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.

Two weeks after Tyre Nichols died from the injuries he sustained at the hands of a number of police officers in Memphis, Tennessee, something unusual happened: Shelby County District Attorney Steve Mulroy charged five of the officers with murder. This was statistically notable: of the nearly 1,200 people killed by police in 2022, criminal charges were subsequently filed against just 9 officers. Even those rare instances usually take longer and require sustained public pressure. 

Mulroy’s swift charges have encouraged onlookers in Memphis and across the United States. “It made a difference,” said Raumesh Akbari, a state senator from Memphis. “It made the community feel like there would be some level of accountability—and punishment, to be perfectly honest with you—for the murder of Tyre Nichols.” 

Akbari was a strong supporter of Mulroy’s successful bid for DA last year, when the Democrat ran as a reformer against incumbent Republican Amy Weirich, who was long denounced by local organizers for racially discriminatory practices and egregious abuses of power. “A lot of times people are not paying attention to the full scope of a position like the DA,” Akbari told Bolts. “I mean, it has the potential to completely impact hundreds of thousands of people throughout the city.” 

But the real test of Mulroy’s tenure as Shelby County DA is what he does next—how he confronts a deep and abiding legacy of police misconduct and brutality in Memphis.

In conversation with Bolts over the last week, local organizers as well as advocates who have worked on policing elsewhere called for a variety of changes, such as using the DA’s pulpit to encourage fewer police stops and reopening old cases involving the SCORPION police unit, which has been disbanded after public outcry and accusations that its deadly violence towards Nichols was merely an extreme example of a brutal status quo. These are moves that prosecutors in other parts of the country have implemented in the wake of police misconduct.

Mulroy told Bolts in a wide-ranging interview on Monday that he was open to some of these demands and to talking about them with community groups. The death of Tyre Nichols, he said, has “highlighted the need for us to have a broader conversation about police reform—and I think given a renewed sense of urgency about having that conversation.” He has implemented some proposals put forth by progressive groups since coming into office, such as creating a new Justice Review unit to root out wrongful convictions, though he said he had not made any definite decisions on a number of policy initiatives Bolts queried him about.

The DA said, however, he has no plans to direct his office to reopen past cases where people were convicted based on the work of one of the officers now under indictment or other SCORPION officers. The release of video footage of Nichols’s death in late January showed that the initial police reports of how he was stopped and what followed were wildly inaccurate. (Editor’s note: Mulroy announced on Feb. 9 that he would review any past cases and convictions involving work conducted by the officers he charged.)

Somil Trivedi, an expert on police accountability who currently works as the chief legal and advocacy director at Maryland Legal Aid, says that there’s a “naturally symbiotic relationship” between prosecutors and police that stands in the way of DAs taking steps to curb misconduct. Prosecutors have to “rely on the same police for his day job” that they need to also hold accountable. 

Trivedi stressed that Mulroy is one of just a handful of elected DAs around the country who has cultivated a sense of independence from their police forces. “The community shouldn’t have to wonder, when there’s a police shooting or police violence, what’s going to happen—-and right now they do,” Trivedi added. 

Mulroy must also navigate the threat of backlash from the police he has attempted to hold accountable and from statewide officials in Tennessee’s conservative political climate, as well as the legacy of racial injustice and police impunity his office has contributed to, which he must now work to transform. 

“We understand that he inherited this,” said Tikeila Rucker, an organizer with Memphis For All, an organization that supports social justice issues. “It won’t be overnight that we’re out of this space.”

“We’ve been asking for these things for years and had some of these things been implemented,” she added, “it could have been a preventive measure.”

In March 2022, Rucker and four other Memphis-based advocates penned a letter to the Shelby County Board of Commissioners, calling for an independent racial equity audit of Weirich’s office. “Race discrimination in our legal system—from how Black people are prosecuted and punished more harshly, to how Black crime victims are dismissed and disregarded—is a crisis that can no longer be ignored,” they wrote. “It is a crisis that threatens public safety on the whole.” 

The group cited Weirich’s office’s prosecution of a Black woman, Pamela Moses, for registering to vote while she was barred due to a felony conviction, which resulted in Moses receiving a six-year sentence. (A judge later overturned the ruling.) It also highlighted Weirich’s treatment of Black children, noting that her office prosecuted more children in adult court than every other Tennessee DA combined—and that between 2018 and 2020, 98 percent of those children were Black. In 2012, the year after she took office, the U.S. Department of Justice had imposed a consent decree on Shelby County owing to longstanding patterns of racial discrimination against Black kids; a monitor later said the county “actively resisted compliance.” 

Weirich did not respond to a request for comment from Bolts for this story.

Local officials over the years have pointed to the threat of violent crime to justify a slate of punitive measures, including the adult prosecution of children, but also ramping up policing and creating elite groups like the SCORPION unit, whose officers terrorized Memphians well before they came into contact with Nichols.

But for critics of those policies, these “tough-on-crime” decisions were only fueling the problem. “A lot of the issues that we’re dealing with on the back end is because we fail to properly handle juvenile crime,” Akbari said. “We have juveniles who become adult offenders…we have to look at the real systemic issues of poverty, lack of education.”

And they felt frustrated in their warnings about the effects of ramping up police presence. “[We had been speaking] about police brutality for years, but it was falling on deaf ears,” Rucker told Bolts.

In 2021, local groups organized themselves into a coalition called the Justice and Safety Alliance. Their goal was to propose alternatives and act as a counterweight to the Memphis Crime Commission, an influential private organization which advocates largely for tough on crime policies, including expanding the number of police in Memphis, and whose board includes public officials. (In 2020, The Marshall Project sued to get the commission to turn over documents about funds it had received and passed on to law enforcement, calling it the “functional equivalent” of a state agency). 

Cardell Orrin, executive director of the Tennessee branch of Stand the Children, which is part of the Justice and Safety Alliance, says the Memphis Crime Commission exemplifies the intimate connections between police and prosecutors. The group has traditionally played kingmaker for DA hopefuls, Orrin said; it has also funneled donations to law enforcement and influenced police policy, for instance by hiring Ray Kelly, the former NYPD commissioner and stop-and-frisk defender, whose recommendation that the Memphis Police Department expand its gang unit was taken up by the department. 

Mulroy told Bolts he had accepted the commission’s invitation to sit on its board but left the door open to leaving, adding that he opposed many of their favored policies and had advocated for adding criminal justice reformers on the commission.

“It’s just somewhat insidious,” Orrin said of the commission’s role in local politics. For a long time, he added, “there wasn’t a coalition or partnership of organizations that represented the perspective that we had.”

During the 2022 DA race, the alliance released a platform that included several measures that could improve police accountability, including greater data transparency and the establishment of a conviction integrity unit to reexamine old cases that may be based on shaky or insufficient evidence. It also demanded the publication of a Do Not Call list, or Brady list, that lists officers with documented issues of bias or dishonesty so that prosecutors cannot bring cases based on these officers’ casework or testimony. 

