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.

Evans captured national attention when, in 2019, he drew an unusually scathing condemnation from the U.S. Supreme Court for engaging in racial discrimination during jury selection at Flowers’ many trials. Flowers was set free after nearly 23 years behind bars and awarded $500,000 by the state of Mississippi for his wrongful imprisonment. Yet Evans faced no consequences.

He continued to run his DA’s office without additional oversight, dodging bar discipline and a civil rights lawsuit, and cruising to re-election unopposed. In an apparent response to the Supreme Court ruling, a lawmaker introduced bills to reform jury selection, but those went nowhere in the legislature. Now Evans exits his office as he ran it, on his own terms, having set the stage for one of his deputies to take up his mantle. 

Evans, now 70, submitted his resignation letter to a state agency in late May, but made no public announcement regarding his departure to his constituents. A local judge revealed Evans’ plans in a court filing on Wednesday. Both documents were reviewed by Bolts.

I first came across Evans in 2017 when I began reporting on the Flowers case for In the Dark, a podcast that investigated Flowers’ ordeal at the hands of Evans.

At the time, Flowers was on death row at the Mississippi State Penitentiary in Parchman. He’d been convicted in 2010, at his sixth trial, for the 1996 murders of four people at Tardy Furniture store in a town called Winona. Flowers’ first three trials had resulted in convictions that were later overturned by the Mississippi Supreme Court due to prosecutorial misconduct; his fourth and fifth trials ended in hung juries.

We found that Evans had used unreliable and faulty evidence in his repeated prosecutions of Flowers, and our analysis of Evans’ discriminatory jury selection practices—in the Flowers case and beyond—revealed his troubling legacy as a prosecutor.

Montgomery County, Mississippi, where the Tardy Furniture murders took place, is nearly half Black. And yet, the juries that convicted Flowers never had more than one Black member; two were all white. Though the U.S. Supreme Court had ruled in 1986 that it’s unconstitutional to dismiss people from juries because of their race in a landmark decision known as Batson, Evans seemed to be doing just that. 

In Flowers’ second trial, Evans removed a Black juror who he claimed was in a gang and sleeping in the courtroom. Neither claim turned out to be true, and the judge ordered the man back on to the jury, ruling that Evans had violated Batson. In Flowers’ third trial, Evans used all 15 of his discretionary strikes to remove Black people from the jury. When the Mississippi Supreme Court reversed Flowers’ conviction from that trial, the court called Evans’ actions “as strong a prima facie case of racial discrimination as we have ever seen.”

Evans’ behavior in Flowers’ trials was part of a broader pattern at his office. In the Dark’s team spent months collecting trial records—over 115,000 pages of them—deciphering notes scrawled on jury lists, and analyzing transcripts of juror questioning. We found that, over a period of 26 years, Evans and his assistants had struck Black prospective jurors more than four times as often as they struck white ones. 

Evans’ alarming history gave the U.S. Supreme Court cause to throw out yet another of Flowers’ convictions in June 2019. The high court condemned Evans’ prosecution in stark terms. “The State’s relentless, determined effort to rid the jury of black individuals strongly suggests that the State wanted to try Flowers before a jury with as few black jurors as possible, and ideally before an all-white jury,” wrote Justice Brett Kavanaugh. 

Evans was undaunted. “It was a ridiculous ruling,” he told a local newspaper shortly after the decision. “They basically said there was nothing wrong with the case and reversed it anyway.”

For a brief time that year, it looked as if Evans might face consequences for his misconduct. He’d become an exception to the rule that prosecutors elude scrutiny, with multiple judges saying his practices for selecting juries violated the constitution.

An In the Dark listener had filed a complaint against Evans with the Mississippi Bar Association, which can reprimand, suspend or disbar attorneys who violate professional standards. And four of Evans’ Black constituents filed a lawsuit, alongside a local branch of the NAACP, seeking court-mandated oversight to force Evans to clean up his act. They asked a federal judge to “hold [Evans] accountable for the policy, custom, and usage of racially discriminatory jury selection” and to grant “an injunction to end this odious practice.” 

But the lawsuit was thrown out on procedural grounds, and the bar complaint has resulted in no known discipline. 

One state lawmaker, Derrick Simmons, authored a bill in 2021 that would have made it easier for defendants like Flowers to stop Evans, or any other prosecutor, in his tracks, if he looked to be discriminating against prospective jurors on the basis of race. But the bill died in a legislative committee. Simmons, a Black Democrat, tried two more times, filing the bill again in the 2022 and 2023 sessions, and twice more it died without ever making it to the floor for a vote. 

