But even with all these hurdles, a cadre of advocates, nonprofits, churches, and community-minded elected officials have shown up year after year for decades, working hard to protect the right to participate in democracy—especially for Black and other minority voters, who are often the most affected by voting restrictions. 

“We have organizations across the state that are part of the Civic Engagement Roundtable that’s organized by One Voice,” said Representative Zakiya Summers, a Democrat in the state house, referencing a Jackson nonprofit focused on policy advocacy. “These organizations are on conference calls every month. They have created voting rights guides and information that partner organizations can distribute in their community to get people educated and engaged.”

In the lead-up to this year’s primary elections in August, these advocates were gearing up to contend with the latest obstacle that Mississippi’s Republican-controlled legislature had thrown their way: Senate Bill 2358. The bill, which passed in the spring and went into effect on July 1, prohibits anyone from assisting another voter in handling and returning a mail-in ballot unless they are an immediate family or household member, a caregiver, or authorized election worker or mail carrier. Anyone caught violating the law could face up to a year in county jail and a fine of up to $3000.

Mississippi Governor Tate Reeves praised the bill when he signed it into law, saying that it would protect against “ballot harvesting,” or the practice of collecting ballots en masse, a fear that is central to the unfounded conspiracies about voter fraud that conservatives around the country latched onto since the 2020 election.

Despite a lack of evidence of widespread ballot harvesting or other fraud in Mississippi elections, the bill has threatened to limit the number of volunteers and advocates involved in get-out-the-vote efforts from sending or retrieving ballots on behalf of voters they don’t live with. More importantly, it could impede ballot access for people who count on this kind of assistance. 

“It just seemed like another barrier that would prevent people with disabilities from being able to vote autonomously,” says Jane Walton, the communications officer for Disability Rights Mississippi, which includes voting access among their advocacy work. “The bill in question dealt with whether or not someone can have a person assist them. Really, it’s an issue of whether a person with a disability has the autonomy to choose to vote in a way that is most accessible to them.”

Soon after it was passed, groups including Disability Rights Mississippi and Mississippi’s League of Women Voters sued the state in federal court to block the law, stating it “impermissibly restricts voters with disabilities from having a person of their choice assist them in submitting their completed mail-in absentee ballots.” On July 26, a federal judge sided with them and temporarily blocked the law, saying it disenfranchised voters with disabilities and violated the Voting Rights Act.

The decision blocked enactment of SB 2358 just in time for the Aug. 8 primary, and will also prevent it from taking effect ahead of the general election in November, when Mississippians will vote on nearly every major office, including governor and lieutenant governor, secretary of state, and representatives in both legislative chambers. Polling indicates that Republican incumbents who supported the bill—including the embattled Reeves, and Attorney General Lynn Fitch—are favored to win in this deep red state.

But no matter who people cast their vote for, advocates are more concerned about some residents being able to cast a vote at all. The suspension of SB 2358 offers some temporary relief, but these advocates fear that the threat of similar legislation still looms.

“For the past two years, we’ve been monitoring legislation that [has]pretty much been pushed by the Secretary of State every year to deal with ballot harvesting, Jarvis Dortch, Executive Director of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) in Mississippi, told Bolts. ”That makes it harder to return a ballot by absentee, especially individuals with disabilities.”

Before the passage of this bill, advocates already had their hands full navigating existing restrictions that make it harder for citizens to vote, and for Black candidates to win. 

The state requires eligible voters to register 30 days before elections, one of the earliest deadlines in the country. This means that often, advocates must find eligible voters early, and educate them on the importance of registering long before there’s any major discussion of elections in the media, because there’s no early voting or same-day registration options as a backup. And advocates must repeat this process every year thanks to Mississippi’s odd-year elections. 

But in order to even register, eligible voters must comply with a stringent voter ID law, passed in 2011 by way of a ballot initiative that established a strict list of acceptable forms of ID, including a birth certificate, firearms permit, driver’s license, college ID card, US passport, tribal ID, or Voter ID card. 

“Voter ID targeted vulnerable populations who may not have access to ID or may not have access to a birth certificate so they can get an ID. The law was written so strongly that the state was willing to provide a free Voter ID,” says Summers.

Voting absentee by mail is also an involved process in Mississippi. As opposed to the majority of states, which offer no-excuse absentee voting, mail ballots are only available to populations with qualifying characteristics, including those living out-of-state, students, people with disabilities, people over 65, and certain others. Absentee ballots must be postmarked by election day to be counted. 

“We make it harder than anyone else to get folks registered and make it hard for people to vote absentee,” said Dortch. We don’t provide early voting. Now, instead of making it easier for folks to vote, we’re trying to get people off the voting rolls… and make it harder for people to actually vote absentee. When we have one of the hardest processes to vote absentee in the country. It doesn’t make sense.” 