In running against Weirich, Mulroy echoed the themes of these local organizations, telling Bolts last year that he wished to confront the “demonstrated recent history of racial discrimination in our justice system.” Buoyed by national attention on Moses’s prosecution and by the light it cast on the punitive and racially unequal status quo of prosecution in Shelby County, he won handily with 56 percent of the vote. 

Since then, Mulroy has made good on some of these goals. He established a new chief data officer role within his office and says he plans to create a public data dashboard in the model of those created by other progressive DAs. He has also kept his promise to implement a conviction review board—a move that had a hand in his recent decision to charge the five officers who fatally beat Tyre Nichols with murder. 

“I’ve tasked my justice review unit not only with looking back over past cases to see if there have been wrongful convictions or wrongful sentences, but they’re also now advising me on prosecutorial recommendations in these officer-involved fatality cases—the same independence from law enforcement and separateness from the rest of my office that brings objectivity to the wrongful conviction and wrongful sentence analysis,” the DA told Bolts. 

Mulroy said, however, that he had no plans to direct the unit to review past convictions that resulted from arrests made by SCORPION, even as their validity may be in question in the wake of revelations about the unit’s pattern of behavior towards civilians and its subsequent disbandment. “I haven’t decided to do any kind of broad-based comprehensive review of every case that might have had any involvement with the SCORPION unit,” he told Bolts. 

Mulroy said he also has no such plan in place for past cases that involved testimony or reports made by the five officers he charged with murder: “I don’t right now think that’s necessary.” 

(Editor’s note: On Feb. 9, Mulroy shifted the position he had shared with Bolts days earlier, announcing that his office would review all the cases involving these officers. His office still indicated no plan at that time to undertake a proactive review of SCORPION cases.)

Trivedi wants to see a review of past cases that involved the SCORPION unit. “There’s absolutely no reason why it shouldn’t be done every time a police officer is found to have committed misconduct,” he said. “Just like there are habitual offender police who are caught either lying or giving un-credible testimony on the stand, which is why we need a Brady list—we all know that there are officers who are habitual rule breakers in the streets and use excessive force.” 

There are precedents for such revisitation: Just a few months ago, Manhattan DA Alvin Bragg and Brooklyn DA Eric Gonzalez said they would clear hundreds of cases that involved the testimony of police officers who faced allegations of lying or misconduct, calling them unreliable witnesses. 

Some progressive prosecutors have also chosen to reopen old cases of police killings in which their predecessors had opted not to file charges. Chesa Boudin did so in San Francisco before he was recalled; across the bay, new Alameda DA Pamela Price recently announced she would look back into eight police killings and in-custody deaths. HuffPost has reported on the demands of some families in Memphis for new investigations into the deaths of their loved ones at the hands of police officers.

Mulroy told Bolts that his conviction review board would focus on current and future police killings rather than looking back into ones that occurred under his predecessor.

Rucker said that activists were also responding to Nichols’s killing by demanding that the police end pretextual traffic stops, a common practice for the SCORPION unit. Though this power technically lies with the police, a few elected prosecutors around the country (notably in Minnesota and Vermont) have put their police forces on notice that they will not charge crimes that result from certain traffic stops, citing the many ways that racial bias that can factor into decisions about which motorists to stop. 

Mulroy said that he was open to the idea but hadn’t made up his mind yet on whether to proceed or which types of stops might qualify. “There’s a city council ordinance being considered that would deal with things like broken tail lights and tinted windows being too dark,” he told Bolts. “By the same token, those are the kinds of things that I would probably be looking at.” 

Orrin worried that bolder action from Mulroy on this front could run afoul of not only the mayor and crime commission, who could accuse him of fostering lawlessness, but also the conservative state government. Republican leaders in Tennessee and other southern states have attempted to preempt progressive prosecutors’ initiatives before. In 2021, Tennessee passed a law allowing for the temporary removal of elected prosecutors who state their intention to avoid prosecuting certain categories of crime. Now, the Georgia legislature is mulling over a bill that would facilitate the ouster of DAs who do the same. 

Orrin regretted that the state’s Republican leadership “has shown the willingness to impose its will on localities.” He added, “DA Mulroy is trying to walk a fine line of living in his progressive reform values, and also dealing with the reality that if he gets too far over his skis, or if they want to, the state can step in and potentially try to harm him.”

Rucker said she hoped Mulroy could heed the calls from the community and use his platform to try to get other elected officials on board with systemic change—so that no one else would have to go through what Tyre Nichols’s family has endured. 

“The hope is that this propels us forward in a direction that we have already been trying to go as relates to criminal justice reform here in Memphis, [that] it does not disappear or dissipate once all the cameras are gone,” she said. “Because we are still here suffering.”

The article was updated on Feb. 10 to reflect new announcements made by Mulroy about his office’s approach to past cases involving the SCORPION unit. 

The post The New DA of Memphis Wants to Break with the Past, to a Point appeared first on Bolts.

But a host of more routine decisions made by Florida officials may be undermining the health of the state’s elections as well, even when they don’t seem directly related to voting rights.

To replace Warren as state attorney of Hillsborough County (home to Tampa), DeSantis appointed Susan Lopez, a member of the conservative Federalist Society. One of Lopez’s first decisions was to rescind a policy implemented by Warren to not prosecute bicyclists and pedestrians for certain traffic charges. A 2015 Tampa Bay Times report exposed the Tampa police department’s relentless ticketing of Black cyclists for things like having inadequate lighting, or riding on handlebars, a dynamic local organizers have labeled “bicycling while Black.” The report catalyzed a Justice Department investigation which ultimately confirmed the disproportionate enforcement.

New research shows how such low-level interactions with the police can undercut our democracy by reducing the number of people who participate in elections. A study I co-authored with fellow researcher Kevin Morris, published in December in the American Political Science Review, finds that traffic stops by police stops in Hillsborough County reduced voter turnout in 2014, 2016, and 2018 federal elections. 

Our study compared the voter turnout of Hillsborough motorists who were stopped by police shortly before and after each election. Drawing on information about each person’s turnout in past cycles, we found that these stops reduced the likelihood that a stopped individual turned out to vote by 1.8 percentage points on average. The effect held when accounting  for characteristics like race, gender, party affiliation, past turnout, and prior traffic stops to improve our comparisons. The discouraging effect of stops was slightly higher in 2014 and 2018. 

These results make clear that the collateral consequences of policing—including worsening outcomes for economic security, educational attainment, and health—also extend to political participation. If the communities who are most frequently subjected to policing are also discouraged from voting as a result, it could create a vicious feedback loop of political withdrawal. 

