Foxx’s presence in Cook County has reassured advocates for bail reform. While prosecutors often undermine the implementation of criminal justice reforms, she has staunchly defended the law against its critics. First elected in 2016 on progressive promises, Foxx reduced her office’s use of cash bail well before the Pretrial Fairness Act took effect last year, even as local defense attorneys pressed her to make even bolder changes. 

But Foxx chose to retire this year rather than seek reelection, leaving the nation’s second biggest prosecutor’s office open for the taking. Voters will now decide who oversees the abolition of cash bail in Chicago for years to come. 

In this staunchly blue county, the Democratic primary on March 19 will likely decide Foxx’s successor, and reform advocates are wary of what this means for the future of pretrial detention. 

“Cook County previously elected a state’s attorney that championed these reforms,” Matt McLoughlin, an activist and cofounder of the Chicago Community Bond Fund, told Bolts. “There are real concerns about who takes control of the largest prosecutor’s office in the state and what role does that individual play in policymaking in the capital.” 

The two Democratic candidates vying to replace Foxx—Clayton Harris III, a former assistant prosecutor, and Eileen O’Neill Burke, a former judge who also worked as a prosecutor—have both expressed broad support for the Pretrial Fairness Act. They’ve both praised the law, and neither is trying to win the election by fearmongering over its effects, a marked difference from other prosecutors’ backlash against bail reform elsewhere in the country, and elsewhere in Illinois.

But O’Neill Burke has also blamed Foxx for being too lenient in some cases, signaling she’d turn the page on the incumbent’s reform priorities. Harris has comparatively aligned himself with the outgoing state’s attorney, whose tenure has seen a considerable decline in the local jail population. Local progressive leaders and the county Democratic Party recently coalesced around Harris as the candidate more likely to continue criminal legal reforms in Chicago.

In responding to Bolts’ questions on pretrial detention, Harris outlined a different philosophy than O’Neill Burke when it comes to how systematically he’d try to keep people behind bars. O’Neill Burke’s campaign declined to respond, but her public statements paint a more punitive picture of how she’d wield the considerable power that the Pretrial Fairness Act gives prosecutors. 

Under the new law, courts can still order someone detained pretrial—but only if prosecutors ask for it. This sets up a new decision point for them: It puts the burden on prosecutors to file detention requests with judges, and then prove at a hearing that the defendant poses either a danger to the community or a flight risk. 

“In effect, the state’s attorney has now become the gatekeeper,” O’Neill Burke told WGN Radio in January. “So it has become exponentially more important that the state’s attorney knows what they’re doing and that they put structure, training, criteria in place.”

Outside of Chicago, some state’s attorneys have taken a hard line in response to the new law, vowing to petition judges to order pretrial detention in every case that’s legally eligible for it, regardless of the circumstances. Patrick Kenneally, the state’s attorney of McHenry County, northwest of Chicago, says his office will ask for anyone charged with an eligible felony to be jailed. 

“We are filing all of those cases because we believe that based on the nature of the charge, that person is self-evidently a danger to the public,” Kenneally, a Republican running for reelection unopposed this year, told Bolts.

For reform advocates who championed the Pretrial Fairness Act, this approach goes against the spirit of the law. “Just because someone is facing an eligible charge, it doesn’t mean prosecutors actually have to have that person detained,” said McLoughlin. “They’re supposed to be using some discretion to determine if that person is a danger to the public.”

McLoughlin added, “At the end of the day, that isn’t about keeping the community safe so much as it is about projecting a tough image of law-and-order.”

For proponents of the Pretrial Reform Act like McLoughlin, the law wasn’t just about ending cash bail, but also reducing the number of people who are locked up in jail. Staying free while awaiting trial allows defendants to keep their jobs, continue supporting their families, and freely meet with their attorney to prepare their legal defense. Pretrial freedom also removes jail as a point of leverage prosecutors often use to pressure someone into taking a plea deal. 

“​​Jailing people awaiting trial increases the rate at which people will be rearrested in the future,” said Sharlyn Grace, senior policy advisor for the Cook County Public Defender’s Office. “It decreases their employment prospects and their earnings potential, and generally contributes to the opposite of what everyone wants for the community.”

O’Neill Burke has partially mirrored Kenneally’s blanket approach for some categories of cases. She has pledged to seek pretrial detention for “each and every” case involving a violent crime, as well as anyone charged with possession of a gun that’s covered by the state’s Assault Weapons Ban. (Gun possession is among the most common felony charges in Cook County.)

Harris has promised an aggressive approach to detaining those accused of violent crimes, but he told Bolts via email that he doesn’t share that blanket approach. The office under his leadership would decide on a “case-by-case basis” whether to seek a detention hearing over violent offenses, he said in a statement emailed by his campaign. 

For gun possession cases, Harris says his office would petition for detention if the gun was used to commit a crime, or if the defendant has a “record of violence.” Elsewhere, echoing a point made by some Chicago public defenders, Harris has expressed concern about the fact that gun possession charges disproportionately fall on Black men, saying they are likelier to carry guns for self-protection. 

For Madeleine Behr, policy director of Chicago Alliance Against Sexual Exploitation, prosecutors should consider their options rather than automatically seek pretrial detention, even in cases of domestic abuse and sexual violence. “For some people experiencing gender-based violence, they often call law enforcement to get the violence to stop in the moment,” Behr said. “But that doesn’t mean they are interested in pursuing charges or a commitment to moving forward with a case for weeks or months or years.” Prosecutors, she said, should “consult directly with the victim for what they would like to see.” 

Whether a prosecutor seeks pretrial detention is only the tip of the iceberg—while it may be the most visible part of their discretion, by that point they’ve already made a suite of other decisions that steer a defendant toward either jail or release.

Prosecutors have always leveraged their power to decide what charges to use in a case. For instance, they may stack charges or start by filing severe ones to pressure a defendant into pleading guilty on lower charges. Under the Pretrial Fairness Act, these charging decisions are also a decisive factor in whether prosecutors are allowed to request pretrial detention at all.

The new law states that courts cannot jail defendants who face some lower-level charges. The provision is meant to limit prosecutors and judges from using the elimination of money bail to increase pretrial detention.

But reform advocates are nervous that prosecutors who want more leeway to detain may respond by filing steeper charges for which pretrial detention is still eligible.

“Differences in charging decisions may be tied to the prosecutor’s desire to have the defendant detained pretrial,” said Ben Ruddell, director of criminal justice policy at the ACLU of Illinois. “If the prosecutor really wants to detain someone pretrial, then they might opt to charge someone” with a stiffer offense than they would have used under the previous system.

James Kilgore, director of advocacy and outreach for FirstFollowers Reentry Program, shares Ruddell’s worry. “One of the things they may do is stack charges and create felonies out of misdemeanors,” he told Bolts. “Whereas before people were going to be kept in jail anyway because they didn’t have bond money, now they have to have a serious charge in order to be kept in jail or on electronic monitoring.”

Here too, O’Neill Burke’s statements signal that she would take a more aggressive stance than the incumbent and her leading competitor. 

For instance, Foxx has set a policy to prosecute retail theft as a misdemeanor, rather than a felony, whenever the value of stolen goods is below $1,000. Harris has said he would continue this policy but O’Neill Burke has denounced it. “Just not prosecuting crime doesn’t deter it, it promotes it,” she told WGN. She says she would charge all retail theft cases where the value exceeds $300 as a felony, as state statutes allow. 

Retail theft charges are not eligible for pretrial detention even at the felony level, so that policy alone would not change the jail population. Still, it provides a window into O’Neill Burke’s interest in dialing up the range of charges her office uses. “I do not believe that they promote a thriving, safe city,” she told the Chicago Sun Times about the Foxx administration’s policies.

Harris, meanwhile, has said he’d give Foxx an “A” for what she’s done during her tenure, saying she has mostly erred in not communicating the benefits of her reforms. 

The next state’s attorney will also steer office policy on electronic monitoring. When they’re not seeking pretrial detention, prosecutors can still ask for release to come with certain conditions, like ankle monitors.

Illinois’ ankle monitor system has been rife with errors; 80 percent of alerts received by local law enforcement as of 2021 were mistaken, a University of Chicago analysis found. Still, a violation may allow prosecutors to ask that the court detain someone. “Given the inaccuracy of these devices and their propensity to create false alarms, this can also be an opportunity to send people back to jail for violating their release conditions,” Kilgore said.

So far, the new system hasn’t resulted in more Chicagoans placed under house arrest as they await trial.

The winner of the Democratic primary between Harris and O’Neill Burke will move on to the general election to face Republican Bob Fioretti, a former alderperson unopposed in his party’s primary. Fioretti has attacked bail reform as dangerous and says Foxx’s office is “erring on the side of letting criminals walk free.”

Fioretti faces long odds in November because Cook County is overwhelmingly Democratic. But sitting prosecutors elsewhere in the state are using similar rhetoric to say the new law is forcing them to release people who should be locked up. They’ve often spread incorrect information to make their case, like Kankakee County State’s Attorney Jim Rowe’s claims that courts can no longer jail fentanyl dealers and carjackers, or McLean County State’s Attorney Erika Reynolds’ statement that misdemeanor domestic violence cases are now ineligible for detention. 

In fact, defendants can still be detained over drug sales, carjacking, and misdemeanor domestic violence, depending on the circumstances.

Opponents of the law have also argued against any bright line that shields some categories of charges from pretrial detention. In 2022, the Illinois State’s Attorney Association, a group that represents prosecutors in the state and typically advocates for more punitive policies, pushed for a bill that is no longer active to allow the court to jail people on lesser charges.

Kenneally, the McHenry prosecutor, wants to make more charges eligible for pretrial detention. 

“My fundamental critique is that, very often times, when people are being charged with these non-detainable offenses, they are in a position to commit more crimes,” Kenneally said. “If their criminal history suggests they will continue to commit crimes, it has taken the discretion of prosecutors and judges to hold those people.”

“We can’t hold somebody on concealing a corpse or concealing a murder, but we can hold them for pushing their boyfriend or throwing a piece of pizza at their boyfriend, and it’s fundamentally absurd,” he told Bolts. (The charge of concealing a homicide is eligible for pretrial detention if prosecutors demonstrate a flight risk.)

This continued conflict over the law’s future would be resolved in Springfield, but the identity of the next Cook County state’s attorney may still shape those developments.

In championing bail reform, Foxx provided a counterweight to the positions of the Illinois State’s Attorneys Association, a role similar to what reform-minded prosecutors have done elsewhere in the country. Cook County alone makes up 40 percent of the Illinois population, and its lawmakers enjoy a lot of clout in the legislature. 