Mississippi has also had a longtime a lifelong ban on voting for people convicted of certain types of felonies, a policy which has disenfranchised nearly 130,000 Black voters, or 16 percent of the state’s adult Black population. It’s one of only three states, alongside Tennessee and Virginia, where anyone stripped of voting rights loses it for their whole life. They can only regain it if they receive an exceedingly rare pardon from the legislature or the governor.

A federal appeals court this summer struck down that system as unconstitutional, calling it a “cruel and unusual punishment,” and denouncing Mississippi as “an outlier among its sister states, bucking a clear and consistent trend in our Nation against permanent disenfranchisement.” The state appealed the decision in late August, and the rights of hundreds of thousands of Mississippians are still hanging in the balance.

Perhaps unsurprisingly given all these restrictions, Mississippi has one of the lowest voter turnout rates in the country. In the 2022 midterms, Mississippi ranked eighth from last, with roughly 46 percent of voters showing up. And turnout for non-white voters was even lower.

Democrats and progressives have historically championed an increase in access to voting options in the state, and have in turn looked to Black and other disenfranchised voters for support in elections. This upcoming race is no exception. Democrat gubernatorial candidate Brandon Presley, for example, is betting on bases of support in majority-Black enclaves around the capital city of Jackson, as well as pockets of white and immigrant progressive and moderate voters scattered around the Mississippi Delta in his long-shot bid to oust Tate Reeves.

Ty Pinkins, the Democratic candidate for secretary of state, is a recent addition after previous candidate Shuwaski Young dropped out of the race for health reasons. While Pinkins has limited time to build name recognition before the contest, he’s hoping that a campaign message of easing the state’s restrictive voting laws will connect with voters.

“Making sure people can register to vote online makes sense, making sure that we have a way for people to do early voting—that makes sense, and not restricting access to the ballot for people with disabilities,” Pinkins told Mississippi Today. 

SB 2358 remains on hold until further hearings are held and a final decision is handed down. And while advocates, voters, and progressive candidates can continue to move as if the law had never been signed, the landscape for voting rights remains difficult in Mississippi. But advocates are quick to mention that they will continue to work to make progress. 

“We along with our partners and our co-counsel are absolutely prepared to do everything that we can to protect the rights of citizens with disabilities,” said Walton. “Whatever that road looks like going forward, we’re prepared to fight for accessibility in Mississippi’s voting system.”

Correction (Sept. 14): An earlier version of this post misspelled the name of the communications officer from Disability Rights Mississippi.

This article is part of U.S. Democracy Day, a nationwide collaborative on Sept. 15, the International Day of Democracy, in which news organizations cover how democracy works and the threats it faces. To learn more, visit usdemocracyday.org.

The post Mississippi Organizers Navigate Difficult Voting Rights Terrain in Run Up to November appeared first on Bolts.

The 51-year-old has a felony on his record, like all of the people DeSantis had arrested. He wondered if the governor would come after him next, because he had just voted in the August primary.

Johnson was convicted of drug trafficking and released in 2002 after serving 22 months in prison. For years after his release, he was barred from voting due to Florida’s draconian rules. In 2018, voters passed Amendment 4, a landmark ballot initiative that overrode the 19th century policy barring anyone with a felony conviction from voting for life. Amendment 4 allowed people convicted of most felonies to vote once they complete their sentence.

Johnson’s first time voting was in 2020 and he’s been engaged with electoral politics ever since. 

But a series of arrests this year have rocked the reform’s promise. Earlier this year, county prosecutors charged people for voting despite owing court debt, due to a law signed by DeSantis in 2019 that rolled back Amendment 4 by imposing financial payments. The people who were then charged in August had been convicted of murder and sexual assault, offenses carved out by Amendment 4. But several said that they thought the amendment allowed them to legally vote, especially because they had been provided with voter IDs by local election officials—with the approval of the DeSantis administration. 

Now, leading up to the November 8 general election, Johnson is wondering what legal stunt DeSantis might pull next. 

 “It makes you think twice before going to vote,” he said.

A new report by the Sentencing Project estimates that over 1.1 million Floridians are barred from voting this fall due to a past felony conviction in Florida. Others may have regained their right to vote but shy away from the polls over the uncertainty caused by the recent events. And given the vast racial disparities in Florida’s criminal legal system, the predicament disproportionately affects African Americans.

More than one in five Black adults in the state were disenfranchised in 2016. Amendment 4 cut down that number, but 13 percent of Black adults are still barred from voting in the state, which compares to 7 percent of the rest of state’s population.