Why would traffic stops make people less likely to show up to the polls? Past research has already established that the most disruptive forms of criminal legal contact, like arrest and incarceration, discourage people from voting. Our study shows that low-level police contact matters in the same way. If a traffic stop makes a motorist fear that the government will harm them, it can prompt a withdrawal from civic life that political scientists call “strategic retreat.” Motorists might worry that a routine traffic stop could escalate into police violence, a more common outcome for Black people in particular. Beyond justified fears of violent victimization, voters might also bristle at the perception of being targeted to raise revenue through excessive ticketing. Accordingly, if incarceration ‘teaches’ would-be voters that their government is an alienating and harmful force in their lives, traffic stops could catalyze a similar form of ‘learning.’  

“I think that people see police as a part of the government,” Bernice Lauredan, director of voter engagement at Dream Defenders, an organization that champions voting rights in Florida, told Bolts. “I don’t believe any interaction with police is safe for people of color–having any interactions with police gives them a negative image of the government. And it may give them a negative idea of voting.” 

And while millions of white Americans have also been swept up in municipal ticketing efforts, the fines and fees in Florida as elsewhere disproportionately affect Black communities.

On average, we found that the deterrent effect was smaller for Black drivers: It reduced their likelihood to vote by 1 percentage point, compared to 1.8 for the overall population. We went further and looked at when voters had been stopped. If they had been stopped in the six months before the election, stops discouraged Black people from voting more than non-Black people. But as the time between a stop and the election increased, the effect weakened. That averaged out to a comparatively smaller effect over the whole two-year period. 

We think that this counterintuitive result might be a mix of two things: on one hand, Black Americans probably have less to “learn” about government from a traffic stop, considering that Black Americans are more likely to have a family member in jail than other Americans. On the other hand, Black Americans probably know that a traffic stop is more likely to turn deadly for them compared to white drivers, which could cause “anticipatory stress” that reduces willingness to vote in the short term. 

“Black folks and other people of color are criminalized in Tampa,” Lauredan says. 

While Florida Republicans have dialed up the use of criminalization to maintain political power, deep-blue urban dwellers also face the political ramifications of policing in their own backyards. 

In New York City, for example, Mayor Eric Adams has dramatically increased police presence and encouraged police to be more proactive in punishing behaviors ranging from public drinking and dice games to carrying unlicensed firearms. New York Governor Kathy Hochul has also announced plans to beef up a “hot spots” policing initiative that focuses on gun violence—quite similar to the Memphis police squad (“SCORPION”) that killed Tyre Nichols in January. Gun control policing efforts in New York could be driving a dynamic similar to the “strategic retreat” that our research demonstrated in Tampa—another study found that NYPD stop and frisk practices, which expanded significantly under Mayor Michael Bloomberg, may have reduced voter turnout in the 2006 and 2010 midterm elections.

New York City is no outlier with respect to increased police contact. In Chicago, for example, the yearly tally of traffic stops ballooned from 86,000 to 378,000 between 2015 and 2021. In addition to boosting city revenues through regressive taxation, these traffic stops also function as a pipeline for gun possession arrests (which have been steadily increasing over time, despite criticisms from local prosecutor Kim Foxx). 

The civic consequences of criminalization don’t stop at voting, either. Research also shows that Americans who have been stopped by police, arrested, or incarcerated become less likely to engage with a range of public institutions that they perceive as surveilling them. Sociologist Sarah Brayne calls this phenomenon “system avoidance,” and argues that the record-keeping practices of institutions like hospitals, schools, and banks—and the ability of state actors to surveil data from these institutions— justify why criminalized people withdraw from them. It’s an ugly realization—harsh punishments and increased carceral surveillance are causing lasting damage to the social fabric of criminalized communities. 

“The more communities are abused by the system, the more natural it is for them to feel alienated from it,” said Yannick Wood, director of the criminal justice reform program at the New Jersey Institute for Social Justice, an organization that advocates reducing the interactions between the criminal legal system and democracy in New Jersey. “They don’t feel like the system serves them, and they don’t feel like their voices are represented, or even respected.”

This is the most important takeaway from our research: American communities most likely to oppose “tough on crime” policy (thanks to their personal experience) are being pushed away from politics and from opportunities to steer policy change. 

In Tampa, ticketing practices work in tandem with an extremely harsh regime of felony disenfranchisement that drives Floridians away from politics more explicitly. Almost one-quarter of the 4.6 million Americans barred from voting due to felony convictions live in Florida. The Florida Rights Restoration Coalition (FRRC) led the successful 2018 campaign to pass a state constitutional amendment restoring voting rights to Floridians with felony convictions, though their victory was diminished by subsequent state legislation requiring fines and fees payments before voting rights were restored, leaving more than 1 million people without access to the ballot. Traffic stops affect an even larger share of Florida residents.

“Criminalizing any kind of behavior can have unintended consequences,” FRRC deputy director Neil Volz told Bolts. “Voting is a reflection of our belief that we’re part of the system, that our voice matters, that we can take that past pain and turn it into something productive.”

The post A Police Stop Is Enough to Make Someone Less Likely to Vote appeared first on Bolts.

Daniel Hughes had an awakening years ago when police in his hometown of Lima, Ohio, killed a Black woman named Tarika Wilson and shot her infant son.

“At the time, there were folks who were talking about how no one will ever remember her name,” said Hughes, who is now a pastor at Incline Missional Community Church in Cincinnati’s Price Hill neighborhood. “And I remember thinking ‘I will never forget her name,’ because it just awakened something in me.”

So when a University of Cincinnati police officer killed Samuel DuBose, an unarmed Black man, in 2015, Hughes decided to get his congregation involved in the fight for racial justice. They joined the Amos Project, a federation of congregations throughout the greater Cincinnati area committed to improving the quality of life for all residents. Amos is among a number of local groups that have made strides in recent years toward criminal justice reform, which contributed to a significant political shift in November.

In Ohio, where President-elect Joe Biden lost and Democrats fell short of flipping the state Supreme Court, local elections in two counties delivered progressive wins that have potential to transform the criminal legal system. Hamilton County, home to Cincinnati, now has a sheriff who wants to lower incarceration rates, along with a slate of new reform-minded judges—though voters also narrowly re-elected a prosecutor who makes frequent use of the death penalty. In Franklin County, where Columbus is located, voters elected Democrats for every judicial seat on the ballot, approved a civilian police review board, and ousted a notoriously harsh prosecutor.

These wins mirror others in cities and counties nationwide, where voters embraced local candidates and ballot measures that promised progressive change, particularly on criminal justice issues like drug policy and policing. The shift highlights how grassroots organizing and coalition-building outside of four-year election cycles can expand electoral power. And it shows how focusing on down-ballot races can engage voters in ways that national elections may not, because it’s often clearer how the outcomes will directly affect people’s everyday lives. 

In 2018, Celeste Treece, a criminal justice organizer with the Ohio Organizing Collaborative, was focused on raising awareness about judicial elections in Hamilton County. “A lot of people didn’t even realize that we elected judges locally,” Treece said.

That year, Democrats flipped two seats on the First District Court of Appeals and picked up two seats on the Hamilton County Common Pleas Court, which handles criminal and civil cases.   