This made Foxx a punching bag for more punitive Chicago officials and other prosecutors, but reform advocates say her pushback against misinformation was essential for the law’s survival. 

“It was hugely important that State’s Attorney Foxx was a supporter of the Pretrial Fairness Act, an advocate and a defender of the law, and a thought partner in its development,” said Grace, of the public defender’s office. “It absolutely matters that we have a state’s attorney who is engaged in good faith efforts to protect this historic transformation of our pretrial system.”

Correction (March 4): The article has been corrected to reflect that the bill to enable pretrial detention for low-level offenses is no longer active.

The post As Kim Foxx Exits, Chicago Is Choosing the Next “Gatekeeper” of Its Bail Reform appeared first on Bolts.

Dennis Watkins, the prosecuting attorney of Ohio’s Trumbull County, sparked national outrage last month when he pursued criminal charges against Brittany Watts, a woman who miscarried at home and was then dragged into court when a nurse called the police on her. A grand jury declined to indict Watts last week, but reproductive rights advocates stress that Watkins’ choice to pursue the case reflects an escalating policing of pregnancies nationwide, fueled by local prosecutors’ power to target women who lose a pregnancy.

The controversy unfolded in the run-up to Ohio’s late December filing deadline to run for prosecutor in 2024. There was a brief opportunity for the state’s upcoming elections to test whether local prosecutors would commit to respecting the will of voters on reproductive rights. Residents of Trumbull County had just voted in November to protect abortion rights, approving a statewide measure known as Issue 1 by a margin of 14 percentage points. Its proponents blasted Watkins for betraying the measure’s “spirit and letter” in going after Watts (Issue 1 enshrined a “right to make and carry out one’s own reproductive decisions” in the state’s constitution). 

But then the December filing deadline came and went, putting an immediate lid on that prospect. 

No one filed to run against Watkins, who is virtually guaranteed to secure an 11th four-year term in November without needing to explain his actions to voters. (The deadline passed for people running as party candidates but independents can still file by March, though they rarely win such races in Ohio.) 

In fact, Watkins has never faced a challenger in any of his other nine reelection bids since 1984. Over his time as prosecutor, he has fought to keep people with mental illness on death row, and in 2019, he defended a prosecutor in his office who frequently mocked defendants with crude public jokes, dismissing ethics concerns.

It’s the same scene around the state. Only 15 of Ohio’s 88 prosecutor elections this year drew multiple candidates by the December deadline, according to Bolts’ compilation in each county. This means that the vast majority of the state’s prosecuting attorneys are running unopposed this year; Bolts has confirmed that no more than one candidate has filed to run in 73 of the 88 counties. 

Like Watkins, many of these prosecutors oversee offices that have faced misconduct allegations but have suffered no consequences from state officials. A recent investigation by multiple news organizations showed how failures by state agencies have allowed prosecutors across Ohio to get away with breaking the law to win convictions. The investigation detailed how one staff prosecutor repeatedly violated defendants’ rights while working for three Ohio counties over the last two decades but continued to be employed. In each of these three counties, the incumbent prosecuting attorneys—Lucas County’s Julia Bates, a Democrat, Ottawa County’s James VanEerten, a Republican, and Wood County’s Paul Dobson, also a Republican—are running unopposed this year.

When there’s a lack of top-down oversight, elections can offer an alternative mechanism of accountability, forcing officials to defend their actions and create some path for an official’s removal. But that all hinges on people actually running.

Fanon Rucker, an attorney who unsuccessfully ran for Hamilton County prosecutor in 2020, referenced many prosecutors’ failure to even set up conviction integrity units to investigate possible errors and correct wrongful convictions despite the misconduct allegations they face. “If a person is running unopposed and doesn’t feel like that’s a priority, then who’s going to hold their feet to the fire?” he asked. “Who’s going to speak to the community to have them unelected if they don’t take on those types of projects? “

To be sure, Ohio’s most populous counties are more likely to see contested prosecutor elections this year. 

Unlike in 2020, each of Ohio’s three largest counties have more than one candidate filed for the race. In Franklin County (Columbus), the incumbent’s retirement has triggered a four-way race, with the winner of the Democratic primary likely favored to take the job. In Hamilton County (Cincinnati), Republican Prosecuting Attorney Melissa Powers faces Democrat Connie Pillich, a former state lawmaker. And in Cuyahoga County (Cleveland), progressive law professor and former public defender Matthew Ahn is challenging Democratic incumbent Michael O’Malley in the March primary.

Still, the lack of candidates is in no way constrained to smaller rural counties. Of the 27 counties with more than 100,000 residents in Ohio, 70 percent drew just one candidate. Watkins’ Trumbull County, southeast of Cleveland, has 200,000 residents. Bolts’ analysis shows the majority of Ohio’s population lives in counties with uncontested races.

Four years ago, even O’Malley ran unopposed in Cleveland. Ahn, who is challenging him this year, says he was shocked at the time to see the race was uncontested, especially given the punitive turn O’Malley’s took during his first term. “We saw a drastic increase in the number of children tried as adults, we saw the county issue more death sentences than any other county in the United States, and so I was really interested in who was going to challenge O’Malley in 2020,” Ahn told Bolts. “The answer to that question ended up being nobody.”

Ahn tried gauging local acquaintances’ interest in challenging O’Malley this year. “By and large, the most common response was, ‘I’m not challenging the machine,’ or ‘Nobody can beat the machine,’” he said. “After hearing this over and over again, I thought it was unacceptable for O’Malley to go uncontested two cycles in a row.” 

In running, Ahn says he’s at least forcing a public debate about local criminal legal policies. “I thought that just even having this conversation is a public good for the voters of Cuyahoga County, for us to think about how we can actually promote public safety,” he said. His campaign blocked O’Malley from securing the local Democratic Party’s endorsement at a convention this month.

It’s unusual enough for any candidate to challenge an incumbent prosecutor in Ohio. It’s even rarer for one to do so while proposing criminal justice reforms—like Ahn, who promises for instance to never seek the death penalty and reduce adult prosecutions of minors.

Prosecuting attorneys tend to vocally fight reform proposals regardless of their party, which has occasionally clashed with the politics of Ohio’s GOP-run legislature. Some Republican state lawmakers have teamed up with Democrats to introduce major reform legislation, but these bills typically run into a bipartisan wall of opposition from prosecutors.

In 2021, for instance, Republican Governor Mike DeWine signed a bipartisan bill that limited the use of the death penalty against individuals with mental illness. Prosecutors from both parties, including Cuyahoga County’s O’Malley, fought the bill’s passage. The same year, Ohio also adopted a bipartisan bill that abolished life sentences without the possibility of parole for minors, over the opposition of the Ohio Prosecuting Attorneys Association, an organization that lobbies lawmakers on behalf of the state’s 88 prosecuting attorneys. 

“They’re pretty much in lockstep, they’re pretty much in unison,” said Kevin Werner, who supported that death penalty bill as policy director at the Ohio Justice & Policy Center, an organization that advocates for criminal justice reforms. He says prosecutors from both parties band together regardless of who supports a reform proposal. “If it’s a bill that intends to increase the penalty, or increase the duration that a person could be sentenced to incarceration, they’re in favor of it,” Werner told Bolts. “If it’s a bill that rolls back any of those kinds of things, they’re opposed to it as sure as the sun will rise.”

“They’re often trying to change the standards of proof, making it easier to secure a conviction,” he said. “They want to make their jobs easier.”

Elsewhere in the nation, victories by reform-minded candidates have changed this dynamic and led to policy disagreements among prosecutors. Ohio is far from that, but Ahn hopes to break the mold of the typical prosecutor. He thinks his background as a former public defender gives him a “different experience and a different perspective on the justice system” than voters usually hear from prosecutor candidates.

“There still is this political assumption that, in order to win, you have to be 90s-style ‘tough on crime’ elected officials,” Ahn said. “What I’m finding in my conversations with folks across the county is that’s not necessarily true. But for folks who come up within prosecutor’s offices and then themselves run for prosecutor, these assumptions are often still accepted as a fact.”

Rucker says his 2020 run for prosecutor in Hamilton County, a metro area that includes Cincinnati, was a lesson in how bruising local elections can be. 

“This is the single most powerful position in the county because of the discretion, because of the influence, because of the relationships,” Rucker said. “You have to raise a lot of money, and you have to have an equal amount of influence and authority as the incumbent that you’re running against.”

As a longtime local judge, Rucker says he felt he had the standing to pull off a campaign. But many attorneys who want to challenge a sitting prosecutor anywhere in the state may be afraid of making a powerful enemy who can have enormous impact on their careers. “‘If I run and lose, how will this affect my financial bottom line, or even the outcomes of my cases?’” Rucker said.

These same dynamics exist throughout the nation, making it common in nearly every state for only a fraction of prosecutor elections to be contested. But the dearth of prosecutor candidates in Ohio this year still stands out even by national standards. In the 2023 cycle, for instance, roughly a third of elections in Mississippi and Pennsylvania drew multiple candidates; half did in New York. 

Numerous factors can contribute to this scarcity of prosecutor candidates. Besides the fear of retribution, some Ohioans who talked to Bolts for this article spoke of difficulties fundraising, and said a general political apathy has set in due to the lack of competition for control of the state government as a result of practices like gerrymandering. 

Rucker, who is Black, said racism in politics may also weigh on the minds of people of color who consider running. He pointed to attack ads his Republican opponent, incumbent Hamilton County prosecutor Joe Deters, unleashed in the final weeks of the 2020 campaign that tied Rucker to some activism born of the summer’s Black Lives Matter protests.

“An angry Black man who was tied into rioting groups who were going to come to the city and beat and rape women, and start fires and riots—that was the messaging, and that was the imagery in their ads,” Rucker told Bolts. “It was intended to emotionally sway suburban white women, Democrats and Republicans.” 

Rucker, who denounced the ads as “race-baiting” at the time, lost to Deters by five percentage points, even as Democrats won nearly all other county-wide offices.

“I was gonna be successful if it hadn’t been for some racist crap, which also may deter some folks from getting into races, particularly minorities,” Rucker said.

Shortly after the election, Rucker received a letter from a Hamilton County voter explaining why she voted for every Democrat on the ticket but him. The letter, which Rucker says he keeps on display in his office, affirmed his suspicions of how racism contributed to his loss.