Of the 19 people whose August arrests for voter fraud were reviewed by The Palm Beach Post, 15 are Black.

“DeSantis’ arrests have built upon a culture of fear that already existed around voting, but he has added new consequences, especially for Black people in particular,” said Kevin Anderson, a defense attorney who represents Leo Grant Jr., one of the people who were arrested in August.

Backed by law enforcement from his Election Crimes and Security Office at a press conference on Aug.18, DeSantis said the voters had committed fraud, which would require that they had knowingly and willfully violated the law so they could cast their votes.

“The state of Florida has charged and is in the process of arresting 20 individuals across the state for voter fraud,” DeSantis said to a round of cheering and applause. “They did not go through any process. They did not get their rights restored, and yet they went ahead and voted anyways. That is against the law, and now they’re going to pay the price for it.”

At another press conference 12 days later, DeSantis then put the blame on local voting jurisdictions. “Some local jurisdictions don’t care about election laws. We do, and we think it’s important. If you’re not able to run an election right, we want to hold people accountable,” DeSantis said.

But DeSantis’ claims have since come under scrutiny. He failed to mention during his press conferences that government officials had told the people who were arrested that they were allowed to vote. And DeSantis’ own election investigation chief had sent an email to local jurisdictions telling them that they did nothing wrong when the returning citizens voted in August.

Last week, one of the arrests was thrown out by a South Florida judge, who said that the state did not have jurisdiction to charge Robert Lee Wood. The DeSantis administration said that it intends to appeal that decision.

“The DeSantis story about the arrests after the primary has already started to fall apart, but who knows what he’s capable of next,” Johnson said.

DeSantis created a new police force to investigate election crimes in April, spending an estimated $3.7 million in startup costs. It employs agents tasked with investigating election-related crimes, which are very uncommon in Florida. 

The DeSantis administration has not responded to multiple requests for comment on this story.

Some of those who were arrested have come forward to explain that they thought their rights had been restored when Amendment 4 passed, and that the state had given them every indication that they were eligible to vote.

Leo Grant Jr. had thought he was just fulfilling his civic duty, until law enforcement arrived at his door in August. His defense attorney, Anderson, says that the DeSantis administration used people’s lives to advance his political agenda and create an environment for rumors to spread in Florida about rampant voter fraud.

“This process was weaponized to make it appear that you have all of these people out in the community casting votes that they ought not cast, when really what has happened is that they’ve been lured,” Anderson said. “So it’s like a game that’s being played with their lives.”

Anderson—who has 20 years of experience and has handled hundreds of state and federal criminal and police liability cases—said that DeSantis has created “an environment of intimidation,” which will affect potential voters who may now be worried about going to cast their vote after the arrests. 

“Intimidation is one tactic that has been used in the past against Black people for voting, and it is being used now,” he said.

Fear tactics have been wielded to mute Black people’s voices and suppress their votes throughout American history. The Ku Klux Klan did this, often through violence, in the late 1800s and early 1900s. This year, in Florida and in other states, intimidation and election-related threats of violence have made securing polling locations more difficult leading up to elections.  

But legislation has also functioned as a means of voter suppression. Prior to Amendment 4 being passed, Florida’s constitution had disenfranchised all citizens who had been convicted of any felony offense dating back to Florida’s first constitution in 1838. It said, “all persons convicted of bribery, perjury, forgery, or other high crime, or misdemeanor” should be barred from voting. This was amended in 1868 to remove the language about misdemeanors. In 1968, the language was amended again, to name felonies as the specific reason that people should not be able to vote.

In an analysis of Florida’s disenfranchisement rules in 2015, Allison Riggs wrote in The Journal of Civil Rights and Economic Development about the “enormous burden that these rules place on people of color seeking to participate in the political process.”  Even after passage of Amendment 4 in 2018, many Floridians are barred from voting, including if they are in prison, on probation, and on parole—outcomes that are far likelier to affect Black Floridians.

Shortly after Amendment 4 was adopted, DeSantis signed Senate Bill 7066 into law, which prohibited returning citizens from voting unless they paid off legal fines and fees imposed by a court pursu­ant to a felony convic­tion.

This caused anger and confusion among those who had struggled for the right to vote, and civil rights groups filed a lawsuit accusing the governor of creating a “pay-to-vote” system. The chaos created by this rule, in addition to the more recent voter arrests, led several civil rights groups to create a legal guide for returning citizens who wish to vote.

This month, body camera footage of one of the arrests was published by The Tampa Bay Times. It showed Tony Patterson, another of the voters charged, in a state of shock that he was being arrested. 

“What is wrong with this state, man?” Patterson asked the police as they arrested him. “Voter fraud? Y’all said anybody with a felony could vote, man.” 