Progress on this issue has been slow-moving throughout the country, but in recent years, some states have made strides by limiting the ways lawyers can use peremptory challenges, the discretionary strikes that allow them to remove jurors without having to state a cause. Washington and California have both adopted rules aimed at preventing unconscious or implicit bias in their use. California’s 2020 law, for instance, makes it easier to argue that the removal of a prospective juror violates Batson, barring the attorney that asked for the removal from defending it with reasons that are essentially proxies for racial discrimination, like having a relative who’s been stopped by police or having a general distrust of law enforcement.

The Arizona Supreme Court went a step further in 2021, eliminating peremptory strikes altogether. Now jurors in Arizona can be dismissed only when a judge has determined they are unable to serve.

Peter Swann, former chief judge of the Arizona Court of Appeals, filed the petition to Arizona’s Supreme Court that resulted in the change. He says he was inspired to take action after an especially egregious Batson case came before him on the bench. “I usually find that when a tool is being used unfairly, taking it away is often the only way to achieve fairness,” he told me. “It’s very hard to have a view that discrimination will happen in jury selection if you take away peremptories.”

Data collected by the court system in Maricopa County, where more than half of Arizonians live, shows that this change has made juries more diverse. The share of jurors identifying as Hispanic increased by 15 percent in criminal trials between 2019, the last full year before the reform when jury trials were unperturbed by the pandemic, and 2022, the year the change took effect. On civil juries, the share of jurors of color saw an uptick of roughly 15 percent over the same period.

“A successful Arizona experiment, which we now have, is going to add fuel to the fire,” Swann said. “Arizona was the first domino. Eventually they’re going to start falling.”

It seems unlikely that Mississippi will be next.

“Legislators in Mississippi aren’t interested in strengthening Batson,” said Tucker Carrington, who heads the Mississippi Innocence Project and was one of Flowers’ lawyers. “Legislators know that race affects peoples’ lived experiences, and many of them are also lawyers who don’t want to make it harder to control which lived experiences end up on their juries.”

Carrington says eliminating peremptories is a step in the right direction, but he also thinks that Batson needs a more ambitious overhaul in order for juries to truly become fair.

“Doug Evans is an egregious example, but the criminal justice system is full of prosecutors like him. Under the Batson paradigm, nothing much happens to them. They get a slap on the wrist and then it’s back to business as usual,” Carrington said. 

Indeed, Evans was allowed to try Flowers again and again, even after he was caught discriminating in Flowers’ trials. Just months after the Supreme Court’s rebuke made him a national figurehead of misconduct, Evans was elected to a sixth term as DA of Mississippi’s Fifth Circuit Court District; no one even ran against him. Last fall, he was bold enough to throw his hat into the ring for a local judgeship. It was there that he finally suffered a setback, losing to a popular local attorney in a runoff. 

Not long after, with his job as DA back in play in the 2023 election cycle, Evans let a February filing deadline pass without entering the DA’s race, forgoing a reelection bid.

He then told his staff he would leave office early, on June 30, in the middle of the contest to fill his seat. He sent his resignation letter to the state of Mississippi in May, which I learned through a public records request to the governor’s office. But he made no statement to the public that had kept him in his post for decades. I called Evans to ask about his imminent exit, but he hung up on me once I identified myself and did not respond to a later text message.

Circuit Judge Joey Loper, who presided over two of Flowers’ trials and ordered his release from jail in 2019, on Wednesday appointed Mike Howie, an assistant prosecutor in Evans’ office, to serve as interim DA upon Evans’ departure.

Evans’ long-term successor will also come from within his office. Only two candidates are running to replace him in the upcoming election, and both are his assistant DAs.

The winner will be decided in the Aug. 8 GOP primary in the state’s Fifth District, which covers Attala, Carroll, Choctaw, Grenada, Montgomery, Webster, and Winston counties. 

One of the candidates, Adam Hopper, is the long-time staffer who did Evans’ bidding in the final days of the prosecution of Curtis Flowers. It was Hopper who appeared in court in late 2019 to say his office still had a strong case against Flowers and to oppose his release from jail, even after his conviction had been overturned by the U.S. Supreme Court. Hopper didn’t respond to requests for comment.

His opponent, Rosalind Jordan, is one of Evans’ newer assistant DAs. Jordan, a former public defender, told me that “it’s important that you go the extra mile in making sure that you do your jury selection properly, and that you don’t discriminate based on sex or race or anything like that.” But she also said she thought no change was needed at the DA’s office.

