Growing up in The County, Chelsea Lynds never thought about going to law school or becoming a lawyer.
It wasn’t until she enrolled at Husson University and took an unpaid internship at the Penobscot County District Attorney’s Office and later became a victim witness advocate that Lynds decided she wanted to go to law school.
Eight years after graduating, the 34-year-old is running for the district attorney seat for Penobscot and Piscataquis counties. Lynds is running as a Democrat, and was the only person regardless of party affiliation to file for the June 9 primary.
If elected, Lynds would fill the seat that has almost exclusively been held by R. Christopher Almy since 1985. He’s served as the district attorney since then, except for a four-year gap from 2018 to 2022 when he did not run. Almy joined the office as an assistant in 1976.
Lynds joined the office as a lawyer in 2020, where she was office mates with Almy. He worked as an assistant district attorney at that time before running for district attorney again.
“He’s been a great mentor to me,” she said.
Lynds is originally from Aroostook County. She said she struggled in school growing up but
attending Husson opened up a whole new world to her. She and her sister were both first-generation college students.
In the legal world, Lynds has met numerous people who had family members who were lawyers or judges, something she had no experience with before the college internship.
“There’s a lot of addiction in my family, unfortunately,” Lynds said. “That is something that I’ve grown up with, and so I definitely do understand that people in active addiction make choices that they wouldn’t make if they were clean. They are more than the worst moments of their lives.”
There are a lot of people who could be great lawyers who have never been exposed to the idea, she said. As an adjunct professor at Eastern Maine Community Center, she said she is working to create a pathway for students to go to law school.
The justice system has issues and there are things she said she hopes to change if she’s elected. They include pushing for longer sentences for people convicted of crimes such as child abuse and sexual assault.
“I have tried a lot of cases and I’ve started to see a lot of the issues with our system,” Lynds said. “You can try all the cases in the world but you can only do so much within a broken system.”
If Lynds wins the primary, she will be on the Nov. 3 general election ballot. A candidate can still challenge her as an independent or write-in candidate.