This isn’t DeSantis’ first attempt at influencing voting procedures in Florida with an aim of impacting outcomes. Earlier this year, his administration pushed a redistricting plan before the legislature, which a Florida circuit court judge found to be unconstitutional for its attempt to dilute the Black vote. The legislature approved the plan, and now the DeSantis administration is refusing to release documents related to its creation, after the League of Women Voters and individual voters filed a lawsuit against the redistricting in April. 

Neither has DeSantis shied away from overruling the will of voters once they’ve already spoken. In August he removed a democratically-elected state attorney from office based on the prosecutor’s statements that he would not charge cases dealing with abortion or anti-transgender legislation, and claims to have “reviewed” several more. It’s created uncertainty among candidates that they could be plucked from their positions even after winning. 

“In the end, he just wants to win,” said Robin Lockett, regional director of the non-profit activist group Florida Rising. “He’ll use any tactic he can, no matter how undemocratic, to try to get his way.”

Lockett works to register voters in Florida, along with fighting for racial and social justice causes. She doesn’t have a felony conviction, but talks to people who do regularly through her work. She says that DeSantis has reached a new level of electoral desperation.

“You don’t see him out there arresting people who are most likely going to vote for him,” Lockett said. “He’s targeting people who he wants to suppress. He wants returning citizens, and especially Black people, to go back to the shed, to go underground.”

Rodney Johnson says that even though DeSantis’s actions make him think twice about voting, he’ll still be heading to the ballot box in November. 

“When you make the effort to turn your life around, you want to be able to have your voice heard, just like any other citizen.”

He won’t let a political agenda based in fear stop him from moving forward, he says, although he’s unsure if that will be the case with everyone who has been convicted of a felony. 

“A lot of us have been through so much here in Florida, rents are going up and we’re just trying to survive,” Rodney said. “People have kids and families to think about. There are plenty of voters who might not take the risk, in case DeSantis decides to pull something shady again. But I have to do what I know is right.”

The post Arrests Over Voting Escalate a “Culture of Fear” in Florida appeared first on Bolts.

“We won in every single district in this county,” George said in an interview Wednesday. She called the results a “command” from the community to continue with the reforms she’s initiated since taking office. “I really hope that it’s seen by law enforcement and others in the community as a sort of, let’s come together and do this, push forward on some of these issues together. And I look forward to doing that. That’s what I plan on doing.”

George, who was first appointed by GOP Governor Phil Scott but has run as a Democrat, will be unopposed in the general election, and is all but certain to secure an additional four-year term. 

George and Kenney fundamentally disagreed during the campaign about the proper scope of prosecution and policing in Chittenden County, with Kenney faulting many of George’s reforms.

During her tenure, George has implemented major changes. She has refused to seek cash bail and declined to charge people for possessing buprenorphine, which helped inspire legislation that in 2021 made Vermont the first state to legalize possession of the prescription medication used to treat opioid addiction. In 2019, George ordered her entire staff to visit a prison, saying she hoped the experience would lead them to seek fewer and shorter sentences.

George has also significantly expanded the use of pre-charge restorative justice programs, Bolts reported in July. The state’s attorney has been a champion of restorative justice since she first took office, arguing that it is a more compassionate and victim-centered form of harm response that can allow people to take accountability for their actions while avoiding contact with the criminal legal system altogether.  

She allied with so-called progressive prosecutors around the country who are looking to reform local court systems, some of whom celebrated her win on Tuesday. Many have faced pushback this year from critics of reforms, including law enforcement associations. In June, San Francisco DA Chesa Boudin was ousted in a recall, while fellow reformer Diana Becton prevailed over police attacks in neighboring Contra Costa. George’s win comes just five days after a reform challenger ousted the police-backed DA of Tennessee’s Shelby County (Memphis).

Similar tensions arose in Chittenden County. Major police associations, including both local and state unions like the Vermont Troopers Associations and the Chittenden County Fraternal Order of Police endorsed Kenney in recent weeks after long feuding with George over her approach.

Police departments criticized George for declining to prosecute certain cases—and, by extension, hemming them in in their duties. A statement from the Burlington Police Officers’ Association criticized what they called her “pattern of non-prosecution,” calling her actions “disastrous.” George, meanwhile, argued that the police themselves were declining to make arrests in cases that she would have prosecuted—in order to prove their own point and drum up fears about rampant crime.