“What I’ve witnessed since I’ve been here since 2021, I’ve found to be completely in compliance with our ethical code and the rules of criminal procedure,” Jordan said.

“I would just encourage continuing to follow that.”

On Friday, the same day Evans leaves office, the U.S. Supreme Court declined to hear an appeal by Tony Terrell Clark, a Black man sitting on death row in Mississippi, who alleged that his conviction was marred by Batson violations. (The case was not prosecuted by Evans’ office.) The state Supreme Court rejected Clark’s challenges last year. In response to the U.S. Supreme Court’s refusal to take up the case, Justice Sonia Sotomayor wrote an excoriating dissent warning that Mississippi courts seem to be “[carrying] on with business as usual,” rather than heeding her court’s 2019 decision in Flowers’ favor. 

“Because this Court refuses to intervene, a Black man will be put to death in the State of Mississippi based on the decision of a jury that was plausibly selected based on race,” Sotomayor wrote in reference to Clark, joined by Justices Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson. “That is a tragedy, and it is exactly the tragedy that Batson and Flowers were supposed to prevent.”

“The result is that Flowers will be toothless in the very State where it appears to be still so needed.” 

The article was updated on June 30 with a response from the governor’s office, and with a new order by the U.S. Supreme Court in the case of Tony Terrell Clark.

The post Mississippi DA, Exposed for Striking Black Jurors, Leaves His Office On His Own Terms appeared first on Bolts.

Shelby County has been notorious for punitive practices that leave people languishing in jail for years without a conviction and fuel harsh youth prosecution, largely against Black residents. Local advocates have fought for years to change the system. The county was under federal monitoring by the U.S. Department of Justice for violating the rights of Black children between 2012 and 2018. In 2018, a DOJ report found continued violations and discrimination in juvenile courts, and characterized the policies of the district attorney’s office as a “toxic combination for African-American youth.”

The local officials who oversaw that system, District Attorney Amy Weirich and Juvenile Court Judge Dan Michael, were both ousted on Thursday. The winners, Steve Mulroy in the DA race and Tarik Sugarmon in the juvenile judge race, ran on reform agendas and secured eight-year terms.

Mark Ward, a local criminal court judge, also appears to have lost his re-election bid. Ward sparked an outcry earlier this year for sentencing Pamela Moses, a Black activist who was erroneously told by a state agency that she was eligible to register to vote, to six years in prison. That case was prosecuted by Weirich’s office, and Moses decried the aggressive charges as a scare tactic.

“I’m very excited,” Raumesh Akbari, a Democratic state senator from Memphis who champions criminal justice reform, told Bolts as she was leaving Mulroy’s victory party. “I think it’s a new day in Shelby County, with a new district attorney and new juvenile court judge, and it’s gonna be a totally different approach to how we handle the criminal justice system in Shelby County.” 

Weirich, a Republican, won her last DA race, in 2014, by a nearly two to one margin. While Shelby is a blue-leaning county, Tennessee holds general elections for local offices over the summer, and the resulting lower turnout can scramble expectations. But on Thursday, Mulroy, a Democrat, defeated Weirich by a margin of 56 to 44 percent. In the nonpartisan race for juvenile judge, Sugarmon won by 10 percentage points, in a rematch of the race he lost in 2014.

The DA race is one of the first elections to take place in the wake of the U.S. Supreme Court’s Dobbs decision overturning federal protections for abortion rights. A ban on abortions is now in effect in Tennessee, which Mulroy pointed to as a critical issue for the campaign. He attacked Weirich for lobbying on behalf of a “fetal assault” bill in the past, and vowed that prosecuting abortion cases would be a “very low priority” for his office. He has not outright ruled out such charges, saying in part that taking a blanket stance may trigger retaliation by GOP politicians; on the same day as Mulroy’s win, the governor of Florida indefinitely suspended a local prosecutor who said he would not prosecute abortions.

Akbari told Bolts that she thinks abortion “definitely made a difference” in the race, noting that Tennesseans voted just two days after Kansas rejected an effort to erode abortion rights. “This is a big deal that impacts women and families across this country.”

The DA race also unfolded in the wake of the prosecution against Moses. Faced with the state’s extremely strict and complicated felony disenfranchisement laws, Moses had received written guidance from a state agency that she was eligible to get her voting rights restored, but when she acted on that guidance that turned out to be erroneous, Weirich’s office threw the book at her andWard sentenced her to six years in prison after accusing her of “tricking” the probation’s office. After The Guardian’s Sam Levine revealed holes in the case, Ward overturned the conviction and Weirich dropped the charges.