“Mr. Rucker, I would not vote for you because you scared me,” the voter wrote. “When I watched your ads, all I saw from your deameanor [sic] was an angry, militant, black man. All I could think was that you would promote those traits.”

Deters, Rucker’s 2020 opponent, resigned in early 2023 to become a justice on the Ohio supreme court. Powers, his replacement, has already warned of rampant crime if she were to lose. Her campaign website says of the prosecutor’s office, “It is simply too important to let it fall into the hands of soft-on-crime criminal advocates.” Powers is uncontested in the GOP primary; in November she will face Pillich, a white Democrat.

In April, Powers warned of more liberal candidates transforming Cincinnati into “a Baltimore, a Saint Louis,” two cities known for having large Black populations. “That’s veiled, stereotypical race baiting and fear mongering,” Rucker said. 

Rucker says he stayed out of this year’s prosecutor race because he’s enjoying his new work in private practice. But he also said he did not want to revisit the sort of attacks he suffered four years ago. 

“It took everything in me to hold my peace during that time and not cuss everybody out, and the second time I would,” he told Bolts. “I have zero interest in being resubjected to the kind of racially hostile messaging that was so very clearly central in the outcome of that previous campaign. Not interested. I’m enjoying my life too much.”

This article has been updated with information on the one county that had not shared its candidate list nor replied to our request by our deadline. Its prosecutor race turned out to be uncontested as well.

The post In Ohio, Uncontested Elections Worsen a Breakdown in Accountability for Prosecutors appeared first on Bolts.

Many states hold their local elections on odd-numbered years—a schedule that depresses turnout and that some places are fighting to change. That means that, if you’re interested in the shape of your criminal legal system, critical storylines are already taking shape: These local and state offices enjoy the brunt of the discretion to shape incarceration and policing. DAs and sheriffs, in particular, decide which cases to prosecute and with what severity, exercise nearly unfettered control over jail conditions, and choose how they partner with federal immigration enforcement.

There are nearly 500 elections for prosecutors and sheriffs scheduled for 2023, a Bolts analysis finds—and the first filing deadlines are coming up in just weeks. 

These elections are largely concentrated in Louisiana, Mississippi, New York, Pennsylvania, and Virginia, with just a few sprinkled in Florida, New Jersey, and Washington State. (The full list is available here.)

Other local offices that shape criminal punishment and policing are also on the ballot next year, including three governorships, at least two supreme court justices in Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, and hundreds of state lawmakers, local judges, and mayors.

Local elections are often very late to take shape, so in most cases the field remains undefined. At this time, the likeliest elections to draw the stark contrasts we have seen in recent cycles—with candidates disagreeing on whether to intentionally aim to reduce incarceration, or what goes into advancing public safety—include prosecutor races in New York City and upstate New York, Pittsburgh and the Philly suburbs, and Northern Virginia, as well as mayoral races in Chicago, Philadelphia, Denver, and across Texas. Sheriff races across Louisiana, Mississippi, and Virginia may draw some scrutiny to immigration and detention conditions.

Bolts will follow these races throughout the year. Today, I am kicking off our coverage by laying out six big questions that will define the cycle: 

1. Can reform-minded prosecutor candidates hold their ground in Virginia, and make inroads elsewhere?

The last time the counties that are electing their prosecutors in 2023 voted for these same officials, in 2019, the results made for a striking split screen. Virginia saw one of the widest set of wins to date for candidates who campaigned on reducing incarceration. After winning  in a string of populous suburban counties,  they formed a statewide coalition called Virginia Progressive Prosecutors for Justice—at the time an unprecedented step—that advocating for lawmakers to abolish the death penalty and mandatory minimums, among other reforms. But their positions drew heavy heat from the right, including judicial pushback and failed recalls as well as criticism from the left over false promises. 

Now, those first-term incumbents are up for election again. They include Arlington’s Parisa Dehghani-Tafti and Fairfax’s Steve Descano, both in Northern Virginia, who drew attention in 2019 for ousting a pair of incumbents in Democratic primaries, as well as Albemarle’s James Hingeley, Loudoun’s Buta Biberaj, and Prince William’s Amy Ashworth. Several of these incumbents are now facing challengers, intra-party strife, or conservative anger, and the results of the 2023 cycle will determine the political strength of the state’s reform prosecutor coalition  going forward.

In New York and Pennsylvania, though, the 2019 DA elections saw advocates of criminal justice reform largely stagnate due to the sky-high number of uncontested elections and some high-profile losses. 

Pennsylvania’s marquee election in 2023 is likely to be the DA race in Allegheny County (Pittsburgh), where longtime Democratic DA Stephen Zappala is a vocal critic of criminal justice reforms amid significant racial disparities in his office. In 2019, Zappala beat multiple progressive challengers, though progressive organizers have made major progress in Pittsburgh in the intervening years, including winning a ballot measure meant to curtail solitary confinement and electing decarceral judges in 2021. 

Other DA races in Pennsylvania include counties like Cumberland and Lancaster that took a distinctly punitive approach to the opioid crisis, and populous Philly suburbs like Chester, Delaware, and Montgomery. Philadelphia’s reform DA Larry Krasner is not up after cruising to re-election in 2021; he has remained relatively isolated so far among DAs in the state, a far cry from the dynamic in Virginia, and 2023 will be the next test of whether his allies can change that.

In New York, where most prosecutors have been relentlessly critical of a landmark package of pretrial reforms, at least two former presidents of the state’s DA association are up for re-election this year—in Monroe County (Rochester) and Onondaga County (Syracuse). Another DA who has battled against state Democrats’ bail reform, William Grady of Dutchess County (Poughkeepsie), has said he is retiring after 40 years as DA.

Bronx DA Darcel Clark has drawn a reform challenger who says she is running to “end mass incarceration” four years after securing re-election unopposed. Also on the 2023 calendar: Queens, the site of the extraordinarily tight 2019 race that saw Melinda Katz become DA after defeating socialist organizer Tiffany Cabán.

In Mississippi, I have my eyes on the Fifth District, which covers seven counties in the central part of the state: DA Doug Evans drew national opprobrium and condemnation from the U.S. Supreme court for his decadeslong effort to prosecute Curtis Flowers six times for the same crime—a crusade exposed in the podcast “In the Dark.” Even with that exceptional spotlight, Evans ran unopposed in 2019 and remains in office, with little accountability, today. 

2. Will sheriffs and jailers face accountability?

The 2022 midterms showcased once again that, with some exceptions, sheriffs tend to secure re-election even when they link up in far-right networks, signal their eagerness to disrupt the federal government, or prepare to disrupt local elections. Next year will bring a different cast of characters to the forefront. There’s Sheriff Adam Fortney of Snohomish County, Washington, in the Seattle suburbs, who faced a recall effort in 2020 for quickly disregarding statewide COVID rules even while ramping up other arrests.

There’s Sheriff Sid Gautreaux, in East Baton Rouge, Louisiana’s most populous parish, who runs a jail with infamously dangerous conditions. Or there’s Sheriff Mike Chapman in Loudoun County, Virginia, who has drawn scrutiny for accepting campaign donations from private contractors that work with his office, a common practice among jailors. The vast majority of sheriffs in Louisiana and Virginia will be elected in 2023, creating a window for local jails to draw more public attention.

Note that Pennsylvania sheriffs have far more limited powers than elsewhere as they typically do not run local jails, which are managed directly or indirectly by other local offices, many of which are on the ballot in 2023. A string of deaths at the Allegheny County jail, located in Pittsburgh, and complaints that the lockup is violating a voter-approved ban on solitary confinement are now issues set to define the race for the county’s next chief executive.

3. Will immigrants’ rights advocates continue to curtail local collaboration with ICE?

When Donald Trump was president, voters in Democratic-leaning counties ousted public officials who cooperated with Immigration and Customs Enforcement. But ICE forged new relationships with Southern jails to make up for it, and sheriffs rushed to profit off renting vacant jail space for ICE to detain migrants and asylum-seekers. In 2023, nearly all sheriffs will be on the ballot in Louisiana and Mississippi, states that  proved to be difficult terrain for critics of those ICE arrangements four years ago.

Still, immigrants’ rights advocates have opportunities in some blue-leaning areas to build on their 2022 successes and elect new officials who oppose collaborating with ICE.

Just four counties with 2023 sheriff races participate in ICE’s 287(g) program, which deputizes local law enforcement to act like federal immigration agents in jails. Three of them voted for Joe Biden over Trump: Duval County (Jacksonville), Florida; East Baton Rouge Parish (Baton Rouge), Louisiana; and Rensselaer County (Troy), New York. (The fourth, which voted for Trump, is Culpeper County, Virginia.)

Still, recent history suggests that efforts to curtail cooperation with ICE will be tricky in all three blue-leaning counties. Republicans defended the sheriff’s office in Duval in a special election just last month. In East Baton Rouge, the GOP sheriff easily prevailed in 2019 with endorsements from prominent Democratic officials. And in Rensselaer, the only county in all of New York State that’s part of the 287(g) program, the Republican incumbent ran entirely unopposed four years ago.

4. Will there be more interest in city halls to reform policing?

Since the Black Lives Matter protests of 2020, the most ambitious electoral platforms for changing or reducing policing have emerged at the municipal level—but so has the most stringent backlash. In the absence of federal elections, 2023 may be the year those dynamics again take front stage with many of the nation’s biggest cities set to hold mayoral races, including five cities of more than one million: Chicago, Dallas, Houston, Philadelphia, and San Antonio. Many others will vote for their city councils.

These elections will feature incumbents who have tended to clash with protesters, such as Chicago’s incumbent mayor Lori Lightfoot; Democrats with a tough-on-crime reputation, such as John Whitmire, a Texas state senator running for Houston mayor; and candidates who have championed shifting resources from policing to other social services, such as Leslie Herod, who is running for mayor in Denver, or Cabán and other left-leaning council members who are up for re-election in New York. Watch out for whatever contrasts emerge around police budgets and ordinances that criminalize homelessness.

5. Will reform initiatives survive state elections in the South? 

In 2023, the elections that may change who runs state governments will largely be concentrated in the South, and the GOP has room to extend their power in what’s already their strongest region. 

In Virginia, the GOP governor and attorney general’s tough-on-crime posturing have run into the Democratic-run state Senate, which has rejected the former’s appointments to the parole board and killed the latter’s proposal to crack down against the state’s reform prosecutors. Should they flip the Senate in 2023, the GOP would gain full control of the state government and could press forward on those matters. 