To build on the momentum after the 2018 election, Treece and a group of friends started a court watch program to monitor judicial proceedings. Meanwhile, they continued talking to people in the community about the role of the courts and how judges were selected. 

“[Often] we only think about the criminal side, but there are a lot of civil matters that go through the courts, like child support and [debt collection],” said Treece. “Many people are going through those things and really don’t understand how the courts affect them.”

Information gathered during the court watch program helped inform Treece’s outreach during the 2020 election cycle. Treece and her team were able to organize small group Q&A sessions with judicial candidates so that voters could ask questions in an intimate setting. Treece also said the national conversation around federal judicial appointments motivated people to learn more about local judges. 

Although judicial races are nonpartisan in Hamilton County, Democrats invested in them like never before, winning nine out of 13 open seats in the appeals and common pleas courts in November. The slate included candidates with experience as public defenders and civil rights lawyers, who promised reforms like overhauling the bail system to reduce pretrial incarceration. In an interview with Cincinnati NBC affiliate WLWT, attorney Bill Gallagher credited racial justice protesters for the election of a slate of judges more reflective of the communities they serve. “What was being demanded by people attending those protests was more accountability, more change, more access, more fairness,” said Gallagher. 

Prentiss Haney, co-director of the Ohio Organizing Collaborative said the political shift in Hamilton County this year was due to multiple cycles of organizing that have gotten more people involved in local elections. He pointed to the efforts of faith leaders in 2016 to mobilize voters around Preschool Promise, a local ballot initiative that levied millions of tax dollars to fund near-universal preschool and other education programs. And he said that the momentum for political change in Hamilton County can be traced back even further, noting the role of the Amos Project, which has been around for 26 years.“The arc of the wins in Hamilton County has been connected to that base over the years,” he said.

In 2018, Hughes, the Cincinnati pastor, was involved in The Amos Project’s effort to pass Issue 1, a proposal to decriminalize low-level drug offenses. Although it did not pass, the group was able to build on that previous work as it started organizing in 2020. “There’s a sense of certainty [with faith institutions], a regularity around the practices, the ritual,” said Hughes. “The ability to bring people to an awareness, to bring people to a moment is intrinsic in faith communities.”

This year, the Amos Project held forums with Hamilton County sheriff candidates. Hughes said voters ultimately supported Sheriff-elect Charmaine McGuffey because she made significant commitments to reform the office. In April, McGuffey beat incumbent Jim Neil by a landslide in a Democratic primary election, running on a platform that included addressing poor jail conditions and opposing a jail expansion. In the general election, she won against Republican Bruce Hoffbauer, who attempted to stoke fear among voters by equating racial justice protests with violence and chaos.

Hughes referenced the recovery pod program that McGuffey spearheaded when she was a major in the sheriff’s department as an example of her leadership in improving jail conditions. The program began as an effort to help women with substance use disorder transition to life after incarceration. Before the COVID-19 pandemic, the program was expanded to offer services to men. 

“Someone like McGuffey gives us the opportunity to start to build on the kind of vision or future that we want,” Hughes shared. 

But winning elections alone is not enough, he cautioned. For Hughes, building a winning coalition of voters is about getting people to stay involved in strategic organizing for equity and justice. 

“What I’m doing right now is I’m trying to get faith communities to recognize the actual power that they have, and name the things that they actually want to create in the world, versus just chasing after an election,” Hughes said.

In Franklin County, Adrienne Hood has a similar perspective. A prominent local figure in the fight for racial justice and police accountability, Hood said the defeat of the county’s chief prosecutor, Ron O’Brien, shows that voters want to change the way Black and Latinx people are treated in the criminal legal system. But she also acknowledged that it takes more than one election to achieve that.

In 2016, Hood’s son Henry Green was killed by two plainclothes Columbus police officers. O’Brien did not prosecute the officers, a pattern that was characteristic of his office. That year, O’Brien faced his first electoral challenge in 16 years. He won, but it set the stage for the renewed effort to remove him from office this year. 

O’Brien’s inaction led Hood to become more active in community organizing with groups like the Ohio Organizing Collaborative and The Freedom BLOC, a Black-led organizing effort focusing on civic engagement and electoral organizing in the cities of Cleveland, Columbus, Youngstown, and Akron. 

Hood recalled the moment she learned O’Brien had been defeated. “There’s accountability sooner or later,” she said. “I was glad that this time around [O’Brien] was seen for who he is.”

But she was less enthusiastic about his replacement, retired judge Gary Tyack, who hasn’t taken a strong stance on certain reforms, like ending cash bail. 

“It’s definitely time for a change in that office, and I’m praying that this is a beginning,” Hood said. “I don’t look at Tyack as my savior, but it is definitely a start in the right direction … that has to be attributed to the grassroot organizations that are making the connections for the community.” She explained that when George Floyd’s murder at the hands of Minneapolis police sparked protests nationwide, organizers in Franklin County channeled the outrage toward electoral action by educating protesters about O’Brien’s connections to the Fraternal Order of Police. 

In addition to ousting a longtime prosecutor, voters in Columbus overwhelmingly approved the formation of a civilian police review board. 

Hood says the actions of the Columbus police made the best case to the public for the civilian police review board. During this spring’s protests, the police pepper-sprayed several Black elected officials including U.S. Representative Joyce Beatty and Columbus City Council President Shannon Hardin. 

“It is very unfortunate that it took three of the top Black officials here in Columbus, in Franklin County, to get [pepper-sprayed] in order to [say] that stuff has to change,” Hood said. 

After that incident, Hood said the conversation of a police review board took greater urgency. “It is something that has been recommended for years.” Hood said, recalling a community elder who told her that the fight for a police review board dates as far back as the 1980s. 

The energy motivating voter turnout also showed up in Franklin County judicial elections, with Democrats sweeping all eight open seats in the Commons Pleas Court, including the domestic and probate divisions. In an interview with the Columbus Dispatch, Judge-elect Andy Miller said candidates talked more during this election cycle about substantive issues. “I noticed people are more appreciative of the concept of restorative justice,” he said.

With the election over, Hood says the work of groups like Freedom BLOC continues through conversations and community education. “Now, the real work is ahead of us,” she said. “That is educating and empowering the people of our community so that they know the responsibility in holding elected officials accountable does not start nor stop at the ballot box.” 

The post How Ohio’s Racial Justice Movement Won Big at the Ballot Box appeared first on Bolts.

The criminal legal system is closely entangled with schools and education policy. This article is the final story in a three-part series, in the run-up to Nov. 3, about local elections where education issues are at stake. Here are the first and second stories of this series.

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The Wake County, North Carolina, public school system was once renowned as a model of successful integration, standing apart from so many school districts that had failed to realize the promise of Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka.