“I think the goal was to scare people, but it could boomerang,” Moses told Bolts in March after being released from prison. Ward and Weirich both lost their races on Thursday.

In voiding Moses’s conviction in February, Ward faulted Weirich for failing to disclose evidence that Moses had been told by a probation officer she was eligible to vote. Weirich’s office has drawn attention from the Tennessee Board of Professional Responsibility and from the media for withholding evidence in the past, including in a New York Times Magazine investigation in 2017.

Local and national advocates told Bolts that the case against Moses was a window into other patterns of harsh and unequal treatment in Shelby County as well. They fault the DA’s office and local judges for overcharging defendants, imposing a harsh “trial penalty,” and for ramping up pretrial detention. Human rights organizations have denounced local bail practices as discriminatory and unconstitutional, and a report released last year by a court-appointed inspector documented that people are held pretrial in the county jail “for months or years.”

Mulroy ran for DA on planks associated with criminal justice reform, including working to reduce pretrial detention and decreasing  the volume of prosecutions for lower-level charges like drug possession. He told Bolts in a phone interview this spring that the DA’s office should not have prosecuted Moses and that, as DA, he would try to counter any chilling effect felt by residents who are unsure about their voter eligibility.

Mulroy said that he wanted to confront the “demonstrated recent history of racial discrimination in our justice system,” telling Bolts that, “I think any district attorney should make it a high priority to try to reduce the obvious and blatant racial disproportionality in our criminal justice system. That goes double for somebody in Shelby County.”

“Excessive bail and excessive seeking of pretrial detention, along with adult transfer of juvenile cases, have a hugely disproportionate minority contact rate,” he added.

The disparities in prosecution and sentencing extend into the electoral realm due to felony disenfranchisement rules. 21 percent of Black Tennesseans were stripped of the right to vote in 2020, compared to 7 percent of other adults, which barred thousands of Shelby County residents from voting on Thursday. 

Weirich seized on her opponent’s commitments to say he would endanger safety in Shelby County, and she ran a campaign centered on promises of law and order. “I believe violent offenders should go to prison,” she wrote on Facebook last week. “If you do too, please vote for me.”

“The most dangerous words in Shelby County would be ‘DA Steve Mulroy,’” that statement also said.

But Weirich’s critics scoffed at the implication that her policies were more effective to bring public safety, and point out that violent crime and murders have increased since she came into office. “If what they’re doing, this tough on crime stance was working, then there wouldn’t be a need to have reform,” Akbari said. “It’s not. It’s costing states, cities and counties an exceptional amount of money. Lives are destroyed by it, communities are destroyed by it.” 

The county’s treatment of Black children was a central theme in Mulroy and Sugarmon’s campaigns. Besides the DOJ’s 2018 report on systemic rights violations, local advocates from organizations such as Memphis for All and Just City have assailed continued disparate treatment, and earlier this year they demanded a racial equity audit of local decisions. Data released by the county shows, for instance, that Black youths were held in pretrial detention nearly three times as often as white youths in 2021. And nearly every single minor who gets prosecuted as an adult, facing far tougher sentences, is Black; the raw numbers are high, too, as Shelby County prosecutes far more children as adults than other counties.

In Tennessee, the DA seeks a child’s transfer into adult courts, and the juvenile court judge then decides on the transfer. This judge also gets to appoint the magistrates who hear the cases.

Michael, the juvenile court judge who lost his re-election bid on Thursday, resisted the federal monitoring, calling for it to end until Trump administration officials granted his wish and ended the oversight in 2018. He defended his record against critics during the campaign. “It’s a very, very difficult decision to make,” he said of his decisions to transfer children into adult court. 

Sugarmon, the victorious candidate against Michael, has called for the DOJ to resume its monitoring. He told MLK50 that he would allow fewer children to be transferred into adult court, and that he wants fewer children to be prosecuted in the first place. Black children were nearly five times more likely than white children to have cases referred to the juvenile court in 2021.

Mulroy echoes Sugarmon on the issue. “I think we also need to call for the U.S. Justice Department to resume its monitoring of our juvenile court,” he told Bolts. 

The incoming DA has not ruled out seeking adult prosecutions of minors, though he told the Daily Memphian, “we would create a strong presumption against transfer. Absent some very, very severe circumstances, adult transfer needs to be a last resort.” 

To Akbari, the election results prove that local residents are looking for a change from the status quo. “It’s easy to just throw somebody in jail. It’s hard work to actually do reform and get to the root of what causes crime, and to make sure that juvenile offenders do not become adult offenders,” she said. “And I think this vote proves that people are ready for something different. You can’t keep doing the same thing and expecting different results.”

