CAMBRIDGE — With a small notebook in hand, Martha Coakley walked to the courtyard outside of Harvard University's John F. Kennedy School of Government to a waiting television crew.
As the cameras rolled on Tuesday afternoon, the former attorney-general-turned-television-commentator homed in on key moments in the two high-profile cases she has been monitoring: the Boston Marathon bombing trial and the murder trial of former New England Patriots player Aaron Hernandez.
This was not the spotlight she had planned for — or wanted.
Last year, Coakley came within 41,000 votes of being governor of Massachusetts, losing her second statewide election in five years, but she’s not hiding from the spotlight. To the contrary, she can be found all over campus this spring as a fellow with the Institute of Politics, and periodically stepping in front of a television camera for WCVB-TV.
“You can run and lose and not fall off the planet,” Coakley said recently in an interview from her Harvard office. “In fact, you can work for the planet.”
Coakley doesn’t avoid talking about her losses in the 2010 US Senate race and last year’s governor’s race, referring to both in conversations and interviews. At a round table about health care at Harvard on Tuesday, she explained she thought Massachusetts’ health care law would help buoy her Senate run since it had served as the model for the federal overhaul. What she didn’t anticipate, she said, was such a backlash to the national law.
“I’d rather bring it up so people don’t feel they have to tiptoe around it or think that I’m sensitive about it, because I’m not,” she said of her losses. “I just prefer to face it head on.”
And while she’s not sure what the next act of her life will include, Coakley, 61, said these two short-term positions — the Harvard fellowship and as legal analyst for WCVB — provide the necessary respite and inspiration to figure it out.
Coakley, once the state’s top prosecutor, says her new role analyzing the case of admitted Boston Marathon bomber Dzhokhar Tsarnaev is not as odd as some might think. She’s prosecuted cases before cameras, scrutinized others’ trial work, and made more than a few television appearances on the stump.
She views the role not so much as providing color commentary on the case — something she said annoys her about how media covers court cases — but exploring the legal strategies of both sides.
“I hope to help people understand what may not seem quite so clear to them,” she said. “Why did the judge do this? Why did the prosecution say this? And not just a play-by-play of ‘they said this today and they said that today.’ ”
The station approached Coakley as she was still working full time to ensure that her successor at the attorney general’s office, Maura Healey, had a smooth transition. WCVB’s longtime legal analyst, David Frank, was appointed to be a judge in Concord District Court, and the station was looking for a replacement.
“It made a lot of sense,” Andrew Vrees, WCVB’s news director, wrote in an e-mail. Still, he said, “Given her credentials and the fact she just wrapped up a run for governor, I thought it was a long shot.”
E-mails were exchanged. Phone calls made. A lunch date had.
Eventually, the deal was done.
Coakley said her goal is to be as objective as possible, as the final decision about Tsarnaev’s guilt or innocence — and ultimately whether he should be put to death — rests in the hands of a jury of 12. She will continue to appear during key moments in both cases: opening and closing statements, key witnesses and evidence, and verdicts.
The jury — and the public — has listened to gripping testimony from bombing survivors and forensic experts in the case that began four weeks ago with the startling admission from Tsarnaev’s defense attorney that “It was him.”
Tsarnaev faces 30 charges — 17 of which carry the possibility of the death penalty — for carrying out, along with his late older brother, Tamerlan, the April 15, 2013, Marathon bombings, the murder of an MIT police officer, and a shootout in Watertown that nearly killed a Transit Police officer.
“The defense’s goal during this phase has always been to mitigate the damage to their client in terms of what he did,” Coakley said into the camera Tuesday afternoon. “They’re really going to be front and center now in the penalty phase. Their real work is going to start in the next phase.”
It was hours after the defense rested its case, and a WCVB reporter started asking her questions about what happens next. It was an eight-minute conversation, including a few questions on the Hernandez trial, that would eventually be truncated into sound bites.
Her television schedule can be unpredictable, and she’s taped segments everywhere from a campus library to a spot in front of her house. She’s parsed the opening statements of both the prosecution and the defense in the Tsarnaev case.
She’s appeared on camera live at least twice. During the noon news last month, she stood in the cold in front of the federal courthouse in a red coat, and later that day from the studio, where she did her best to answer the question: Where does the defense go after admitting Tsarnaev’s guilt?
This won’t become a full-time job, she said. Her fellowship at Harvard, where her focus has been on creating change in courts, legislation, and grass-roots politics, lasts three months. Working with students, though, has helped give her new vigor as she figures out what’s next, she said.
Her friend and colleague at Harvard, Barbara Anthony, a former undersecretary of consumer affairs for the state who is a senior fellow at the Kennedy School of Government, is delighted by Coakley’s most recent chapter.
“The thing about her being here at the Kennedy School is she gets to share her perspective, her knowledge, her expertise, her credibility, in these sorts of informal settings,” Anthony said. “You can’t buy that.”
And while the future remains unclear, Coakley is certain about some things in her past: “I don’t miss some of the adversarialness of being in the public sector or campaigning.”
Akilah Johnson can be reached at ajohnson@globe.com. Follow her on Twitter @akjohnson1922.