After Barack Obama was elected president in 2008, a slate of conservative candidates took over the Wake County school board and set out to dismantle the district’s diversity policy that determined how students were assigned to schools. Though Democrats regained control of the board in 2011, they never restored the policy. Now a slate of five conservative candidates is vying to win a majority on the nine-seat board on Nov. 3, and some have shown a clear antipathy toward racial equity.

“If they get elected, I definitely think that there could potentially be some challenge to the equity work that has been done in the district,” said Letha Muhammad, executive director of Education Justice Alliance, a local group that advocates for Black and Latinx families, as well as families of disabled children, within the Wake County school system. Muhammad said some of the candidates have been pandering to conservatives by using “inflammatory language” to drum up controversy over the district’s racial equity policies and curriculum.

Gregory Hahn, a Navy veteran who is running for the school board’s District 2 seat, includes “curriculum transparency” as a key tenet of his platform. On his website, Hahn says:  “School systems across the country are adopting Black Lives Matter curriculum at an alarming rate, indoctrinating our children to achieve Marxist objectives.” He criticizes the Teaching Tolerance curriculum developed by the Southern Poverty Law Center because the organization is “known for including conservative organizations on its list of ‘hate groups.’” And he’s adamantly in favor of keeping police in schools, an issue that school board members have been weighing since a video of a school police officer slamming a young girl to the ground was shared widely in 2017. Hahn is even endorsed by the Fraternal Order of Police, which does not typically get involved in school board races.

Rachel Mills, a real estate agent and former press secretary for former U.S. Representative Ron Paul of Texas, is running in District 7 and taking a similar tack. Her website states that she won’t be “a rubber stamp for misguided Marxist agendas.” In a Facebook post, she referenced the district’s website for racial equity resources as an example of what she doesn’t support. When asked how educators should approach teaching history and current events in a time of heightened racial tension, Mills wrote in an email to The Appeal: Political Report that “we owe our kids the truth about these issues with a clear emphasis on reliable, hard data and original sources.” She was the only conservative candidate to respond to requests for comment.

Two other candidates—Steve Bergstrom and Karent Carter—are also advocating for issues like “transparency” and a “return to traditional education,” but without going into specific detail.

“It’s not clear,” said Muhammad about this kind of rhetoric. “I think that’s also a tactic.”

Deborah Prickett, who is running in District 1, was among the conservative candidates on the school board a decade ago. Now, though, her position on diversity in school assignments is not as explicit. During a PTA forum with District 1 incumbent Heather Scott, a moderator asked if the candidates would support a policy to ensure that every school would have a diverse student population. Prickett deflected by saying that she “believes all children should have access to good schools.” 

But many locals believe Prickett would continue her crusade against diversity policies if she took office again. The editorial board of the News & Observer in Raleigh endorsed Scott, writing that Prickett’s “acrimonious leadership led to explosive meetings, demonstrations, and arrests of protesters. There’s no need to revisit that era.”

If Wake County does, it’s possible that the school district’s progress toward racial equity could be eroded.

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The current Wake County Public School System was formed in 1976 when the largely Black Raleigh City Schools merged with the suburban, white Wake County schools. This created a large and diverse school system that, at the time, business leaders believed would safeguard the county’s economy from the effect of “white flight.” Individual schools were diverse too, thanks to a school assignment policy based on race.

In light of federal courts striking down other school districts’ race-based student assignment policies, in 2000, Wake County school district administrators used new benchmarks based on economic and academic factors instead. No more than 40 percent of students at any school could receive free and reduced lunch, and only 25 percent of students could be low-performing academically.

In effect, the new approach maintained racial diversity and it drew national attention; there were articles in major media outlets and two books written about the diversity policy. 

Wake County also became renowned nationwide for academic achievement and teacher quality. The schools, along with the generally low cost of living compared to other regions, contributed to a population explosion. Between 2000 and 2010, the county’s population grew by over 40 percent, and this made the school assignment process increasingly complicated.

A chorus of complaints steadily grew among suburban families. Parents concerned about the school board’s decision to convert some schools to a year-round academic calendar formed an advocacy group called Wake CARES. The group sued the school board over the issue and lost. But observant GOP leaders invited the disgruntled parents into a new political movement that was sweeping the country.

After Obama’s historic presidential win in 2008, and the economic downturn caused by the housing market crash, predominantly white and middle- to upper-class conservatives—like those of Wake CARES—began seeking ways to regain political control. The Tea Party became their vehicle, and it began by concentrating on local elections, including school boards.

Multimillionaire GOP megadonor Art Pope was a lightning rod for building conservative power in North Carolina. In 2009, Pope donated $15,000 to the Wake GOP during the school board race. A cohort of five conservative candidates ran on the promise of ending the district’s diversity policy.

All five, including Prickett, won their races and quickly worked to change how students were assigned to schools. Their plan eliminated the diversity clause in the assignment policy and focused on sending students to neighborhood schools instead of busing, though kids in some majority Black areas would still be bused far away. Superintendent Del Burns resigned in protest, and said the plan was an attempt to carve the district into “have” and “have not” subdistricts. 

Activists from the NAACP and the Southern Coalition of Social Justice, as well as parents, students, and teachers, held protests during school board meetings and eventually filed a legal complaint against the school system. The case, which also concerned racial disparities in school discipline. was taken on by the U.S. Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights and made national news. The accreditation board, AdvancED, also considered revoking the Wake County Public School System’s credentials. 

What was once a national example of a successful diversity policy and school performance had become a cautionary tale.

— 

In 2011, Democrats ousted most of the Wake County school board’s conservative members, but they had made an indelible mark. In January 2012, a compromise school assignment policy went into effect. It gave parents more power to send their children to the school of their choice, and it emphasized attending schools close to home. It didn’t include provisions to ensure diversity.

Since then, Wake County school board members have not attempted to reinstate the diversity policy, but they have taken other steps toward addressing racial equity. The board created the Office of Equity Affairs as part of a settlement in connection with the complaint filed with the U.S. Department of Education. The office provides “cultural proficiency training” to teachers and administrators, and works to eliminate racial disparities in discipline. The move rankled conservatives who felt it was a waste of funding. 

The school board has also revised a memorandum of understanding (MOU) between the district and local law enforcement agencies to improve how school police do their jobs. The law enforcement MOU has drawn criticism from community members who want police removed from schools. After renewing the MOU in 2017, the board admitted the document needed a broader overhaul, “We’re not going to hold up the MOU, but we absolutely agree that there’s some work to do,” Monika Johnson-Hostler told the News & Observer at the time.

The MOU was up for renewal again this summer, as Black Lives Matter protests rocked the country. At a June board meeting, community members sent in comments calling for an end to the SRO program and thousands have signed a petition. But even after admitting that they could have done more to engage the community,  a majority of board members voted to renew the MOU for one year, rather than the usual 3 years, to give them time to gain stakeholder input. The decision drew protests from several activist groups that want police-free schools, including Education Justice Alliance and the Wake County Black Student Coalition. 