In Kentucky, Democratic Governor Andy Beshear will seek a second term in difficult conditions given the state’s conservative bent. On his third day in office, he issued an executive order enabling hundreds of thousands of Kentuckians with felony convictions to vote; his re-election bid may decide the fate of his initiative since the GOP has reversed a similar one in the past.

The GOP also hopes to gain full control of Louisiana’s government; Democratic Governor John Bel Edwards cannot run for a third term, in a state where a short-lived bipartisan agreement to lower incarceration shattered within years of him signing a landmark reform package in 2017. 

6. How will judicial elections shape criminal punishment in Pennsylvania and Wisconsin?

In 2021, Pittsburgh and Philadelphia progressives made the unusual choice of organizing around local judicial races, and it paid off with a wave of wins by candidates who ran on curtailing bail and reducing incarceration. Next year, there will be more elections for the local bench in both places. 

Also in 2023, all Pennsylvanians will get to vote in a supreme court election to replace Max Baer, a Democratic justice who died this fall. The court, which is sure to retain a Democratic majority, has vacillated on criminal justice matters. One of Baer’s final opinions came in a September ruling that brought relief to defendants with mental illness, though the court has also disappointed reformers by rejecting cases challenging the death penalty or felony murder statutes. 

While Pennsylvania’s election won’t be resolved until November, one of the year’s most important races looms in April: A state supreme court seat on the ballot in Wisconsin may hand the majority to the liberal wing. Such a flip would affect criminal justice cases that have long divided Wisconsin justices, but the fate of the state’s 1849 abortion ban also looms large. Wisconsin’s staunchly GOP legislature is locked into place by aggressive gerrymanders; unlike neighboring Michigan, there is no mechanism for citizens to put a popular initiative on the ballot. That leaves state litigation, and April’s judicial election, as a rare path for Wisconsinites to curtail the policing of reproductive rights. 

The post What Off Year? Hundreds of Local Elections Will Define Criminal Justice Policy in 2023 appeared first on Bolts.

The law required officials to automatically erase exonerated defendants’ case records and ended an onerous petition process that often took months, cost thousands of dollars, and had blocked relief for people with an unrelated felony conviction. According to the North Carolina Administrative Office of the Courts (NCAOC), court clerks purged the public record of more than 354,000 criminal cases in the six months after the law took effect. 

But starting on August 1, less than a year after automatic expunctions began in North Carolina, they’ll stop thanks to another bill the General Assembly quietly passed last month. 

Lawmakers stress that the suspension is only temporary, while the North Carolina Conference of District Attorneys, an influential organization that represents the state’s prosecutors and pressed for the pause, argues that the court system needs time to address the law’s “unintended consequences.” 

Reform advocates don’t deny that the rollout of automatic expunctions has been a bungling and bureaucratic mess that, in a few cases, harmed the people it was supposed to help. But advocates aren’t convinced the pause is necessary, and they’re worried that prosecutors could be watering down reforms that were passed amid the nationwide protest movement following George Floyd’s murder, now that the anger and energy have dissipated two years later.

Kimberly Overton Spahos, director of the state conference of DAs, dismissed that idea, telling Bolts in an email that prosecutors “are not against the idea of automatic expungements.” She added that her group “supported the Second Chance Act and has led expungement efforts over the past several years.” 

But North Carolina DAs have previously resisted automatic expunctions. After the state Senate unanimously passed the Second Chance Act in 2019, Conference president-elect Jim O’Neill, the district attorney of Forsyth County, cited the language around expunctions when telling WXII that prosecutors wanted lawmakers to “slow it down.” The House listened, and the bill languished for more than a year.

Without Floyd’s death, the Second Chance Act might have died without a vote. But by the summer of 2020, with protests mounting across the state and country, the North Carolina House rushed the legislation to the floor, where it passed unanimously. Governor Roy Cooper, a Democrat, signed the Second Chance Act on June 25, 2020, one month after Floyd died.  

Less than a year later, the state conference of DAs tried to undermine it, critics say.

In addition to automatic expunctions, the law allowed prosecutors to initiate mass expunctions for many convictions that occurred when people were 16 and 17 years old. Several district attorneys quickly committed to purging more than 75,000 youthful convictions, putting pressure on more reluctant prosecutors to follow suit. But in March 2021, as the Senate Judiciary Committee prepared another bill to expand expunctions, Chuck Spahos, the legislative liaison for the prosecutors association (and Overton Spahos’ husband), pushed for language to eliminate mass expunctions. The change was so subtle that committee members didn’t notice until Sen. Mujtaba Mohammed, a Charlotte Democrat, flagged it during a hearing.

This year, when issues with automatic expunctions first surfaced, Spahos sought to repeal them altogether, according to emails obtained by Bolts. The one-year suspension was apparently a fallback position.  

Spahos did not respond to requests for an interview. But in an email, Overton Spahos said prosecutors “support the resumption of automatic expungements for dismissals once the unintended consequences have been resolved.”

Twenty-eight states have passed laws to expunge non-conviction records either automatically or on request, and almost every state permits some records to be expunged, according to the Collateral Consequences Resource Center (CCRC), which tracks expunction policies across the country. Most states do not automatically destroy expunged files, but rather remove them from public databases and keep them confidential, granting law enforcement varying levels of access.   

But in North Carolina, when cases are expunged, court clerks destroy “both the physical and electronic records of the courts,” Charles Keller, a spokesman for the NCAOC, wrote in an email. All that remains is a barebones, confidential index of the expunged charges, which aggravates prosecutors, who want access to the expunged records. 

Some reform advocates think those records should be preserved, too, pointing out that destroying a file prevents exonerated defendants from accessing their own court files for a civil rights lawsuit. Immigrants, who have to disclose dismissed charges to immigration officials, may have no way to prove those charges were dismissed. Defense attorneys can’t find information to challenge witnesses’ credibility. 

“I’m working on a case right now where this is a material issue,” said a defense attorney who requested anonymity to discuss a client’s case. “There’s a testifying co-defendant, and I wanted to check up on his charge, and it’s just gone. I know it’s been dismissed and expunged, but that’s a problem because he got a benefit, and I don’t have a way to access that now.”

Law enforcement, meanwhile, is concerned that they’re not told when a case is automatically expunged. More troubling, there is “no procedure for the court system to notify the jail that the defendant’s case has been dismissed,” said Eddie Caldwell, executive vice president of the North Carolina Sheriffs’ Association. “Therefore, unless the lawyer calls the jail—of course, if the lawyer calls the jail, they’ve got to verify [the dismissal] with the court system. But the clerk can’t verify it because it’s all been expunged.”

During committee hearings, Spahos assured senators that these were all technology problems preventing agencies from communicating. The one-year pause would ”give us time to work on it,” he said. 

Advocates point out that officials have already had plenty of time to work out the kinks. 

The Second Chance Act required several state agencies to explain to the General Assembly how they’d “automate the expunction process” by October 1, 2021. State court officials filed a two-page report in January—three months late—that said transitioning from a paper-based record system to the digital eCourts will “play a crucial part in NCAOC’s ability to fulfill the mandate to automate expunctions.” But eCourts is more than a year behind schedule, with no firm launch date in sight. 

Even so, the NCAOC says it doesn’t need a year to fix the notification issue. 

“NCAOC is working diligently to provide a mechanism for interested law enforcement agencies to receive notice of these expunctions and expects to provide that capability in the next few weeks,” spokesperson Charles Keller told Bolts in mid-June. 

That leaves reform advocates wondering why district attorneys still pushed to halt expunctions. 

The suspension bill, which Cooper signed on July 7, instructs “stakeholders”—district attorneys, law enforcement, defense lawyers and reform advocates—”to examine and make recommendations to resolve the issues,” which the NCAOC will report on by March 1, 2023. In particular, lawmakers want solutions “related to the expunction of records that do not require the total destruction of all court files and that would allow access to these particular expunction records by additional parties.”

There are real questions about who should access expunged records and how they should be used, says Laura Holland, director of the Fair Chance Criminal Justice Project at the North Carolina Justice Center. But the state doesn’t need to shut down expunctions to answer them. 

“We have models from other states that have worked through similar issues,” Holland said. “This problem of systems not talking isn’t new. And they haven’t paused the criminal legal system.”

The post Prosecutor Pressure Stalls Automatic Expunctions in North Carolina appeared first on Bolts.

Their Prosecutors Alliance emerged as an alternative voice to the California District Attorneys’ Association (CDAA), the organization that lobbies on behalf of nearly all California prosecutors and typically champions more punitive legislation. Efforts to strengthen accountability for police and prosecutors are a flash point of disagreement. The CDAA has fought bills to curtail racial discrimination by prosecutors in jury selection and to make it easier to prosecute police for misconduct. The Prosecutors Alliance, meanwhile, has called for a ban on law enforcement contributions to DAs, citing the undue influence such donations can portend, and supported legislative efforts for increased data transparency amongst DA offices.

These fault lines are now bleeding into Tuesday’s local elections. During their time leading the Contra Costa and San Joaquin DA offices, Becton and Verber Salazar have prosecuted law enforcement officers for violent or abusive behavior toward civilians, earning their unions’ opposition. Now, both face challenges from opponents who are backed by law enforcement.

Becton faces Mary Knox, a prosecutor in her office. Verber Salazar’s opponent Ron Freitas is a former San Joaquin prosecutor who sat on the CDAA’s board until recently. and who faces a jury discrimination scandal of his own. The Stockton NAACP recently unearthed a case from 2009 where a federal judge ruled that Freitas had illegally struck a Black juror from a case involving two Black defendants. “If Ron Freitas is elected it will cast a shadow over every prosecution involving a person of color,” the NAACP wrote in a press release.

Knox and Freitas are highly critical of the incumbents’ attempts to change prosecutorial practices within their county, alleging that these reforms have eroded public safety. The elections also involve plenty of personal animus: Knox and Freitas sued Becton and Verber Salazar, respectively, after being demoted while serving as high-ranking officials in their offices.

The only other DAs on the Prosecutors Alliance’s advisory committee, San Francisco’s Chesa Boudin and Los Angeles’s George Gascón, have attracted far more national attention. And they have drawn similar animosity from local law enforcement, including from the ranks of their own offices. This has helped fuel a broader backlash from centrist and conservative forces, which are capitalizing on perceptions that the DAs’ policies have contributed to rising crime, though crime has also hiked in California counties governed by tough-on-crime DAs. Boudin is set to face voters as well next week in a recall election that is heavily funded by real estate and venture capital money.  