“In some cases, they were saying, ‘I’m not going to even respond to this because Sarah George won’t prosecute it’—and in a lot of those instances, it was things we absolutely would have prosecuted and would prosecute if the police sent it to us,” George told Bolts. Asked for an example of such a crime, George cited vehicle thefts—which Burlington officers’ association had singled out in their letter denouncing George’s reforms. This conflict also seemed reminiscent of the dynamics in San Francisco around Boudin: in the months before his recall, San Francisco police refused to assist the DA in a sting operation, leading some to speculate whether they were engaged in a retaliatory “work stoppage.”

In recent weeks, local media has published multiple accounts of individual officers invoking George as the reason they couldn’t or wouldn’t arrest someone. According to Seven Days, after a couple’s moped was stolen and the couple tracked down the thief, police let him go, placing the blame on George’s directives. In an encounter caught on body cam and reported on by VT Digger, a Winooksi police officer blamed the police’s inability to address crime and drug use in the neighborhood on George’s “super-progressive, soft-on-crime approach”—and urged the Winooski residents he was talking to vote for her opponent Kenney. 

One of George’s most controversial reforms was her policy of not prosecuting cases that arose from traffic stops for things like a suspended registration or a broken brake light, which she enacted to try to reduce the documented racial bias that factors into such encounters. The Vermont Troopers Association cited this reform as evidence of “an imbalance, [sic] that put her in direct conflict with her elected responsibilities as State’s Attorney.”

Kenney’s campaign echoed much of the criticism that local law enforcement leveled at George, arguing that restorative justice was not appropriate for repeat offenders, denouncing her traffic stop policy as “radical,” and highlighting upticks in theft as evidence of George’s leniency on crime. 

But the criticism failed tosway the county’s voters, and given Vermont’s progressive voter base, the highly visible support from police may have actually hurt Kenney’s chances. George prevailed on Tuesday by a margin of 62 to 38 percent.

George said the last-ditch involvement from law enforcement seemed to spur a dramatic escalation in the amount of hate mail she received during the home stretch of the campaign. At the same time, George said, she suspected that the community would react against the outpouring of police opposition.

“I think they were rightfully pretty angry that they were pawns in this political game that it felt like law enforcement was playing,” George told Bolts.

The post Reform Prosecutor Wins After Police Union Attacks in Vermont appeared first on Bolts.

The use of the death penalty in Utah County, a majority Republican county that’s the second most populous in Utah, had been rare when Leavitt took office in 2019, two years after the Baum murders. The last time a Utah County attorney had sought the death penalty was in 1984, when prosecutors pushed for the exections of Ron and Dan Lafferty, who had been charged with capital murder for the killings of their sister-in-law Brenda Lafferty and her 15-month old daughter, Erica. (Dan was sentenced to life in prison, where he remains, while Ron died of natural causes on death row.)

As the Baum prosecution got underway, Leavitt, a Republican, assigned four full-time prosecutors to the case. But then he quickly saw how they detracted from other prosecutions. At the start of the Baum case, Leavitt said his office was handling 17 homicide prosecutions and around 230 cases involving sex crimes. Typically, Leavitt said, each prosecutor in his office would work more than 100 cases. 

Leavitt eventually decided that seeking death was no longer worth it, announcing last September, that he would take the death penalty off the table in Baum’s case and never again seek the ultimate punishment, saying it deterred him from his ultimate goal of public safety. 

“My commitment to you when I took office was to focus our efforts on community protection rather than on methods of the past that have long since proven ineffective,” Leavitt said in a statement at the time. “Focusing on ALL victims by no longer seeking the death penalty advances that commitment.” In April, a jury convicted Baum of aggravated murder. Leavitt’s office argued for four consecutive life sentences without the possibility of parole, and a jury agreed during Baum’s sentencing last week. By not seeking the death penalty, Leavitt says his office only had to assign two lawyers to the case instead of four, and estimated the trial was shortened by about three months. 

“The doctrine of limited government is that government acts only to the extent necessary to get the job done,” Leavitt told Bolts in an interview. “But what is the job? The job in this case is protecting society. And we can protect society far better with life in prison without parole than we can with the death penalty.” 

In recent years, conservative politicians across the country have joined in Leavitt’s thinking, shifting from once zealous proponents of capital punishment to supporters of limiting and ending the practice. Leavitt, however, may be the only known conservative prosecutor to have done so. He has been lauded as a trailblazer among the nation’s conservative groups fighting to end the death penalty, who typically frame their stance as pro-life, fiscally responsible, and in line with limited government. 

But at home, his move sparked a heated political battle: the county’s commissioners have voted in favor of abolishing the death penalty, while the Fraternal Order of the Police and a group of former prosecutors issued a vote of no confidence in Leavitt. 

Leavitt’s pivot away from the death penalty might now cost him his job in Utah County. He faces tough competition to keep his seat in Utah’s June 28 Republican primary, up against an opponent who cites his stance on the death penalty and the Baum case in pushing the narrative that Leavitt is soft on crime.