District 2 incumbent Monika Johnston-Holster, who is running against Hahn, was the only board member who voted against renewing the MOU. She gave an impassioned speech criticizing the board for failing to move forward with a Peacebuilders program and other alternatives to policing that community members support.

“This vote is really about the consistency of requests asking us to make a change and we haven’t done that,” she said. “I think for me, this is really about my own children who are in my life, who at the end of the day will look back at these videos [of police brutality] and say, ‘Where are you on the right side of history?’”

Though discipline and policing have become the primary focus of the district’s equity initiatives, Scott, the District 1 incumbent, told the Political Report that administrators were starting to return to the issue of diversity in school assignments before the COVID-19 pandemic hit. 

“Last year, the [Wake County Public School System] started to explore using census data to shape student assignment,” she said in an email. “This would help us consider different ways of reducing the number of students receiving free and reduced lunch at specific schools, which would also help address questions of how best to provide equitable programming and support across the system.” 

Now the future of that effort is on the line. In many ways, 2020 mirrors the social and political climate of 2008. There is a global upheaval in the form of COVID-19, there is racial unrest since the murders of Ahmaud Arbery, George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and others sparked a worldwide protest for Black lives, and there is a rise in populist nationalism as a reaction to these crises. Similar to the Republican school board candidate slate of 2009, the 2020 challengers joined other conservative parents in airing frustrations about issues like math curriculum and the delayed opening of public schools because of the pandemic which, combined with complaints about Black Lives Matter, created an appetite for candidates with extreme positions on racial justice in education.

But there’s another similarity: Many Raleigh community members are ready to fight for their public schools. Education Justice Alliance held a candidate forum and has been working to educate people about the school board election. Muhammad says the group will continue to organize beyond Nov. 3.

“It would require us to mobilize our families, our parents, and our students,” she said , “if folks got into office who were [against] the things that we know are important, like equity in the schools and addressing the over-criminalization of Black and brown students, and the removal of school resource officers.”

The post This School Board Election Could Ramp Up Resegregation in North Carolina appeared first on Bolts.

Ballot initiatives in Arizona, New Jersey, South Dakota, and Montana are seeking to legalize cannabis for recreational use. These states are aiming to raise revenue and reverse the effects of the war on drugs on marginalized communities.

Drug reform advocates say that racial justice should be central to legalization efforts.

“Cannabis criminalization is a cornerstone of the war on drugs,” Jared Moffat, campaigns coordinator at the Marijuana Policy Project, told The Appeal: Political Report. According to the Pew Research Center, 40 percent of all drug arrests in 2018 were marijuana-related, down from 52 percent in 2010. The overwhelming majority were for possession, as opposed to sale or manufacture. 

“People of color are arrested at far higher rates for marijuana possession than white people,” Moffat says, “and that’s not due to any difference in usage. That’s just due to a racist policy.”

If the cannabis legalization measures pass, they would accelerate a shift in drug policy that has quickly evolved since Colorado and Washington became the first states to legalize marijuana in 2012. Now 11 states and the District of Columbia allow recreational use of cannabis, and medical marijuana is legal in 33 states. South Dakota and Mississippi voters also have the chance to approve medical marijuana legalization this election cycle. And other drug reforms are on the ballot in Oregon, where voters will decide whether to decriminalize possession of illegal drugs by replacing criminal penalties with fines, and whether to legalize psilocybin therapy.

But when it comes to making amends for racial injustice, this year’s marijuana legalization measures vary. Only Arizona’s initiative includes provisions to ensure that communities harmed by drug criminalization benefit financially from legalized cannabis.

Arizona has particularly harsh marijuana laws; possession of even a small amount of cannabis is a felony punishable by up to two years in prison. Since incarceration can become a barrier to employment, education, housing, and even the right to vote, one marijuana conviction can upend people’s lives—especially people from marginalized communities.

Black people in Arizona are three times as likely as their white counterparts to be arrested for marijuana possession. Despite only making up 5 percent of the state’s population, Black Arizonans comprise 18 percent of those in jail and 14 percent in prison.

Arizona’s Proposition 207 would legalize possession of up to one ounce of cannabis for adults over the age of 21.

It would also allow people with past cannabis convictions to apply to have their records expunged. Everyone who applies would be presumed qualified unless proved otherwise, according to Stacy Pearson, a spokesperson for Smart and Safe Arizona, the campaign promoting Proposition 207. “We’ve given money to community organizations to process expungements on behalf of folks in that system,” Pearson told The Appeal. “The onus is on the prosecuting agency to petition to the court why this person wouldn’t qualify.” 

Arizona’s cannabis initiative would place a 16 percent tax on marijuana sales, which would fund social services as well as a social equity ownership program to help those with past marijuana convictions get licenses to produce and sell their own cannabis.

But the majority of early priority licenses for recreational cannabis would go to existing medical dispensaries. Only 26 out of 160 licenses would be reserved for social equity applicants and rural counties without a dispensary, according to Pearson.

Advocates have pointed out similar shortcomings in other states that have legalized recreational marijuana; Illinois is considered to have the most robust social equity program, but people who qualify still struggle to secure enough capital to start a business. Other states that have legalized marijuana have also put in place social equity provisions, setting precedents to build upon.

In New Jersey, social equity is not factored into the state’s marijuana initiative, though it was a sticking point in the legislative battle that led to the referendum. New Jersey’s initiative doesn’t specify regulations beyond tax limits, so other details would be worked out by the state’s Cannabis Regulatory Commission if it passes. Advocates plan to push for social equity provisions in that process. R.Todd Edwards, the political action chairperson of the New Jersey NAACP, told the New York Times: “If this passes and we are not at the table, it will have been a big hoax.” 

Social equity provisions are also absent from South Dakota’s cannabis initiative, even though the state has the highest arrest rate for marijuana possession in the nation. Black people in South Dakota are five times more likely than white people to be arrested on those grounds. Yet funds from a 15 percent cannabis tax would only go toward public schools and the state’s general fund. Similarly, in Montana, a 20 percent recreational marijuana tax would fund a variety of social services, including substance use programs, veterans’ services, and healthcare.

Some drug policy reform advocates take issue with placing high taxes on cannabis.

“It’s like robbing Peter to pay Paul,” said Deborah Small, executive director of Break the Chains, a California-based organization that aims to change drug policies. “It gives cities and local governments the green light to impose whatever taxes that they want.” Small also said that high cannabis taxes may make cannabis inaccessible to those from low-income households which, in some cases, could drive them back into illicit drug markets.

Small made the case that the best way to make legalization more beneficial for everyone is to develop specific plans for investing in communities that have borne the brunt of marijuana criminalization . “Use the proceeds to actually reinvest in communities that were disinvested in because of drug war enforcement,” she said.

The post Four States Could Legalize Marijuana Next Month appeared first on Bolts.

In and around Charleston, South Carolina, this summer of nationwide protests has compounded grievances and Black Lives Matter activism that have been building for years against racial injustice.