But Becton and Salazar’s re-election bids are equally symptomatic of the ongoing tussle over DAs who break with the tough-on-crime status quo. Cristine Soto DeBerry, the executive director of the Prosecutors Alliance, believes these challenges are part of a broader effort to roll back criminal justice reforms. “That has been consistent in this state as we’ve passed statewide ballot measures, as candidates have been elected—police unions and conservatives have been looking for ways to unwind those reforms,” she told Bolts. 

Neither Freitas nor Knox responded to requests for comment from Bolts.

In 2018, Becton, a former judge, became the first Black person and first woman to serve as DA in Contra Costa, a largely suburban commuter zone for the Bay Area that includes poor cities like Richmond as well as more affluent areas like Walnut Creek. In 2021, she filed charges against Deputy Andrew Hall for the fatal shooting of an unarmed Filipino man named Laudemer Arboleda. Hall was ultimately found guilty and sentenced to six years in prison—making him the first law enforcement officer to be convicted of a felony for an on-duty shooting in Contra Costa history.

Hall’s killing of Arboleda occurred in 2018, the year Becton took office. Three years later, the same deputy shot and killed another person: an unhoused man with schizophrenia named Tyrell Wilson. John Burris, a prominent civil rights attorney who represented Arboleda’s mother, has criticized the DA office’s delay in charging Hall, saying, “Wilson could be alive if Hall were prosecuted earlier.” In an interview, Becton defended her timeline, saying she had to completely overhaul the DA office’s mechanism for investigating officer uses of force. “These decisions were always made in a back room somewhere,” she said. “No reports, officers were cleared, nobody could tell you exactly how or why.” The DA’s office now has a protocol that every local law enforcement agency in the county has signed on to requiring the office to independently investigate every instance where an officer shoots someone. 

Livingston suggested Becton’s prosecution had been politically motivated, saying, “I also urge her to take down the posts on her reelection campaign social media where she touts this prosecution.” Livingston is also running for re-election on Tuesday, against a challenger who has criticized his handling of the issue.

The Contra Costa sheriff’s deputy union alone has heavily contributed to Knox’s campaign to oust Becton. Knox has also criticized her boss’s handling of the case against Hall, suggesting that the timing of the filing was political. But she has given contradictory answers about how she would have dealt with the case herself, including telling the Mercury News editorial board that she would not have prosecuted the deputy.

A similar dynamic is playing out in San Joaquin, which lies further east in the Central Valley. In 2021, Verber Salazar convened grand juries to investigate two cases of San Joaquin County Sheriff’s Office jail guards accused of sexually assaulting incarcerated women; both guards were indicted. 

Verber Salazar, who did not respond to requests for an interview for this piece, has had an unconventional career: she touted her law enforcement donations when first seeking office in 2014, but has since spurned police money. She was the first DA in California to exit the CDAA in 2020, regretting the association’s opposition to the state’s landmark criminal justice reforms throughout the 2010s.

“The community can come together and reach out to our current DA,” Toni McNeil, an ordained elder and lead community organizer with the interfaith social justice group Faith in the Valley, told Bolts when asked about her group’s relationship with Verber Salazar. “Clergy can call that DA together in a meeting and say, Hey, we’re concerned that law enforcement beat Devin Carter, and we demand that these officers be held accountable for violating AB392, excessive use of force. And she shows up. She responds.” 

In the case of Carter, a Black seventeen-year-old who was brutally beaten by four Stockton police officers, Verber Salazar chose to empanel another grand jury, which ultimately charged two of the officers with felony assault. Though the Stockton police department fired the two officers who were ultimately charged, the local police union criticized the grand jury’s decision to indict.

Now, the San Joaquin County Deputy Sheriffs Association and Correctional Officers Association, and the Stockton Police Officers Association, which represented the three law enforcement officials that Verber Salazar has prosecuted for charges of beating or sexually assaulting civilians, are all supporting Freitas. The candidate has received campaign contributions from all three PACs, as well as other law enforcement associations around the state like Peace Officers Research Association of California (PORAC).

Both challengers have criticized the incumbents they’re hoping to unseat for being insufficiently tough on crime. And both say that even lower-level offenses need more stringent responses. 

Knox, for instance, criticizes Becton’s decision to forego prosecuting low-level misdemeanors in favor of diversion or other services, which the DA says she has enacted to try to stop people from “cycling through our system.” Knox also makes the case for confronting substance use with criminal punishment, indicating that she would reverse Becton’s policy of not charging people for possession of small amounts of controlled substances. “The most successful drug treatment comes when there are consequences…those consequences come from being on felony probation,” she said on a recent podcast. 

Freitas has similarly criticized Verber Salazar’s efforts to change prosecutorial practices in San Joaquin, telling a local paper that, if he is elected, he would “get out of the way of the assistant DAs and let them do what they were trained to do.” Freitas supports the repeal of Proposition 47, a 2014 initiative that reclassified some felonies as misdemeanors in an effort to reduce the prison population. Californians decisively re-affirmed Prop 47 in 2020 (the rollback effort lost overwhelmingly in San Joaquin County as well), but in the wake of highly publicized retail thefts, law enforcement and business interests have doubled down on repealing it this year. Legislative proposals to do so have not moved forward.  

“It is the old failed policies of the past that have not kept our communities safe, have led us to the highest rates of incarceration and very high rates of racial disparities in our system, versus continuing the path that we’re on,” Becton told Bolts. 

Similar debates are playing out through a reverse dynamic in many California counties, where outsiders running on decarceration and criminal justice reform are either challenging more conservative sitting DAs or running to succeed outgoing ones including in Alameda, Orange, Santa Clara, and Sacramento. The CDAA’s president, Yolo County DA Jeff Reisig, faces a challenge of his own from former public defender Cynthia Rodriguez.

The state’s elections on Tuesday could shake the established order of so-called progressive prosecutors in California, and there are a huge range of possible outcomes. If Boudin, Becton, and Salazar prevail, and progressive challengers win around the state, the alliance’s ranks could double. But when the dust settles, Gascón, the only DA who is not up for reelection next week, might also find himself in an alliance of one.

The backlash is real, Becton acknowledged. But she recalled how few progressive prosecutors there had been when she first became DA in 2017. “When you look around the country, we’re now about 20 percent of the elected prosecutors in the country [who] are standing on principles of reform and equity in the criminal justice system,” she told Bolts. “I still think that at the end of the day, the movement—and that’s really what it is—is continuing to grow.”

The post Meet the Other Two Northern California DAs Facing Law Enforcement Blowback appeared first on Bolts.

Nevada, a state where district attorneys are fond of death sentences, is close to repealing capital punishment. When the Assembly passed a bill to abolish the death penalty in April, the chamber’s Democrats, who hold the majority, all voted in its favor, sending it to the Democrat-controlled Senate.

But a pair of Democratic senators, both of whom work as prosecutors when the legislature is not in session, may derail the effort. Nicole Cannizzaro is the Senate majority leader and has not committed to bringing forward the legislation, Assembly Bill 395. Melanie Scheible leads the Judiciary Committee, which has yet to hold a hearing or vote on the bill. The clock is ticking; the bill would need to pass the committee by next week, and the entire legislative session is winding down at the end of May.

Cannizzaro and Scheible are deputy district attorneys in the office of Clark County (Las Vegas) DA Steve Wolfson. Wolfson is a staunch foe of death penalty abolition who has sought death sentences in dozens of cases over his tenure, testified against AB 395, and is trying to schedule an execution just as this debate is coming to a head in the state Capitol.

“There’s an apparent conflict of interest, where the people that are making laws are enforcing laws,” Scott Coffee, a longtime public defender in Clark County who has worked on many capital cases, told The Appeal: Political Report. “Walking into that office after repealing the death penalty would be kind of like walking into the Red Sox dugout after trading Babe Ruth.” Neither Cannizzaro nor Scheible responded to requests for comment for this article.

The Nevada Association of District Attorneys, the state’s prosecutorial lobby, has been urging lawmakers to reject AB 395. Its president, Elko County DA Tyler Ingram, testified against abolishing the death penalty in the Assembly. “Throughout Nevada, prosecutors make the decision to seek the death penalty sparingly and judiciously,” Ingram told the Assembly. “It is reserved for the worst of the worst.”

But Nevada prosecutors have pursued the death penalty so frequently that they have helped make their state an outlier even by national standards.

Nevada has about 70 people on death row. Relative to the state’s population, that is the second-highest number in the country, behind Alabama. The numbers are “completely out of whack with the rest of the country and the rest of the free world, to be quite honest,” said Coffee, who blames a “culture” where DAs seek death sentences “in volume because it’s always been sought in volume.”

And state prosecutors have filed notices seeking death sentences in dozens of additional cases—but have either failed to secure them or else dropped their quest. Critics say prosecutors use these notices to gain leverage in plea negotiations.

The Nevada District Attorneys Association, contacted through its president and through two registered lobbyists, did not respond to requests for comment.

For Assemblymember Steve Yeager a Democrat who is a chief sponsor of AB 395, the death penalty gives prosecutors an alarming degree of discretion over someone’s life. 

Yeager worked as a public defender in Clark County for eight years, going up against the county’s prosecutors. He says he already opposed the death penalty before that experience, but his resolve hardened when he witnessed the “unjustifiable differences” in how prosecutors handled similar cases. A disproportionate share of the people on Nevada’s death row are Black, and Yeager says last summer’s protests for racial justice have helped push this bill further than similar measures have gone in the past. 

AB 395, as currently drafted, would commute the sentences of people on Nevada’s death row to life without the possibility of parole—in addition to barring future death sentences.

Nevada has not executed anyone since 2006, in part due to its difficulties obtaining execution drugs from manufacturers. But abolition advocates point to the resurgence of federal executions under President Donald Trump to warn that a pause could end at any moment. 

Wolfson, the Clark County DA, is looking to break Nevada’s stretch by trying to schedule an execution for Zane Michael Floyd, who was sentenced to death in 2000 for the murders of four people. There is a hearing scheduled in state court for next week, shortly before the deadline by which the Judiciary Committee must act on AB 395, though a federal judge said on Thursday that he may intervene to block the proceedings.

Holly Welborn, policy director at the ACLU of Nevada and a member of the Nevada Coalition Against the Death Penalty, says the DAs’ involvement in the death penalty debate this year mirrors how they’ve torpedoed past criminal justice reform proposals. She regrets that lawmakers let them have such sway in legislative proceedings.

