Fired Massachusetts Marijuana Regulator Asks Supreme Judicial Court To Reinstate Her To Position

“The removal of Ms. O’Brien from her position as chair of the CCC is a serious miscarriage of justice to an honest public servant.”

By Bhaamati Borkhetaria, CommonWealth Beacon

Shannon O’Brien is taking Treasurer Deborah Goldberg (D) to court for firing her from the top position at the Cannabis Control Commission (CCC), arguing that the charge of gross misconduct levied against her is dependent on “speculation that is not based on anything other than [the treasurer’s] own dislike of” O’Brien.

O’Brien filed a petition to the state’s Supreme Judicial Court (SJC) on Friday asking the full court to hear her case and reinstate her as the commission chair.

“Shannon O’Brien deserves the opportunity to publicly clear her name,” wrote O’Brien’s lawyer William Gildea, in an email statement. “The removal of Ms. O’Brien from her position as chair of the CCC is a serious miscarriage of justice to an honest public servant with an excellent reputation that the Supreme Judicial Court should rectify.”

Goldberg initially suspended O’Brien in September 2023. She fired her nearly a year later in September 2024 for “gross misconduct” and being “unable to discharge the power and duties of a CCC commissioner.” The accusations against O’Brien included the charge that she made “racially insensitive comments” and that she bullied the former executive director of the commission, Shawn Collins.

In her petition, O’Brien lists and rebuts the complaints against her, including that she used the word “yellow” to refer to Asian Americans. O’Brien has said many times that she was repeating the words of an African-American developer and did not mean to be racially insensitive.

The petition also refers to an additional complaint that has previously not been made public—that she exhibited “insensitive conduct” for saying “[m]any of these people who answer the phones may or may not be college grads, but they are articulate” to one of the investigators looking into allegations against her.

According to O’Brien’s petition, Goldberg found this exchange “troubling” because O’Brien “implie[d] surprise that someone with lesser education can speak articulately, which [O’Brien] knew or should have known is offensive.” In the lawsuit, O’Brien claims to have had no memory of even making the statement and that it did not come up at the hearing so she was surprised that it was listed as one of the grounds for removal as gross misconduct.

The attorney general’s office will be representing Goldberg. Goldberg’s office and the attorney general’s office declined to comment.

Goldberg made her decision to fire O’Brien after holding four closed-door hearings which O’Brien has repeatedly argued were unfair. Following the hearings, Goldberg fired O’Brien and provided her with a document that O’Brien described in her petition as “an 80-page diatribe composed virtually entirely of one-sided, hyperbolic language characterized by endless, repetitive adjectives (over 700) such as outrageous, flagrant, extreme, inexcusable, and inappropriate.”

This Goldberg document has not been made public but O’Brien’s legal team said it has been submitted it to the SJC along with the suit. It is likely to be made public soon.

There has been a question as to whether O’Brien’s behavior rose to the standard of “gross misconduct” because in previous SJC decisions the bar has been very high for an appointing officer to fire an official at an independent agency. In one previous decision, “gross misconduct” was linked to intent and O’Brien’s lawyers have repeatedly argued that O’Brien had no malicious intent in making the comments and decisions that she made.

After she was fired, O’Brien released several documents which the treasurer was using as a basis for terminating O’Brien, including two investigatory reports into O’Brien’s behavior. CommonWealth Beacon published these documents as well as the closing statement of O’Brien’s lawyer at the hearings.

This article first appeared on CommonWealth Beacon and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.

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