“I think it’s a violation of his oath not to pursue the death penalty in appropriate cases,” Jeff Gray, who is an assistant Utah solicitor general, told the Daily Herald in January. Adam Pomeroy, who currently works under Leavitt as a deputy county attorney and who dropped out of the primary in early June to endorse Gray, told Bolts that Leavitt has “become a rogue prosecutor who simply refuses to follow what the law is.” Pomeroy also called it “completely inappropriate for a county attorney to unilaterally decide, disregard the will of the people and nullify a law he personally disagrees with that usurps the legislative function.”

Before becoming Utah County attorney, Leavitt served as top prosecutor for Juab County from 1995 to 2003. After he lost the 2002 election, he started working in Ukraine and Moldova to reform their criminal justice systems. “In 2018,” Leavitt said, he “realized that I really had very little business traveling 7,000 miles to try and reform someone else’s criminal justice system when my own was falling apart around me.”

After taking office, he first introduced a pre-filing diversion program that would allow people accused of low-level crimes to avoid conviction and prison time by participating in classes, community service, and treatment programs. He also aimed to reduce incarceration for non-violent offenses, and change the office’s charging practices. 

Leavitt was presented with the Baum case his first year in office. Initially, he remembered thinking, “If there was ever a crime that in my estimation warranted the death penalty it is that one.” But the resources and time devoted to the case at the expense of others made him rethink his position. Leavitt said that he also considered that even if the jury sentenced Baum to death, it would be decades before he would be executed, if ever. (The last person Utah executed, Ronnie Lee Gardner, spent nearly 25 years on death row between his conviction and execution, and Utah has not carried out an execution in 12 years.) Leavitt said he also had problems with coercive plea bargaining in capital murder cases and the possibility that an innocent person could be executed at the government’s hands. 

“My evolution with the death penalty really came down to the fact that I realized that the only person that really benefits from seeking the death penalty is me as the elected prosecutor because it makes me look tough on crime,” Leavitt told Bolts. “But at the same time, the prosecutor is spending all the government resources, we’re diminishing the effectiveness of all the other cases in the office.”

He added, “In my mind, the choice was clear. I’m not here to get and stay elected. I’m here to reform the criminal justice system.”

The families of Baum’s victims have criticized Leavitt’s decision to drop the death penalty. “There is no reform for this man. There is no rebuilding,” Amanda Davis, Otteson’s aunt, said of Baum during an interview with local news outlet KSL. “Taking the death penalty off the table makes it, like, he won. He got what he wanted.” 

Leavitt isn’t the only prosecutor in Utah to move away from the death penalty. Shortly after his announcement in September, he was joined by three others, two Democrats and one independent, in an open letter urging the state legislature and Governor Spencer Cox to repeal the state’s death penalty statute. Instead, they favored the introduction of a 45 years-to-life sentence to replace the death penalty, along with the existing punishments for aggravated murder of life without parole and 25 years-to-life. 

Leavitt is part of a growing movement of Republican politicans who are increasingly fueling efforts to end the death penalty. In January, two Republican Utah lawmakers who had formerly supported capital punishment introduced legislation that would prohibit prosecutors from seeking death; the bill failed in committee by a 6–5 vote. In Kentucky, a conservative lawmaker introduced a bill that was signed into law in April that would prevent people with certain mental illnesses from being sentenced to death. Missouri’s legislature is now considering a Republican-sponsored bill that would abolish the death penalty on the grounds that the government cannot be trusted with administering the ultimate punishment. And a bill to end the death penalty in Ohio, which has a Republican governor and legislature, is gaining traction, having gone further than others before it. 

Utah’s conservative activists have not responded positively, though. Pomeroy led with 46 percent of the vote in April’s county GOP convention, a gathering which grassroots activists usually dominate, while Gray had nearly 44 percent. Leavitt won just 10 percent but will appear on the June ballot because of the signatures he collected. 

Regardless of the outcome, Leavitt has already helped change the debate on capital punishment among conservatives, says Demetrius Minor, national manager for Conservatives Concerned About the Death Penalty. “I believe that because of David Leavitt, that could possibly open up the gateway for for other prosecutors to come forward in opposition to the death penalty,” Minor told Bolts. “There’s definitely a shift happening. It’s not a matter of if it’s a matter of when.”

The story has been updated to note that one of the primary candidates dropped out in early June.

The post Utah Prosecutor Tests GOP Appetite for Opposing the Death Penalty appeared first on Bolts.

Oregon is the first state in the nation to decriminalize possession of low-level amounts of drugs.