“It’s almost like they have a veto, that everything has to be signed off by the DAs, by some law enforcement entity,” Welborn said. Referencing a 2019 omnibus reform bill that several DAs opposed that was weakened before its final passage, she added, “It seems that every change in a bill is at the request of law enforcement, who then still show up and oppose these measures.”

This dynamic has played out before, in ways strikingly similar to the current debate on the death penalty.

In 2019, the Assembly overwhelmingly passed legislation to limit civil asset forfeiture. Advocates who supported the bill called on Cannizzaro to allow a Senate vote on the bill, much like they are doing now with AB 395. But the bill never received a vote in the Senate. 

The Nevada District Attorneys Association testified against that asset forfeiture bill in the Senate’s Judiciary Committee. This year, when lawmakers introduced a watered down version that also has yet to get a vote, the association testified against it again.  The group has also been resisting a bill that would toughen use-of-force standards for police. 

Throughout the country, DAs and their statewide associations play a similar role of adamantly fighting reform, but they are facing a reckoning in some states. Reform advocates in Nevada hope their state can follow suit. “This is something that we’re not tolerating anymore,” Wellborn said, describing renewed efforts by criminal justice reform advocates to expand whose voices are heard at the state Capitol.

Leslie Turner, an organizer with Mass Liberation, credits AB 395’s progress to community organizing. “We really focused on getting into impacted communities and empowering our own community members, reducing the stigma and shame about having been impacted by the criminal justice system,” she said. “And I think that that has created a lot of momentum around criminal justice reform in general.”

“There is a difference between the emotional satisfaction that comes from revenge, versus actual justice,” Turner added about the death penalty. “Justice to me is making sure that this doesn’t happen in the future. We’re having three or four mass shootings a week, because we never actually got to the root cause of why this was happening. … We just react over and over again. I think there’s just a mass refusal in the community to accept this anymore.”

Local elections have also added to the influence of public defenders, sparking new fault lines even within the Democratic Party. In addition to former public defender Yeager, the chief sponsor of AB 395 in the Senate—Democrat James Ohrenschall—works as a public defender in Clark County when the legislature is not in session. 

Public defenders also secured a string of victories in judicial races in Clark County last year after running on promises to bring a decarceral outlook to the bench. In response, Wolfson called on the state to move away from electing its judges. Wolfson himself is up for re-election as DA in 2022.

The Nevada Democratic Party has faced broader turmoil this year. A slate aligned with the Democratic Socialists of America took over the leadership of the state party. And Judith Whitmer, the incoming state party chairperson, supports abolishing the death penalty. 

Even if the Senate were to pass AB 395, though, Democratic Governor Steve Sisolak has tentatively indicated he may block the legislation. He said he would have a “hard time” supporting a bill that fully abolishes the death penalty. 

Death penalty opponents remain hopeful that the state’s broad political transformations, combined with the reckoning brought about by protests and the nationwide tide against executions, can outweigh Nevada’s propensity for capital punishment.

Welborn invoked the anti-death penalty movement’s recent triumph in Virginia, another state that long embraced executions. “We know that the death penalty system is too broken to fix in the state of Nevada, and anywhere else in this country,” she said. “Virginia at one time had the highest rate of executions in the country. If they can do it, we certainly can do it here in Nevada.”

The post Nevada Prosecutors Are Standing in the Way of Abolishing the Death Penalty appeared first on Bolts.

Los Angeles County’s newly elected district attorney George Gascón resigned today from the California District Attorney’s Association (CDAA), the group that represents most California DAs and that is now fighting Gascón’s criminal justice reforms. 

Statewide prosecutors’ associations are among the most punitive forces in the criminal legal system, in California and elsewhere. While they are largely unknown to the general public, they have historically lobbied local and state governments to keep prison sentences long and to protect prosecutors’ vast powers.

Gascón, who took over running the nation’s largest prosecuting agency in December, chided the organization for its opposition to reform in an open letter published online today. Among other criticisms, the letter mentioned the CDAA’s failure to appoint a single person of color to its 17-member board of directors; its opposition a 2014 initiative that Gascón himself authored to lower the severity of some charges; its siphoning money away from environmental and workplace-safety prosecutions to instead lobby against legal-system reform; and its rejection of what Gascón said were “commonsense criminal justice reforms” backed by the majority of Californians.

“CDAA continues to be a member organization solely for those willing to toe the ‘tough on crime’ line,” Gascón wrote today. “For the rest of us, it is a place that fails to support us, our communities, or the pursuit of justice.”

The association has been one of the loudest voices in California urging Sacramento lawmakers and state voters to reject reforms. It has for instance opposed successful ballot initiatives to legalize marijuana or reduce penalties for drug offenses, and fought similar legislation.

“The CDAA has enjoyed a very cushy and close relationship with the California legislature for decades,” Anne Irwin, who heads the reform group Smart Justice California, told The Appeal: Political Report. “They have been unrivaled … and they spoke with one voice. They were able to influence a tremendous amount of legislation over the decades and able to shape criminalization in California.” 

Irwin added that Gascón’s decision could dramatically alter the CDAA’s power in Sacramento and continue to break apart the notion that prosecutors have “one voice.” Los Angeles County and its 10 milion residents represent over one fourth of California’s population.

Gascón, who is a Democrat, is the second sitting DA to leave the CDAA over its opposition to criminal justice reforms. San Joaquin DA Tori Salazar, a Republican, sounded a similar note last year when she announced her own departure, calling on state DAs to “look at ourselves, accept responsibility” for the “generational harm” caused by tough-on-crime policies.

Gascón, the former San Francisco DA and LAPD assistant chief, was elected last year against an incumbent DA on a platform that included progressive promises like never seeking the death penalty and not using sentencing enhancements to trump up “gang” charges against defendants in court. Since his election, he has instructed line prosecutors to not seek cash bail and to not use sentencing enhancements that greatly increase prison terms, among other changes.

But many of his own prosecutors have revolted. At the end of December, the Association of Deputy District Attorneys of Los Angeles County (ADDA), the group representing Gascón’s employees, sued Gascón to prevent him from enacting his promised reforms. A state judge blocked some of Gascón’s instructions last week.

In January, the CDAA filed an amicus brief in Los Angeles County Superior Court supporting the ADDA’s lawsuit against Gascón and claiming that Gascón’s reforms will ensure “the voices of victims fall silent and the might of the State has failed its most vulnerable.” 

The CDAA’s membership is dominated by prosecutors who advocate a much harsher approach to criminal justice than the one on which Gascón was elected. San Diego County DA Summer Stephan, a former Republican who now identifies as an independent, in January called Gascón’s ideas “unlawful” and attempted to wrest control of a high-profile double-murder case from Gascón’s office by claiming that the accused would not face enough prison time if found guilty.

Today, Gascón fired back and said it is instead the CDAA that is harming Californians.

“Ultimately, CDAA cannot claim a commitment to prosecutorial excellence while misappropriating millions of public dollars, ignoring the will of the voters, and fighting reforms that evidence clearly indicates will enhance safety, racial equity, and save scarce taxpayer resources,” Gascón wrote.

“This appears to be a publicity stunt to divert attention from his favoring criminals at the expense of victims and growing calls for his recall,” El Dorado County DA Vern Pierson, the current CDAA president, told the Political Report in a statement. (Pierson also blamed the organization’s diversity issues on the fact that Gascón himself unseated former L.A. County DA Jackie Lacey, a Black woman, last year.) “As for reform, the CDAA, in fact, sponsors many programs, including DA-initiated diversion prorams and courts for folks who have mental issues, are homeless or veterans. Our prosecutors are working to protect children who live in violent homes because we know they are more likely to become part of the cycle of violence when they reach adulthood.”

***

Gascón’s move comes at a time when a new generation of left-leaning prosecutors around the country is rethinking its relationship with the statewide associations  their predecessors have long supported. Besides lobbying legislatures around the country to adopt tougher statutes, these associations have worked to keep their own members in line.

In 2017, for example, after Orange-Osceola (Orlando) State Attorney Aramis Ayala announced she would not seek the death penalty in any cases while in office, the Florida Prosecuting Attorneys Association chucked Ayala under the bus and supported then-Gov. Rick Scott’s efforts to remove her from overseeing any capital cases. 

But these agencies are beginning to lose their grip on America’s criminal legal system. In 2018, Philadelphia DA Larry Krasner quit the Pennsylvania District Attorneys Association and called the group the “voice of the past” when it comes to justice issues. Salazar followed suit by leaving the CDAA last year, and now some prosecutorial candidates are making this into a campaign issue. 

Earlier this month, three candidates running for DA in Manhattan told the Political Report that they would not join the District Attorneys Association of New York (DAASNY), that state’s prosecutorial lobbying arm, if elected. DAASNY, as is typical for these associations, has been fighting efforts to turn the corner from decades of draconian policies in New York It lobbied against New York’s 2019 landmark bail-reform law, for instance, and, since then, has even trained prosecutors on how to use legal loopholes to hold people pretrial anyway.

“Elected prosecutors have, until very recently, been seen as a pivotal part of the punishment system — there’s been a very clear pass-off, that begins with police, who then hand people off to prosecutors,” Irwin told the Political Report. “They’ve been on the same team, pursuing the same goal, which has largely been to hold people accountable through criminalization and incarceration, as much as possible for as long as possible.” 

***

In September, a set of California DAs formed a new lobbying association, the Prosecutors Alliance of California, with a stated goal of promoting policies more aligned with criminal justice reform. This came on the heels of a similar group that emerged in Virginia in July to lobby that state’s legislature to pass laws reducing incarceration rates and increasing alternatives to imprisonment.

The California group includes Salazar and Gascón, as well as San Francisco DA Chesa Boudin and Contra Costa County DA Diana Becton, who are still in the CDAA.

Gascón himself had stayed in the CDAA until today, including throughout his tenure as the San Francisco DA.

In his letter today, Gascón said that, now that California has a progressive competitor to the CDAA, he no longer needs to support an association that won’t support him.

“I participated in CDAA for nine years,” he said. “I paid dues, attended our sessions, and assigned staff to the legislative committee all in hopes of building an organization that took account of my perspective and that of a majority of Californians. What has become clear to me after a decade of participation is that the organization is unwilling to change and grow with its members and our constituents.”

Roughly a third of California lawmakers represent Los Angeles County, and Irwin expects that the CDAA losing the membership of that county’s DA will alter the political pressures legislators face in the coming years. Sentencing reforms and bills that promote alternatives to policing are on the state’s agenda in the 2021 session.

