mental issues, people with Autism, and other disabilities. On this issue I liked on how you worked with Apple Inc. to help them find ways to follow the American With Disabilities Act and follow Massachusetts Equal Rights Act to reduce discrimination and to help people with disabilities get an access to an educational source when learning different topics.  Another thing I really liked was on how you supported same-sex couples rights by supporting hate crime legislation to help protect them from being targeted by a hate crime and filed suit to challenge the Defense of Marriage Act’s law because it discriminates against b same-sex couples. For the environment, I liked on how you created a coalition with leading 18 states asking the EPA to take action to regulate greenhouse gas because gas emissions causes danger to public health or welfare after the Supreme Court ruled that the EPA does have authority to regulate greenhouse gases under the Clean Air Act. To help protect home owners, taxpayers, and people who owned businesses from abuse caused by financial institutions including Wall Street I was very proud of how you stood up to special interest groups including financial institutions by suing Goldman Sachs and Fremont Investment & Loan for their abuse on subprime loans and lending and later winning the settlements with using the settlements to help the state including people who were abused by the financial institutions.

Your work on helping people with disabilities, being an advocate to help them, and protecting people who are different from being discriminated really inspires me to work hard on my disability which is Autism with a learning disability. Having a disability is hard for me because I have trouble comprehending on learning different subjects and have trouble with speech when communicating with other people. When you negotiated with Apple Inc. it really made a great difference for me because Apple Inc. has made their technology with educational software easy for me to work on understanding vocabulary with having audio being read back to me to help me understand comprehension when reading or learning topics.  Also your work as Attorney General got me interested in taking a criminal justice class at my community college in Ann Arbor, Michigan. I enjoyed taking the class because I got to learn about how the court system works, Miranda rights, law enforcement, settlement cases, Supreme Court cases, and different ideas of reform. My instructor also explained in class for the need for Attorney General to help protect victims or people who are different from discrimination or if they are targeted by a crime. After he lectured about what role does an Attorney General does I got very interested in researching your role and I liked on how you worked hard to protect the people from fraud and discrimination.

Ms. Coakley, You make a great example of what an Attorney General needs to be by helping protect people who are different like minorities, women, people with sexual orientation, and people with disabilities from being discriminated, finding ways to negotiate with a company to help improve people’s lives or work on creating accommodations to help people who are different get access or care that they need instead of going to court where it cost taxpayer’s money, and prosecuting financial institutions including special interest groups when they commit fraud, waste, and abuse against homeowners including taxpayers. Your work on working with Apple on finding ways to improve technology to be more access or accommodating to people with disabilities really inspired me to use Apple software including educational software to help assist my disability with improving on learning comprehension.  Also your commitment to improve society inspired me to have an interest in studying the criminal justice system. Thanks for taking the time to read my letter, making a great difference, and inspiring me to continue to work hard on studying subjects with having the confidence to work on Autism.  I wish you well at Foley Hoag LLP where you can use great ideas to make society better.

Sincerely,

Matthew B. Winick