Montgomery County State’s Attorney John McCarthy is running for re-election to his sixth four-year term in 2026, touting his long service and public safety vision for the county.
McCarthy, who has served nearly 20 years as the county’s top prosecutor, filed to run in the Democratic primary with the state elections board on Feb. 25, the first day of the filing season for the 2026 Gubernatorial Primary Election.
“I think I still have the energy and the vision to lead my office,” McCarthy, 73, told Bethesda Today on Monday. “I think I have stayed connected at the legislative level in Annapolis as to what’s going on locally. Also, I’m involved in national conversation about the direction of law enforcement.”
McCarthy was elected to his first four-year term as the county’s state’s attorney in 2006. As of Monday, he is the first candidate from either political party to file for the 2026 election. He defeated three opponents in the 2022 primary and ran unopposed in the November general election.
Beyond his role in prosecuting cases, McCarthy said he has a vision for the county that’s focused on raising awareness about public safety issues. He noted his office’s efforts to prevent residents from falling victim to so-called gold bar scams and to promote safe teen dating, along with running a truancy prevention program for students.
“We are seizing upon educational opportunities to go out and try to use education, not arrests. Not ‘lock them up’ kinds of things, because to me, if I can prevent crime, if I can prevent victimization, and I think through educational programs we can do all of those things, it would be a much safer community,” McCarthy said.
Top issues
McCarthy told Bethesda Today that school safety is one of his top issues. He noted his vision for the county also entails bringing the school system “back to where it was many years ago” as a top school system in the country, something he says he shares with Montgomery County Public Schools Superintendent Thomas Taylor.
“It is my goal, along with him, to help do that and also to make sure that our schools are safe learning environments,” McCarthy said.
He also noted that he believes in reinstating school resource officers (SROs), which are officers assigned to patrol schools.
“I think we need SROs to ensure that the learning environments that we have in Montgomery County are safe again,” McCarthy said. “When the decision was made to take them out, at the time, the vote was 26 to nothing by the [school district’s high school] principals. And I trust our principals and I trust the people that are in the schools.”
Another top issue is how to handle juveniles who enter the justice system.
“I think we should have a more careful conversation about when a child commits a crime,” McCarthy said. “There are conversations about taking more violent offenders and putting them into the juvenile system – [those] over age 16 or 17 – rather than having them go into the adult system.”
He said he thinks that “conversation is premature and the reason for that is it is pretty clear to me that the Department of Juvenile Services programs do not have the resources to deal with the number of kids they have now.” In the current session of the Maryland General Assembly, some state lawmakers are again trying to end the practice of charging kids as adults with a proposed bill that would instead only send young people who have committed the most violent offenses to adult court.
McCarthy said he believes the justice system needs to offer “better,” more longer-term, research-based programs to serve juveniles, particularly those who may be receiving mental health or substance abuse treatment. He noted the expected release in November of a state report on the juvenile justice system that should help inform how the state may make future changes to the current system.
About McCarthy
McCarthy has four adult children and lives in Rockville. He attended Catholic University of America in Washington, D.C., and then taught at Our Lady of Good Counsel High School, now in Olney, according to the state’s attorney’s office website. While teaching, he attended law school in the evenings at the University of Baltimore. In 1980 he joined Prince George’s County State’s Attorney’s Office and later became a public defender.
In 1982, McCarthy joined the Montgomery County State’s Attorney’s Office. From 1996 to 2006, he served as the county deputy state’s attorney, according to the office’s website. During his time as the county state’s attorney, McCarthy worked to establish the office’s gang prosecution unit, a truancy court and the county’s Mental Health Courts, which aims to divert defendants who have committed low-level crimes due to mental illness into treatment instead of jail.
In 2017, McCarthy told Bethesda Magazine in an interview that working as a public defender helped him have more perspective on the lives of defendants when he became a prosecutor.
“I was doing misdemeanor work, and the majority of the people I represented were knuckleheads. A lot were young people who couldn’t get out of their own way starting out their lives,” he said.
“I represented about 400 people as a public defender. My memories are less about the specifics of the case and more about the individual people,” McCarthy said. “Even after I long switched back to being a prosecutor, I’d walk the streets of Montgomery County and see people I prosecuted and people I represented.”
While state’s attorney, McCarthy has also handled many high-profile cases such as the investigation into the so-called Beltway snipers who terrorized the D.C. region in 2002 and the 2011 murder at a Lululemon Athletica store in downtown Bethesda.
Candidates for other 2026 races
McCarthy is not the only incumbent to file for the 2026 races. The Clerk of the Circuit Court Karen Bushell, the Register of Wills Joseph M. Griffin, and Sherriff Maxwell Cornelius Uy all filed on Feb. 25 to run for re-election.
The Montgomery County Board of Elections is accepting candidate filings for the 2026 Gubernatorial Primary Election until 9 p.m. on Feb. 24, 2026, according to a Thursday press release.
Maryland will hold its 2026 primaries on June 30, followed by the general election on Nov. 3, according to the state board of elections. More information about the 2026 Gubernatorial Election can be found at this link.