“My prediction is that CDAA, like other law-enforcement groups facing their own falling out of public favor, will resort to what they know is their most potent tool to regain public trust: fearmongering,” she said.

This article has been updated with a statement from Vern Pierson, the El Dorado County DA and the current CDAA president.

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This article is published as part of a partnership between New York Focus and The Appeal: Political Report to cover Manhattan‘s 2021 elections. Read our first article, on the war on drugs, here.

The District Attorneys Association of New York (DAASNY), an association of New York prosecutors that generally takes tough-on-crime stances and in recent years fought reforms championed by state Democrats on prosecutorial misconduct and bail, is one of the state’s most powerful lobbying forces on criminal justice issues. All 62 of the state’s DAs are members of the association.

But Manhattan’s DA election could weaken DAASNY’s influence this year, by costing it the membership of one the state’s most prominent prosecutors’ offices.

Three of the eight declared candidates in the June Democratic primary—civil rights attorney Tahanie Aboushi, public defender Eliza Orlins, and Assemblymember Dan Quart—told New York Focus and The Appeal: Political Report that, if elected, they would not join DAASNY and would instead seek to be a “counterweight” or “alternative” to the association in criminal justice policy debates. The Democratic primary is expected to decide who will replace Cy Vance, the incumbent who has not yet indicated whether he will seek re-election.

These three candidates would be part of a budding trend of DAs distancing themselves from their state’s prosecutors’ associations, which tend to be among the staunchest foes of criminal justice reform around the country. Philadelphia DA Larry Krasner left Pennsylvania’s DA association in 2018, and San Joaquin County DA Tori Salazar left California’s a year ago. Other reform-minded prosecutors in California and Virginia have stayed in their states’ associations but formed competing organizations to advocate for progressive reforms.

Sandra Doorley, the Republican DA of Monroe County who became president of DAASNY last year, castigated the candidates who pledged to leave DAASNY. “Candidates for District Attorney who declare that they will not join DAASNY before they are even elected do not understand the immense value that comes from the connections made with fellow prosecutors that can lead to new ways to approach problem solving in all of our communities,” she said in a statement to New York Focus and the Political Report.

All but one of the candidates said that they would be interested in joining or forming an association of progressive DAs intent on promoting criminal justice reforms, regardless of whether they also stay in DAASNY, reflecting a desire by most of the field to position themselves as progressives. 

But some reform advocates warn that if the next Manhattan DA remains in the association, it would preserve DAASNY’s ability to present itself as the authoritative voice of prosecutors. For a DA to leave DAASNY would be a “signal that people are willing to break ranks” from the tough-on-crime conventions of the state’s law enforcement, said Nick Encalada-Malinowski, civil rights campaigns director at VOCAL-NY.

Should the next DA leave DAASNY, he said, “we’d finally have a DA in New York State that is actually attempting to be accountable to their specific constituents, as opposed to the most regressive DAs in the state.”

A century at the table

Founded in 1909, DAASNY has historically been a bastion of opposition to criminal justice reform in New York State. In the last decade, it has opposed the creation of a state commission to investigate prosecutorial misconduct, limitations on the practice of trying minors as adults, and 2019’s discovery reforms.

In addition to opposing the landmark 2019 bail reform law and lobbying for its partial rollback in 2020, DAASNY gave prosecutors 90-minute trainings on how to use loopholes in the law to hold more defendants in jail pretrial.

“They have intransigently opposed for decades reforms that would decrease the number of people incarcerated in jails and prisons, that would allow people access to due process, that would address the criminalizing of gravity knives, for example,” said Katie Schaffer, director of organizing and advocacy at the Center for Community Alternatives. “That is what DAASNY has done and stood for.”

DAASNY’s influence has somewhat diminished since Democrats won full control of the state legislature in 2018, according to former DAASNY president and current Albany County DA David Soares, who said the association worked especially well with the formerly Republican Senate and Governor Andrew Cuomo, a Democrat. But the organization still exerts considerable sway.

“Any legislation related to the prosecution of crimes or the criminal legal system, DAASNY has been consulted and had a seat at the table,” state Senator Julia Salazar, chairperson of the chamber’s crime and corrections committee, told New York Focus and the Political Report. “They really had a big influence on the conversations on bail, and discovery and speedy trial in 2019, and again in 2020 when there were essentially rollbacks to bail reform, unfortunately.” 

In her statement, Doorley defended the group’s practices as fueled “by a common goal of sharing ideas and improving the criminal justice system.” 

“Together we use our broad experiences to assess whether proposals ensure sufficient protections to victims of crimes and whether a proposal will harm public safety while also safeguarding the rights of those accused of crimes,” she said.

In 2019, when prosecutors were fighting proposed reforms, advocacy organizations urged DAs who say they are progressive, including Manhattan’s Vance, to withdraw from DAASNY, but none did. In the DA race for Queens that year, Tiffany Cabán ran on a pledge to leave the organization, but she fell just short of victory.

Vance did not respond to multiple requests for comment on DAASNY.

Leaving DAASNY

The three candidates who said they would not join DAASNY detailed their stances.

Quart said that in addition to not joining the association, his nearly 10 years in the legislature would help him serve as a “counterweight” to its lobbying efforts in Albany. 

Quart noted that he has fought the association in the legislature and won, pointing to his seven-year effort to repeal a law banning gravity knives, which was passed and signed in 2019 over DAASNY’s objections, as an example.

Orlins said that as a public defender, she has “fought every day against prosecutors, and against the terrible outcomes for which DAASNY has lobbied,” adding that she hopes that the Manhattan DA choosing not to join DAASNY could have a “ripple effect.” 

“Manhattan is a place that a lot of people look to and think about as a model,” Orlins said. “So when the Manhattan district attorney says ‘I am no longer going to join DAASNY; I will not be part of this regressive group that has been an opponent of real change, and blocked criminal justice reform measures,’ that hopefully brings about real change across the state. Maybe it opens the door for other DAs to withdraw from DAASNY.”

Aboushi said DAASNY’s hard-line positions are out of step with the population of New York. “The positions of DAASNY have always been consistent, have always been clear,” she told New York Focus and the Political Report. “But when you look at what the people are demanding and what the city needs, you can’t go and do the same thing over and over. They need something different.”

The other five candidates who are all former prosecutors, took a different route. Their responses to New York Focus and the Political Report ranged from uncertain to supportive of membership in DAASNY.

Diana Florence and Alvin Bragg said they would remain in DAASNY, and Liz Crotty said she would “likely” do so.

Lucy Lang said she was undecided; this represents a shift for Lang, who had said at a forum last year that she would join DAASNY. Tali Farhadian Weinstein’s spokesperson did not indicate which course the candidate would take.

“Whether as a member of DAASNY or not, as district attorney I will advocate for reforms consistent with what the public is calling for,” Lang said. “DAASNY’s positions on everything ranging from bail reform to discovery reform are out of line with the values that I will bring the Manhattan district attorney’s office—and as district attorney, I will actively advocate against the positions the organization has taken on these critical issues.” 

A progressive alternative?

Other candidates echoed Lang’s commitment to advocate for more progressive policies even if they stay in DAASNY. One tool to promote progressive change, most said, would be to join an alliance of reform-oriented DAs. No such group exists yet in New York.

Aboushi, Orlins, and Quart said they hope to create an alternative prosecutors’ organization. Such an organization could foreground the views of “prosecutors who are for real reform,” Aboushi said.

Bragg, Farhadian Weinstein, Florence, and Lang all indicated that they would be interested in joining a reform-oriented DA association, even if they stay in DAASNY. Lang said she would do so “enthusiastically,” and Farhadian Weinstein’s spokesperson said the candidate would “look to create one.” 

Crotty declined to say whether she would join such an association.

Some of the candidates who said they would stay in DAASNY said they would push for changes in policy stances from within the organization.

“I believe in ‘having a seat at the table’ especially in elected associations that historically didn’t include people who looked like me,” Bragg, the only Black candidate in the race, said. Bragg, a former chief deputy attorney general in New York, is now co-director of the Racial Justice Project at New York Law School.

He added that he would “continue to speak out publicly and forcefully against DAASNY positions that I disagree with,” noting his record of support for ending cash bail and discovery reform.

Florence said that she, too, hopes to change the organization from the inside. “There is no question that the DA association has not been a voice for progressive change within the criminal justice system,” she said, noting her previous criticism of DAASNY and DA Vance’s opposition to a proposed change to New York’s rape laws to expand the legal definition of rape to include oral and anal sex. “I believe that as DA, I can use the bully pulpit and its incredible power to influence prosecutors statewide to embrace a more progressive, 21st-century view of criminal justice.”

Crotty said that “things don’t change unless you get in there and help them change.” But she declined to share a specific policy on which she disagreed with DAASNY’s views and would like to see change.

Asked about the possibility of reforming DAASNY from within, criminal justice reform advocates argued that regardless of the next DA’s individual stated positions, remaining within the group would bolster its legitimacy as the organization as a whole continues to fight reforms.

When they left California and Pennsylvania’s DA associations, Salazar and Krasner highlighted that a key source of these groups’ influence is their ability to project a sense of universal consensus among the state’s prosecutors. “The [Pennsylvania District Attorneys Association] will not claim legitimacy of its most important criminal justice jurisdiction and try to take us back 40 years,” Krasner said at the time.

DAASNY has functioned similarly, reform advocates said. It has presented its stances to Cuomo as “the collective perspective of our state’s prosecutors,” and media outlets frequently refer to its views as the views of the state’s prosecutors at large. Just one DA choosing to withdraw could disrupt this perception, advocates said.

Advocates were also skeptical of candidates’ claims that it would be possible for the next DA to change DAASNY from the inside. “I think it’s either naive or intentionally avoidant,” Schaffer said. “We have seen multiple self-identified progressive district attorneys … join DAASNY, claim to want to have a seat at the table, but not be able to shift what DAASNY looks like, and frankly not necessarily be very dedicated to that.”

“The idea that if one of these candidates was elected and joined DAASNY that they would either stay committed individually to really shifting DAASNY, or that they would be able to do so, seems to me highly unlikely,” she added.

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On Tuesday, a bipartisan coalition of elected prosecutors and candidates in California announced the formation of the Prosecutors Alliance of California, a progressive alternative to the state’s powerful prosecutors’ group, the California District Attorneys Association. The move signals a dramatic shift in how prosecutors will influence the criminal justice reform agenda in America’s most populous state.