The post Memphis Ousts DA and Judge Who Oversaw Its Notoriously Harsh Court System appeared first on Bolts.

Baltimore police fired a hail of 44 bullets at Keith Davis in June 2015, striking him three times. Keith survived, but he has since been tried five times over the events of that day. After he was acquitted of robbery but found guilty of illegal gun possession in 2016, the local prosecutor’s office added murder charges and has relentlessly tried to convict him ever since. Two convictions were overturned due to allegations of prosecutorial misconduct; two other trials resulted in a hung jury. Still, prosecutors under Baltimore City State’s Attorney Marilyn Mosby indicated they were planning yet another trial—a fifth over the same allegations—which according to at least one legal observer would be nearly unprecedented. 

Since her husband’s arrest in 2015, Kelly has been his most vocal and tireless advocate, pitting her against Mosby, who sought a third term in last week’s election.

“Keith is the most aggressively prosecuted man in American history,” she told Bolts. “We have a city full of murders and Keith faces a continuous cycle of malicious prosecution.” A judge ruled in June that Mosby’s continued prosecution of Keith Davis was driven by “personal animosity.” 

Mosby’s campaign was plagued by other major legal woes, including a federal grand jury that indicted her earlier this year on multiple perjury charges over false statements she allegedly made related to her purchase of two vacation homes. Prosecutors have accused Mosby of lying to lenders to receive more favorable mortgage terms. Mosby said the charges were politically motivated and launched a re-election bid anyway. 

In the run-up to the city’s July 19 elections, Kelly publicly backed Ivan Bates, the only candidate challenging Mosby in the Democratic primary who said he would drop the charges against Davis if elected. She even campaigned for Bates on Election Day alongside other members of “Team Keith,” a group of supporters who have waged an aggressive grassroots campaign to raise awareness of his case.

“Having so many people come to the polls that were familiar with Keith’s story … come out and say, ‘Hey, I voted for Bates,’ was a good feeling,” she told Bolts.

Bates defeated Mosby last week, grabbing the Democratic nomination by a comfortable margin of 41 to 29 percent over the incumbent. Another challenger, Thiru Vignarajah, received 30 percent. Bates will be unopposed in the general election, which makes him the city’s presumptive next prosecutor.

Since his win, Bates says he is now subject to a gag order, which Mosby has been accused of violating, that prevents him from making additional comments on what he’ll do with Keith Davis, but he told Bolts he stands by his previous statements.  

“Ethically I can no longer talk about that because I’m no longer, quote unquote, a private citizen, but I can say, the way I felt then is still and will always be the way that I felt. I still feel that way,” he told Bolts. “My word is very important to me.”

Beyond his position on Davis’s case, Bates largely anchored his campaign on talk of ramping up prosecutions—criticizing Mosby for being too lenient on crime at a time of rising murders. Gun violence has increased around the nation but is especially high in Baltimore, and Bates has vowed to seek lengthy prison terms for illegal gun possession.

He has also said he would increase prosecution and penalties for the kind of lower-level cases that decreased significantly under Mosby, such as drug possession, prostitution and loitering.

Mosby took part in national networks of so-called progressive prosecutors, and she implemented a series of criminal justice reforms over her two terms. She engaged in reviews of old sentences, stopped prosecuting canabis possession, and during the pandemic she stopped charging low-level offenses like drug possession and prostitution. 

Mosby rose to national prominence in 2015 for charging six Baltimore police officers over the death of 25 year old Freddie Gray in police custody but she was unable to secure a conviction in that case. Mosby’s opponents have blamed her for ongoing high murder and crime rates that have plagued the city—a critique she herself deployed against her opponent Gregg Bernstein in the 2014 election. Vignarajah accused her of turning Baltimore into a “crime scene” and campaigned more aggressively than Bates on rolling back her reforms; he was endorsed by Larry Hogan, the GOP governor who regularly clashed with Mosby. He finished narrowly ahead of Mosby but more than than 10 percentage points behind Bates. 

Kelly Davis and some other local activists reject the notion that Mosby is progressive. Davis cites the ongoing prosecution of her husband, as well as reports that Black residents are still greatly overrepresented in cases that Mosby’s prosecutors bring to court. During the first six months of this year, city prosecutors requested that defendants be held without bail as they await trial, a process that often takes months, in over three out of every four cases observed by the group Baltimore Court Watch.