Voters approved Measure 110, a citizen-led ballot initiative that will swap arrests and criminal penalties for a noncriminal $100 citation. It will also fund more treatment services.

They also adopted Measure 109, which legalizes psilocybin (“magic mushrooms”) for medical purposes. Oregon is also the first state to do this.

The results mark a momentous shift in favor of a public health-focused approach to substance use, and a turn away from longtime policies that incarcerate people or at least saddle them with a criminal conviction over behaviors tied to addiction.

Getting caught with drugs like cocaine, heroin, or methamphetamine normally leads to arrest, jail time, and a criminal record, an approach that advocates have rejected. “Punishing people for a substance use disorder is an ineffective way of changing people’s drug use behavior,” Haven Wheelock, who helped organize for the initiative, told the Political Report in September. “We know that because we’ve been trying for a hundred years to punish people into not using substances, and it hasn’t worked.” 

A growing body of evidence shows that tougher prison sentences do little to deter drug use, and that higher rates of drug arrests do not correlate with use patterns. Instead, people who are booked in jail for substance use face heightened health risks given the substantial rate of overdoses and suicides in detention or upon release. And a criminal conviction over substance use often leads to mounting economic difficulties by limiting access to housing, employment, and student loans, which can make recovery more difficult. 

Measure 110 will decriminalize the vast majority of drug possession cases now prosecuted, a state analysis found. The reform does not apply to possession of more than one or two grams, depending on the substance, however.

It will also use the savings from excess cannabis tax revenue, and from reduced policing and incarceration, to fund treatment and other health services. 

This approach is modeled after reforms undertaken by Portugal. In the 1990s, Portugal faced an injection drug crisis that led to a growing number of overdoses and an outbreak of HIV. To tackle the issue, drugs were decriminalized; in addition, new policies focused on boosting treatment and prevention programs. Drug-related deaths, drug use, and HIV infections have since plummeted.   

Measure 110 will not stop law enforcement against drug possession, however. It will still be treated as a civil infraction.

This continued role for law enforcement has advocates worried that inequalities tied to policing will persist even if Measure 110 passes.

They note that the $100 citation could create a new form of fines and fees likely to target people of color and burden those with lower incomes. For instance, an ACLU report shows that, even in states where cannabis is legalized, Black people are far more likely to be arrested for possession than white people. 

The $100 fine would be waived if a person agrees to a health assessment where they would be screened for a substance use disorder and other health needs by licensed professionals.

During the campaign, proponents of Measure 110 centered their message on racial justice, and on the harms of the drug war on communities of color, the Political Report found in September.

Leo Beletsky, director of the Health in Justice Action Lab at Northeastern University’s School of Law, stresses more is needed. “To substantially shift the experiences of people who use drugs in their communities, decriminalization must be coupled with meaningful police reform and efforts to build-up systems of support and care,” he said.

Beyond Oregon, advocates hope that the state’s new reforms start a domino effect, akin to the one in favor of cannabis legalization, and start a national decriminalization trend on other substances. In July, the Drug Policy Alliance released a framework for decriminalizing drugs at the federal level. 

Daniel Nichanian contributed to this report.

The post Oregon Becomes the First State to Decriminalize Drugs appeared first on Bolts.

Austin and Orlando sent progressive candidates to their prosecutor’s offices tonight.

José Garza and Monique Worrell each vowed during their campaigns to reduce the prison population, and their wins add to a series of victories for criminal justice reformers this year. Many other prosecutorial elections were at play today, though the results are still unknown. 

Garza, a former public defender who works as a labor and immigrants’ rights attorney, won in Travis County (Austin), Texas, against Republican Martin Harry. Garza won the Democratic nomination in July after ousting the incumbent district attorney in a heated primary.

Worrell, a former defense attorney, prevailed in Florida’s Ninth Judicial District, home to Orange (Orlando) and Osceola counties, against Jose Torroella, an independent. She will replace Aramis Ayala, the departing prosecutor who did not seek re-election; Worrell won a tough Democratic primary in August.

“Garza and Worrell were elected because their messaging around public health, public safety and the fact that we cannot prosecute and incarcerate our way out of society’s problems resonated with voters,” Tiffany Cabán, who narrowly lost the DA election in Queens in 2019 and has since worked with the Working Families Party to help progressive candidates, told The Appeal: Political Report in an email. The WFP endorsed Garza and Worrell this year. 

For both candidates, the summer primaries were the main events since these jurisdictions lean Democratic.

Still, their general election opponents resorted to tough-on-crime messaging to overcome these odds. Torroella called himself an “old fashioned” candidate espousing “law and order” values, and said people should be prosecuted more harshly. Harry has attacked Garza for threatening safety with his promise to release more people who are detained pretrial. 