The protesters who gathered after George Floyd and Breonna Taylor’s deaths also remembered Walter Scott, a Black man killed by a North Charleston police officer in April 2015. Two months later, in June 2015, a white supremacist shot nine African American church-goers in Charleston.

Residents are also speaking up about the persistence of Confederate monuments at the expense of Charleston’s Black history, and against the towering inequalities of the local criminal legal system. Recent studies found African Americans likelier to be prosecuted over marijuana and to be struck from the jury pool, for instance. The state also faces litigation for suspending driver’s licenses over court debt, a practice that disproportionately affects Black South Carolinians.

Earlier this month, I talked to Ben Pogue, who is running to be the chief prosecutor of the Ninth Judicial Circuit (home to Charleston and Berkeley counties), about how he would confront these issues. He replied that we cannot confront the criminal legal system’s “systemic racism” without also addressing the region’s wider inequalities.

“If we continue thinking about justice as criminal justice, it’s not really justice,” he said.

Pogue wants to launch a “racial audit” of law enforcement that can connect the decisions made by police and prosecutors to broader socioeconomic discrepancies. Absent that comprehensive outlook, he argues, programs that are meant to divert people from conviction or incarceration are setting them up for failure. “We can come up with a prearrest diversion program,” he said, “but if we don’t know that the kid who’s involved in it doesn’t have any transportation resources, and his mom’s only transportation resource is a vehicle used for two jobs, then what are we doing?”

Pogue is the Democratic nominee against Solicitor Scarlett Wilson, a 13-year GOP incumbent. (Of South Carolina’s ten prosecutorial elections this November, this is the only one with more than one candidate on the ballot.) The Ninth Circuit split nearly evenly in the 2016 presidential race, and Democrats are optimistic that they can score breakthroughs in the state this fall. Jaime Harrison, the party’s nominee against U.S. Senator Lindsey Graham, tweeted in June about this prosecutor’s race that “local elections are sometimes even more important than national ones.”

In the course of my Q&A with Pogue, he stated that he would not prosecute marijuana possession, nor would he prosecute cases of driving with a suspended license. He laid out how he’d fight racial discrimination in jury selection. But he also repeatedly stressed that he would approach reform incrementally—he said for instance that he would for now treat simple drug possession as a criminal issue, despite calls to approach it as a matter of public health—invoking a need to gain community “buy-in.”

Still, Pogue was quick to delineate a stark contrast with his opponent on sentencing policies and reliance on incarceration. Asked about Wilson’s call for lawmakers to toughen the state’s “truth in sentencing” rules, which severely limit early release opportunities, Pogue answered that such a proposal is indicative of a “mass incarceration mindset” that has failed at reducing crime. Locking people up longer and making it harder for people to re-enter their communities, he added, only compounds recidivism.

“We are consistently using our current incarceration system to turn out people who have no resources to do anything but reoffend,” he said. “We’re perpetuating the depletion of the resources that a lot of times gets people in the situation where they offend to begin with.”

The Q&A has been condensed and lightly edited for clarity.

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The renewed national calls for racial justice this summer resonate in the Charleston region, not just given its long history, but also due to the events of recent years. To what extent do you think the local criminal legal system has been responsive to the Black Lives Matter movement, and if elected how would your tenure advance the goals of this movement?

Our current criminal justice system has been inadequate, to say the least. Black Lives Matter should not be a controversial statement. We should be going to communities, especially communities of color, to listen, to understand what the issues are. This is of specific importance as it relates to people who look like me, people who are white folks who have lived in an environment of white privilege: We’ve got to make sure that we’re actively investigating where our blind spots are as far as racial bias is concerned. 

We need a racial bias audit—of the solicitor’s office, not simply the police department and the sheriff’s department. That needs to be done by an independent advocate and also needs some means of community input, because any racial bias audit has got to go to the community to hear what their complaints are. This is how we create community accountability, especially in an area in the South when we know that folks are marginalized, especially racially. What we’ve done is create our community action team: These are people who are connected to various networks in our community, and they’re a continual accountability measure. We want this to be part of the solicitor’s office.

Your opponent recently, in July, launched an initiative to collect demographic data and information about some charging and sentencing decisions. What is the difference between the racial audit that you were describing and that initiative? 

I think that a major issue that our community has with our current solicitor is an issue of trust. We need all cases to have all the data that is available to the public to the greatest extent possible.  But we’ve also got to be finding other data sources that we’re not even asking about: The huge problem when it comes to criminal justice in our area is that we’re not even asking the relevant questions. We’re not gathering the relevant data. It seems that we’re not really trying to find what the root causes of crime are, so that we can understand criminal behavior.

What is a relevant question that you think isn’t being asked, and how would the racial audit approach capture that?

It’s not enough to say, “OK, we’ve got racial bias in terms of our criminal procedure.” In every single step there’s racial bias: It’s why it’s systemic racism. We’re trying to keep people safe, reduce crime, increase people’s access to their rights. If we don’t have a real idea what their life is like, and we’re not gathering the data that reflects that, and not really interested in finding the root causes of crime, then we’re not really interested in what we’re communicating. Part of that is socioeconomic data, family situations.

An example is a teenager who is 15 years old and was caught for marijuana possession. How many parental figures do you have to watch you throughout the day? What kind of transportation resources does he have to go to after-school programs? What about how many vehicles does the entire family unit have access to? We can come up with a prearrest diversion program, but if we don’t know that the kid who’s involved in it doesn’t have any transportation resources, and his mom’s only transportation resource is a vehicle used for two jobs, then what are we doing? Before you know it, some ludicrous line prosecutor is going to suggest that we put this kid away for years and try him as an adult.

So you are saying, to audit the racial injustice of the criminal legal system, it’s essential to have information about other systems—housing, transportation, education are not separate.

Precisely. If we continue thinking about justice as criminal justice, it’s not really justice. 

It’s interesting to hear you bring up transportation resources as this is an issue that has deep ties to a prosecutor’s discretion: Advocacy groups are suing South Carolina for suspending people’s driver’s licenses when they cannot afford paying off their court debt. This is an issue that disproportionately affects Black South Carolinians, who are more likely to be pulled over, and people face prosecution if they then drive with a suspended license. Some prosecutors around the country, for instance in Nashville and Memphis, have announced they will not prosecute cases for driving with a suspended license. Would you?

The presumption needs to be that we’re not going to criminally prosecute those cases. A disportionate share of Charleston’s African American community is at or below the poverty line. What are we doing when we prosecute cases for not having a driver’s license? We’re taking people who are in a deep resource-starved hole, and we’re putting them in an even bigger hole. We’re eliminating their transportation resources. 

What other prosecutorial tools do you think have been wielded in a way that’s too punitive?

I think it’s easier to answer your question when we look at some of the things that more progressive prosecutors are doing: seeking lighter sentencing; making sure that we don’t use unethical charging procedures like adding charges that you’re going to drop anyway and creating leverage of time in jail to get somebody to plead guilty to something that they may not have done in the first place; trying to really eliminate or reduce cash bail at every opportunity; making sure that people are represented during bond hearings. And we need an additional community relationship aspect to it, to build trust, to get the information flowing back and forth.