Data also indicates that arrests for some low level offenses such as drug possession, minor traffic violations and prostituion dropped significantly after Mosby stopped prosecuting those cases in March 2020. A 2021 Johns Hopkins study, commissioned by Mosby, found that police made 443 fewer arrests in the 14 subsequent months. While the report does not establish causality, it did find that the decrease in arrests did not pose threats to public safety, and the majority of the averted arrests were of African Americans.

Bates argues that Mosby’s policies of not prosecuting some offenses has fueled crime and caused confusion; during an interview, he mentioned a former client arrested with multiple pounds of cannabis telling him he thought that Mosby had legalized drug dealing.

Bates says he’ll resume prosecuting arrests for lower-level infractions such as drug possession. He said this not for the sake of punishing people. He argued that arrests give officials the opportunity to connect people with treatment and support, offering the example of police “engaging” a sex worker “to find out this person is being sex-trafficed and if they are, given the resources and the services that they need.” 

Marguerite Lanaux, Baltimore’s top public defender, believes in alternative approaches that look to reduce the scope of the criminal legal system.

“Where you’re talking about treatment and treatment services, those things can occur without being justice-involved,” she told Bolts. She hopes that the city’s next prosecutor will reject the “immediate, feel good approach that more incarceration somehow leads to lower crime rates.”

Robbie Leonard, a defense attorney in neighboring Baltimore County, shares Lanaux’s analysis.

“There are other ways of providing services to people outside the court system,” he told Bolts. “And sometimes that’s hard for an attorney that’s only practiced criminal law to think outside courts, police, outside of arrests, and judges, but it can be done.”

Leonard also cautioned Bates against reflexively undoing policies that have proven effective, noting the mounting evidence that incarceration does not reduce recidivism or bolster public safety over the long term.

But Bates has said he’ll seek lengthy prison terms for gun possession. “If you’re a violent offender and you’re carrying an illegal handgun, we’ll be invoking the five-year minimum mandatory sentencing,” he told Bolts. There have long been heated debates in Maryland over whether to eliminate or strengthen mandatory minimum sentencing, which critics stress balloon prisons and pressure defendants into guilty pleas to avoid the harshest charges. Bates defends their deterrent effect. “I never enjoy sending people to jail,” he said. ”However I also can no longer stand by when we have so many funerals of young people in the city.”

Leonard, who is a former public defender, ran for prosecutor himself this summer in Baltimore County. (The county does not include the city of Baltimore.) He challenged State’s Attorney Scott Shellenberger, a fierce opponent of police and criminal justice reform. This was Shellenberger’s first primary challenge since he took office in 2006. 

As of publication, some votes remain to be counted and the local press has yet to call the race, but Shellenberger leads 51 to 49 percent and appears to be the likely winner. Leonard told Bolts he is heartened by the results because it shows that there’s a path to victory for a reform candidate in the county, which has the reputation for being more conservative than the city.

Shellenberger is set to stand trial later this year over his office’s handling of sexual assualt cases, something Leonard says motivated him to run. The Daily Record reported on Thursday that Shellenberger told his staff he would take a leave of absence from his office, citing exhaustion. GOP nominee James Haynes awaits the Democratic nominee in November.

Three other prosecutors lost elsewhere in Maryland, all in Republican primaries. Saint Mary’s County’s Richard Fritz lost to Jaymi Sterling, a former employee of the office who is also the daughter of the current governor; Hartford County’s Albert Peisinger lost to Alison Healey, who benefited from heavy support from a local police union; and Lisa Thayer Welch ousted incumbent Justin Gregory in Garrett, a smaller county.

See: The full list of candidates running for prosecutor in Maryland.

None of these new GOP nominees will face an opponent in November; in total, all but three of Maryland’s 24 prosecutor races are now resolved.

Baltimore City was meant to have a contested general election as well but Roya Hanna, a defense attorney running as an independent who has also proposed rolling back some of Mosby’s reforms, announced on July 29 that he would drop out and endorse Bates, effectively sealing Bates’s victory.  

Bates gained prominence for working as the defense attorney for Alicia White, one of six officers charged by Mosby over Gray’s death in police custody, and in 2018 for his role in exposing the Gun Trace Task Force, a group of corrupt Baltimore cops convicted of crimes ranging from robbery, extortion and overtime fraud.

For the city’s next state’s attorney, one of the first decisions will be how to handle the prosecution of Keith Davis. A court hearing scheduled for August will decide the date of the new trial sought by Mosby; if the trial goes forward, it would be his sixth.