“A broad spectrum of political ideologies believe in a smaller, less punitive, and more equitable system of justice,” said San Joaquin County District Attorney Tori Verber Salazar in a statement. “This is one of the few issues in America’s discourse upon which Republicans and Democrats can find common ground, and we welcome prosecutors from across the political spectrum to join us.” 

“Traditional law enforcement organizations abide by a philosophy that hasn’t changed for 40 years,” added San Francisco District Attorney Chesa Boudin, noting law enforcement unions’ “vested interest” in policies that lead to more policing and criminalization. “We can no longer allow these groups to distort what’s in their interest with what’s in the interest of your safety.”

In addition to Salazar and Boudin, Contra Costa County DA Diana Becton and current Los Angeles DA candidate George Gascón have also joined the organization, which offers membership to current and former prosecutors—including line prosecutors—at the local, state, and federal levels.

Gascón, Boudin’s predecessor as San Francisco’s top elected prosecutor, is running against incumbent Los Angeles County DA Jackie Lacey this fall. If his challenge proves successful, the PAC’s inaugural members would represent four of the largest 15 counties in California that are together home to about a third of the state’s population.

Salazar, a Republican, made headlines earlier this year for becoming the first of the state’s 58 district attorneys to leave the CDAA. “As criminal justice reform sweeps through California and the nation, I witnessed the CDAA oppose most reform-based initiatives, which tells me the association is out of touch and unwilling to find new approaches to criminal justice,” she wrote in her resignation letter. In an interview with The Appeal: Political Report, Salazar predicted that some of her colleagues could follow suit. “I think more DAs are going to think about their decisions more closely and differentiate between their decision of what’s best for their county and what the CDAA is recommending,” she said.

The CDAA has long functioned as one of the most vociferous anti-reform voices in Sacramento, fighting proposals to, among many other things, reclassify certain nonviolent felonies as misdemeanors, increase the use of parole, prevent children under 16 from being tried in adult court, and amend the state’s notorious three strikes law. The CDAA subsequently disputed Salazar’s characterizations of its work, calling them “a disparagement on our professional reputations” in a January letter. (Boudin and Becton, who plan to remain members of the CDAA, declined to sign the letter.) 

El Dorado County DA Vern Pierson, the CDAA’s president, told The Appeal that he “welcomes” the PAC’s arrival, claiming that his organization represents a broad spectrum of political viewpoints. “I don’t think it’s necessarily a bad thing to have another advocacy group,” he said.

Among the new organization’s top priorities will be to push for a new state bar ethics rule, which is already under consideration, to prevent prosecutors from accepting campaign donations from law enforcement unions. Pierson told The Appeal that the CDAA believes the proposed rule is unconstitutional. 

“This group of prosecutors knows how critical their independence is to their role and their communities’ trust in them,” said Cristine Soto DeBerry, the PAC’s executive director, in a press conference. She added that they may explore legislative alternatives as well.

With increasing frequency, prosecutors across the country have been taking a hard look at their membership in professional organizations that oppose efforts to reduce incarceration and decriminalize addiction and poverty. In late 2018, Philadelphia DA Larry Krasner left the Pennsylvania District Attorneys Association while denouncing its attempts to link Philadelphia to the organization’s policy platform. “The [PDAA] will not claim legitimacy of its most important criminal justice jurisdiction and try to take us back 40 years,” he said.

This past summer, 11 Virginia prosecutors formed the Virginia Proressive Prosecutors for Justice to serve as a counterweight to the Virginia Association of Commonwealth’s Attorneys, a powerful tough-on-crime voice in the state legislature. “It gives us a way to counter the narrative that safety and justice are opposite values,” Parisa Dehghani-Tafti, Commonwealth’s Attorney for Arlington County and the City of Falls Church, told The Appeal: Political Report.

The post A New Association of Progressive D.A.s Could Overhaul California’s Reform Movement appeared first on Bolts.

Cracks are showing in the state associations that lobby on behalf of local prosecutors, and in the expectations that have empowered them to stymy criminal justice reforms in legislatures.

These associations thrive on the blurred line between their policy role and their status as professional membership organizations. This has meant that the punitive policies they defend come across as the natural offshoot of having prosecutorial experience. Amy Woolard, policy coordinator at Virginia’s Legal Aid Justice Center, regrets that lawmakers have long relied on the Virginia Association of Commonwealth’s Attorneys (VACA) to “weigh in on an issue, even go so far as to treat them almost as ‘the neutral expert in the room’ as to how criminal justice policy was unfolding on the ground.”

Earlier this month, 11 Virginia prosecutors breached this expectation of a neutral and monolithic law enforcement perspective that advocates for carceral norms. They formed a new association, the Virginia Progressive Prosecutors for Justice, with a stated intention of championing criminal justice reform in the legislature.

“I’m proud to be doing this work with my counterparts who acknowledge the harm our profession has done and now seek to correct it,” Stephanie Morales, the commonwealth’s attorney of Portsmouth, tweeted when announcing the launch. 

There is no indication that the prosecutors who joined this progressive alliance plan to leave VACA. This may help the old association retain a privileged standing and its vocation to speak in the name of all elected commonwealth’s attorneys.

Still, the new coalition is the first formal manifestation within a state of the recent progressive gains in prosecutorial offices.

Around the country, candidates have won on reducing incarceration, signaling alternatives to the punitive consensus of recent decades and exposing the policy discretion that goes into being a prosecutor, but even in victory they have remained largely isolated within their own states. 

Morales says this is the situation she found herself in when she first entered office in 2015, but that the political landscape has since changed. “Many other members of the legal profession were surprised and confused and thought I couldn’t be elected without the traditional law and order, tough on crime approach,” she told me of the reactions she encountered in 2015. “It has been amazing to watch the attention placed on the role of the prosecutor… The result has been the election of reform minded prosecutors who understand the need for decarceration.”

Virginia’s 2019 elections offered a new roadmap because of a wave of wins by candidates who positioned themselves against VACA’s preferences.  

“[VACA] is down in Richmond every single day of session, and opposes reform after reform after reform,” Parisa Dehghani-Tafti told me during her campaign in Arlington County. She cited VACA’s opposition to decriminalizing marijuana. In neighboring Fairfax, Steve Descano told me he wished to build a “counterpoint” to VACA with which to head to Richmond and say, ‘Hey, legislators, you’ve heard this regressive view of the world. Let me tell you a progressive view of what justice should be.’” Both won, ousting incumbents, and have now joined the new coalition. Some advocates are calling for similar projects in other states, such as California.

The Virginia Progressive Prosecutors for Justice called for six legislative proposals in its inaugural statement. They include repealing mandatory minimum sentences and creating new opportunities for people with criminal records to expunge convictions. 

“Coming together shines a light on our efforts, it gives us organizing principles, it gives us each backup and support, and most of all, it gives us a way to counter the narrative that safety and justice are opposite values,” Dehgani-Tafti told me after the launch.

Other progressive advocates in Virginia are planning bold moves on issues pertaining to the criminal legal system. 2020 was the first legislative session with Democrats fully in control of the state government since the early 1990s, and Virginia adopted a string of reforms, though their scope left some organizers wanting more. Woolard stressed that progressive prosecutors are just one segment of a broader “organized set of counterbalances of power” enabling a new agenda, such as groups of defense attorneys, and “an increasing visible presence of directly affected community members sharing their own experiences and ideas.”

Questions remain about the scope and strategies of the new progressive coalition of prosecutors.

For one, as long as its members remain in VACA, that may foster an asymmetry by which VACA continues to represent all of Virginia’s prosecutors, while the progressive group only represents a share of them. 

Over the past 18 months, some district attorneys—Larry Krasner in Philadelphia and Tori Salazar in San Joaquin County, California—have outright quit their state’s prosecutorial associations, in part due to frustration that these groups were fighting reform while representing them. A Political Report analysis of media coverage of the Pennsylvania District Attorneys Association found that its statements can indeed get covered as the voice of prosecutors writ large.

In confirming she would stay in VACA, Dehghani-Tafti said the 2019 elections changed the balance of power within it, at least enough to stop it from endorsing some “tough on crime” policies it may have backed in the past. (Morales also said she would stay in VACA.) Woolard agrees that VACA has taken some “atypical positions” this year, like eliminating mandatory minimum jail time for people convicted of driving with a suspended license. She attributes that to “shifts within the association that made consensus on more punitively-oriented positions less of a sure thing.”

The state has 120 commonwealth’s attorneys, though the 11 in the new alliance represent nearly 40 percent of its population.

The new progressive coalition will face parallel questions about its own internal debates, and how these will shape and constrain the group’s positions and the scope of its ambitions. 

Its members have expressed differing views in the past. The Virginian-Pilot points to Hampton Commonwealth’s Attorney Anton Bell as one prosecutor who has cultivated a “tough on crime” profile, and he offered a more qualified answer than his colleagues when asked by a lawmaker whether Virginia should reinstate parole. (Virginia stopped granting parole, with some exceptions, in 1995; there are now proposals to lift those restrictions.)

Other disagreements pertain to what prosecutors should do in their respective counties. During last year’s elections, Dehghani-Tafti and Descano vowed to not prosecute marijuana possession, a promise they then implemented; Amy Ashworth, who won in Prince William County and has also joined the new alliance, told me that adopting such a declination policy would violate the oath of office. (Morales and Norfolk’s Greg Underwood had already adopted policies of declining marijuana cases in Portsmouth in 2019.) Dehghani-Tafti and Descano both pledged to not seek the death penalty, while Ashworth would not rule it out. Ashworth said she backed repealing the death penalty and at least decriminalizing marijuana, and prosecutors’ views on statutory changes may be more pertinent to their statewide lobbying. That said, in Virginia as elsewhere, it is when prosecutors have made use of their local discretion that they have found themselves most targeted by other officials, and most isolated.

I asked Morales how she would characterize the common denominator of those prosecutors who are joining the progressive alliance. “We are unified around transformative change in this moment and far beyond,” she said. “We will not tire.”

Woolard makes the case that an effective transformation of the state’s criminal legal system will require that prosecutors make room for other groups, and take steps to diminish their own clout and authority.

This mirrors the demand of many Black Lives Matter protesters that the scope and resources of the criminal legal system be reduced, and not just rearranged. It remains rare, though no longer unheard of, for prosecutorial candidates to say they will support shrinking their office’s budgets.

“A true shift in the profession—whether from VACA or the new progressive prosecutor group—means that prosecutors will not only have to accept, but advocate for a diminution of their own power,” Woolard said.

The article has been updated with comment from Stephanie Morales.

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