And there are funding issues, making sure that public defenders are more well funded.

Let’s look at marijuana. According to a recent study, in Charleston and Berkeley counties, Black residents were four times more likely to be arrested than white residents. Would you prosecute cases involving the possession of marijuana or would you not charge these?

No, not at all. 

What about cases involving possession of other drugs? On your website, you recommend a list of books for people to read, many of them about mass incarceration (with the caveat that you don’t agree with everything in them). One is “The New Jim Crow” by Michelle Alexander, who argues that the policies that have fueled the war on drugs are mechanisms of “racialized social control.” What lesson do you draw for how you would approach drug possession? Do you think the criminal legal system should be involved at all? And if you think it should, would you have a goal of avoiding incarceration and/or convictions?

I really don’t want to see convictions for those cases. But I do want to see data. The studies out there really show us that a great many of these crimes are either poverty or mental health crimes, and they should be treated as part of a larger health issue. But I think that if we’re going to take immediate steps to communicate to all law enforcement officers and all communities that we’re not even going to look at any of this kind of stuff, then we have really better make sure that we have the infrastructure to gather the data and address the health problem as well. An issue is that we don’t: We don’t have enough state funding to have a public health infrastructure. 

The goal is that within the span of one four-year term, we go from where we are now to no drug possession charges. But we can’t simply stop it right away because a key element of what we’re doing is trying to gain the trust of community members. 

Another proposal we hear nationwide, as to what prosecutors can do for accountability, is to maintain a public “do not call” list of police officers with a history of wrongdoing they will not rely on. Would you do so?

Absolutely. Having a do not call list is a great idea, and I know some good prosecutors around the country are doing it. And in Charleston we’re rife with a history of racial bias by law enforcement officers. 

Another book on your list is “Prisoners of Politics” by Rachel Barkow, who argues that on top of the moral and human injustice, the “tough-on-crime” practices or policies have been harmful in the sense that they haven’t promoted safety. What is your perspective on that?

This is a personal thing for me. I was held up at gunpoint back when I was living in Richmond, Virginia. It really affects your perspective. But ultimately, most victims and survivors who I’ve spoken to want to make sure that this does not happen to somebody else. If we look at things from a safety standpoint, are we going to put somebody in prison for an extended period of time, especially if they’re not an imminent threat to the community? Ninety-five percent of the people in jail or prison are getting out of prison. We know that prison actually makes people more likely to do crime, especially violent crime, increasing stress and decreasing personal growth and access to all kinds of resources. 

Your opponent, Solicitor Wilson, has spoken up for legislative proposals that would toughen some sentences. She has said for instance that the state’s “truth in sentencing” statutes (which require that people serve at least 85 percent of their sentence) be expanded to more cases. She has also proposed toughening penalties for unlawful carrying of a firearm. What do you make of these proposals, and how do they fit what you were just saying?

That’s not what we need. This so-called tough on crime stuff doesn’t work. It doesn’t reduce crime. It really perpetuates crime: It manufactures people who have no other perceived path. What we’re doing with these kinds of policies is we’re creating a floor, we’re creating a crime rate which we will never go below, because we are consistently using our current incarceration system to turn out people who have no resources to do anything but reoffend. We’re perpetuating the depletion of the resources that a lot of times get people in the situation where they offend to begin with. We create a gotcha system, that our law enforcement officers are incentivized to go along with. It’s oversensitizes police to waste time on bringing those people back into the system. 

We could save a whole lot of money and reduce crime substantially, like we are doing in other places around the country, if we just shut off the mass incarceration mindset, and said we’re gonna focus on what reduces crime. Mass incarceration, longer sentences and putting more people in jail just doesn’t do it.

An issue you’ve talked about in your campaign is the composition of the jury pool, and how many prosecutors are likelier to strike Black jurors from the jury pool. What exact policies would you implement to avoid this? I ask because it’s been, legally speaking, rather easy for prosecutors to get around rules against racial discrimination through excuse.

There was a study in 2016 — the study that was limited, and I understand criticisms — and it said that our solicitor, in the cases that were evaluated, struck African American jurors seven times more often than white jurors. We know that when juries are all white, or nearly all white, the chance that an African American defendant is going to be convicted is substantially higher. And that should be a major concern, especially with the backdrop of inequity in Charleston area.

It has to be a multifaceted approach here. First and foremost, don’t strike a juror because of the way that they’re dressed, or the way that their hair is, or because of what a white person thinks that their mood is. Another thing is that In South Carolina, you don’t have to be compensated for your time on the jury; jurors in Charleston county and Berkeley County get paid 25 bucks a day to be on the jury. Well, if you’re hourly and working a full day shift, you’re getting 80 bucks to 100 bucks a day. So you end up paying the court system for your jury duty time. So how are we going to get by that? I’ve started working with members of county council to have more juror pay or at least have the option of people being paid a full day of living wage for their jury service so they don’t have to worry about that. It also takes community involvement. It takes having a “community action team” that is primarily African American to say we’ve got members that are elevating your voice, and it takes hiring African American attorneys. 

A lot of what we’re discussing, in terms of charging levels and involvement in the criminal legal system, shapes people’s right to vote through felony disenfranchisement. How would you want that change, if at all, in South Carolina? 

In South Carolina, once you’re off probation and parole, your rights are automatically restored. But a lot of folks don’t know that. We don’t have any programs to let people know that they have these rights. They think if they’ve been arrested before, they can’t vote. They’re afraid to show up at the polls because they’re afraid they’re going to be harassed because they owe some fees. So the first part is, you should have your rights restored even as you are on parole and probation. 

As long as the law is not changed: There are cases nationwide where individuals who make a mistake and cast a ballot while on probation and parole are prosecuted and sent to prison. Would you ever file criminal charges against an individual who has cast a ballot while on probation and parole? 

I really can’t see that ever happening. We know also from data that actual voter fraud is such an extraordinarily rare occurrence. The data shows it time and time again that it’s not much of a concern and prosecuting those cases often has a chilling effect on other people voting. So no. 

A concern voiced about progressive prosecutors, writ large, is that they often end up pursuing law enforcement solutions to things best left outside of criminal justice. One book on your list, “Usual Cruelty” by Alec Karakatsanis, advances a version of that criticism, for instance. How would you, as solicitor, shrink the system’s foothold and through that your own authority?

I think that it’s not practical to think that you can absolutely completely overhaul a system if you want continued buy-in and investment and trust from your community. But the overall goal of a prosecutor should be to prosecute less crime, make his or her own position less necessary. And that’s what we should be doing. If we’re doing our job right, then we have less reason to have all these resources devoted to justice and all these biases. We can reduce the cost of the system. We can increase funding for education, for healthcare, for housing, for transportation.

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