Leonard praised Bates for his criticism of Mosby’s handling of the case. “Not prosecuting Davis is very important,” he said. He also hopes that Bates will not pursue a total break from some of the incumbent’s reforms. “He really needs to think about some of the policies Marilyn Mosby had that were successful, implement them, modify them—don’t eliminate them because they were implemented by someone he had to beat.”

Correction: An earlier version of this article misstated Jaymi Sterling’s relationship to Governor Hogan.

The article was updated on July 29 to reflect Roya Hanna’s decision to drop out from the general election.

The post Baltimore Ousts Its Embattled Prosecutor, Reshuffling Local Criminal Justice Policy appeared first on Bolts.

In a ruling issued earlier this month, a federal court left a Black man on death row despite the emergence of new documents that suggest prosecutors sought to eliminate Black people from the jury pool. 

The decision reveals the length to which judges will go to permit prosecutors’ maneuvers,  and underscores the urgency of political solutions that could create meaningful constraints on prosecutors.

It’s well-established that the rule barring race discrimination in jury selection is inadequate, bordering on useless. The rule, established in the 1986 Supreme Court case Batson v. Kentucky, is so narrow and its burden of proof so high that prosecutors have had little trouble devising ways around it. Finding a Batson violation—that prosecutors struck a potential juror because of race—ultimately requires finding that prosecutors intentionally discriminated and that any acceptable reason they gave for removing a juror was a lie, knowingly offered to conceal the racism driving their conduct. 

Part of Batson’s deficiency is that it leaves judges, a great many of whom are former prosecutors themselves, wide leeway to defer to prosecutors. In most cases, a judge simply taking the prosecutor at their word is all it takes to kill a Batson claim. And prosecutors have developed training manuals on how to get all-white juries while going through the hollow motions of legal compliance. 

The ruling by the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals this month, along with the 2019 district court ruling it affirms, exemplifies judges’ extraordinary deference to prosecutors, and the contorted reasoning they use to avoid holding prosecutors accountable for even the most obvious racism. 

The Fifth Circuit denied relief to James Garfield Broadnax, in a decision written by Edith Jones, a conservative judge who once complained that a last-minute appeal in a death penalty case made her miss a birthday party. Broadnax was sentenced to death in 2009 in a case where prosecutors tried to exclude every Black person from the jury pool. Prosecutors even highlighted each potential Black juror on written documents that they then withheld and that only recently surfaced. The Dallas district attorney’s office, where they worked, has a long history of racial discrimination; it had “for decades, followed a specific policy of systematically excluding blacks from juries,” the Supreme Court found in 2005.

But rather than face the discrimination staring at them, the district court and the Fifth Circuit panel recast much of this evidence as the prosecution’s good-faith efforts to comply with Batson. 

At Broadnax’s murder trial, prosecutors used their peremptory strikes—which allow lawyers to remove potential jurors for virtually any reason or no reason at all—against all seven Black potential jurors and one Latinx potential juror. They pointed to factors that disproportionately affect Black people in the United States, for instance striking one potential juror because she had relatives in jail. The trial judge initially permitted this tactic before reseating the last Black juror, offering a make up of sorts for the racism he had allowed before then: “I’m going to grant the Batson challenge and I’m going to do so because of the fact that there are no African-American jurors on this jury and there was a disproportionate number of African-Americans who were struck,” he said. 

That ruling gave Broadnax 11 white jurors and one Black juror whom the prosecution had tried to remove.

In addition, prosecutors had marked the names of each Black juror—and only the Black jurors—in bold font on a spreadsheet. Prosecutors had withheld this document for years, until after Broadnax had finished his state court appeals and filed his habeas petition in federal court. 

This spreadsheet was the focus of the Fifth Circuit’s opinion. The court had to decide whether the rules governing federal claims of unlawful imprisonment would allow Broadnax to submit the spreadsheet as new evidence of race discrimination, or if, as the federal district court had decided, the document must be excluded, effectively dooming Broadnax’s claim. 

In other cases, prosecutors have tried to spin such evidence into a positive, claiming they marked the Black jurors they eventually struck from the jury pool as part of their efforts to avoid discrimination. 

In Foster v. Chatman, this drew the rare wrath of the U.S. Supreme Court. In that 2016 case, prosecutors in Butts County, Georgia, had a list of potential jurors with the names of all four Black jurors highlighted in bright green (a legend indicated that the highlighting “represents Blacks”), and then struck them from the jury. The state of Georgia later argued that, while this may look bad, it reflects how the prosecution was “thoughtful and non-discriminatory in [its] consideration of black prospective jurors,” and worked “to develop and maintain detailed information on those prospective jurors in order to properly defend against any suggestion that decisions regarding [its] selections were pretextual.” 

The Supreme Court didn’t buy it. “The focus on race in the prosecution’s file plainly demonstrates a concerted effort to keep black prospective jurors off the jury,” the Court wrote, and any suggestion to the contrary “reeks of afterthought.” 

But in Broadnax’s case, both the federal district court and the Fifth Circuit declined to follow the Foster ruling’s lead. They announced that marking Black jurors on a list and then trying to strike all of them could have indicated benevolent race-consciousness intended to comply with Batson. 

They reasoned that the DA’s office’s history of racist jury selection may actually count in its favor. Since prosecutors have been caught discriminating before, the courts explained, they should be tracking the race of potential jurors to better protect people of color, and judges could assume that was their intent with the spreadsheet.

The district court said “it would have been professionally irresponsible for the Dallas County District Attorney’s Office (in 2009) to have failed to identify the members of the remaining jury venire who were members of a protected class and against whom it might have been preparing to exercise a peremptory challenge.” The Fifth Circuit echoed this, explaining that, given its history, the “office would have had considerable motivation to identify which jury venire members belonged to a protected class when preparing to defend its use of peremptory challenges.” 

Absent from this analysis is the fact that prosecutors attempted to strike every single juror they were supposedly trying to protect. 

Looking at the evidence this way, the Fifth Circuit found that the spreadsheet was, at best, unimportant—certainly “no smoking gun,” it wrote—and affirmed the district court’s decision not to consider it. In a system that routinely holds people’s history of misconduct against them, prosecutors got a free pass, and James Broadnax remains sentenced to die.

There is some chance that the Supreme Court will intervene, as it did in the high-profile case of Curtis Flowers, decided in 2019. But that would only underscore how slow and nearly random securing justice under Batson can be. Flowers sat on death row for decades and was tried six times for murders he almost certainly didn’t commit. Over that time, 61 of the 72 jurors who decided his fate were white. And although Flowers won, the Supreme Court declined the opportunity to use his case to strengthen Batson, instead emphasizing that its ruling was limited “to the extraordinary facts of this case.” Moreover, the prosecutor in Flowers’s case, Doug Evans, has so far evaded accountability, and a civil lawsuit against him was dismissed last year. 

But elected lawmakers don’t have to wait for judges to battle discrimination. Last year, California passed legislation that targets how implicit bias and racial stereotypes often influence jury selection, accounting for racism that is hard to detect and can infect jury selection even when prosecutors do not intend it. This can allow relief without defendants having to prove that prosecutors were intentionally discriminating against potential jurors of color. Among other things, the law presumptively bars an enumerated list of reasons that prosecutors have often used to exclude Black jurors, including “having a negative experience with law enforcement” and “expressing a belief that law enforcement officers engage in racial profiling or that criminal laws have been enforced in a discriminatory manner.” The Washington Supreme Court adopted a similar rule in 2018. 

Such a law may have helped Broadnax, had it been in place in Texas at the time. It certainly would have made it harder for prosecutors to get away with striking one juror because she had relatives in jail, and another because she had children but no employment and “desperately wanted to sound intelligent” — both “race neutral” explanations that prosecutors used to defeat Batson challenges in his case. 

When he authorized most of prosecutors’ requests to exclude jurors of color, the trial judge in part blamed  Batson’s exacting standard of intentional discrimination. “The problem … is that if you grant a Batson challenge it implies some sort of nefarious intent on the part of prosecutors … you’re essentially saying that the prosecutors are lying,” he said. While Broadnax argued at trial and throughout his appeals that he proved Batson violations, a law like California’s would have also enabled the judge to grant the defense team’s objections without finding “nefarious intent.”

But reforms to jury selection require courts to enforce them, and they will not be enough as long as judges excuse even overt, documented discrimination, giving prosecutors every benefit of the doubt. That’s why there’s a growing chorus to abolish peremptory strikes altogether, and allow lawyers to strike only those jurors who are not qualified to serve. That’s what Justice Thurgood Marshall argued when he concurred in Batson itself. The “inherent potential of peremptory challenges to distort the jury process by permitting the exclusion of jurors on racial grounds,” he wrote, “should ideally lead the Court to ban them entirely from the criminal justice system.” 

In the meantime, Broadnax remains on Texas’s death row, his legal challenges nearly exhausted. Now only the U.S. Supreme Court can vindicate his right to jury of his peers, selected without the taint of racial discrimination.

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