Garza’s victory is a milestone for national debates on drug policy, and more broadly for criminal justice reform in Texas. 

He ran on a promise of declining to prosecute cases of drug possession and sale for under one gram, a policy that would effectively decriminalize small quantities of any controlled substance in Austin.

“Using our resources to prosecute these offenses increases the likelihood that people will commit future crimes, and that makes our community less safe,” he told the Political Report in June.

Cate Graziani, policy and operations director of the Texas Harm Reduction Alliance, told the Political Report in July that “there’s a huge opportunity having a DA who understands that the war on drugs is harmful,” In 2017, the county saw nearly 1,700 cases where drug possession of less than one gram was the primary reason for arrest, according to a report released by a coalition of advocacy groups, including the Texas Harm Reduction Alliance. An additional 1,200 arrests involved possession alongside other charges. African Americans were a vastly disproportionate share of these arrests.

This pattern was a major issue in the primary between Garza and Margaret Moore, the incumbent whom he defeated by more than 35 percentage points in a runoff in July. Garza also criticized Moore for failing to hold police officers accountable. The runoff unfolded against the backdrop of protests over Moore’s handling of the killing of Mike Ramos by an Austin police officer in April.

Garza’s win was boosted by heavy local organizing against police brutality and mass incarceration in Travis County. Through his work with the Workers Defense Project, Garza  himself took part in efforts to change county practices. Moore took a more defiant attitude toward the demands of protesters.

Garza expressed support for fully ending the use of cash bail and has committed to never seek the death penalty, a significant promise in Texas. He also said he would rarely pursue reducing the resort to sentences of more than 20 years. And his call for shrinking the criminal legal system extends beyond drug policy. 

“We use our criminal justice system like a rug that we sweep our problems underneath so we don’t have to look at them,” he said in June. 

In implementing his platform, Garza will have to contend with Republican state officials who at times try to pre-empt local policies adopted by Travis County, though he says he is undaunted and eager to show an alternative politics on criminal justice is possible in Texas.

Worrell, too, will face the prospect of intervention by Florida’s Republican officials opposed to criminal justice reform. Her campaign unfolded in the shadow of the retaliation Ayala experienced over the last four years.

Elected in 2016, Ayala soon announced a policy of never seeking the death penalty. Republican Governor Rick Scott stripped her of cases eligible for the death penalty, a move that went to the state Supreme Court, which upheld it. Ayala, who is one in a number of Black women elected as prosecutors nationwide who have faced retaliation for promoting criminal justice reform, pointed to that war of attrition last year to explain her decision to not seek re-election. 

Worrell did not reiterate Ayala’s pledge to never seek the death penalty, and she told the Political Report in July she is aware that opponents of reform “will use any means necessary.” But the other candidates she ran against in the primary indicated they were more likely to roll back Ayala’s policies, and Worrell ran as the candidate aligned with the incumbent.

Her victory is a vindication for Ayala, who endorsed her. Worrell worked as the head of the conviction integrity unit in Ayala’s office.

One of Worrell’s most significant commitments involves youth justice: She said she would not use Florida prosecutors’ unchecked discretion to “direct file” a case involving a minor in adult court, unless there is “loss of life.” As Samantha Schuyler wrote for the Political Report in July, “Florida transfers more children into the adult system than any other state in the country,” mostly for nonviolent offenses. Worrell has also said she would reduce the prosecution of low-level offenses associated with poverty and marijuana possession. 

Worrell also participated in Black Lives Matter protests in Orlando in June. “If you want to change the system, you must change the player,” she said in a speech at a rally. 

Even as Garza and Worrell’s platforms staked very different levels of commitment to upending their local criminal legal systems, with Garza outlining more specific positions on how he will change local policies, Cabán took heart at both of their successes.

“Progressives winning DA races are a clear indicator that our movement is growing,” she said. “This is about more than just harm reduction—a worthwhile goal in and of itself—it is a larger paradigm shift around the definition of public safety.”

The post Austin and Orlando Elect Prosecutors Who Vow to Fight Mass Incarceration appeared first on Bolts.

In March, Los Angeles District Attorney Jackie Lacey was a hair’s breadth away from a runoff in what had been heralded as “the most important D.A. race” in the country. 

For days after the Democratic primary, her share of the vote hovered around 50 percent; she needed to cross that threshold to win. With all ballots counted, Lacey took home 48 percent against her progressive challengers, former San Francisco DA George Gascón and former public defender Rachel Rossi. It was enough to force her into a runoff with Gascón, who nabbed 28 percent of the vote. 

Much has changed since early March. The pandemic amplified existing social inequities, and nationwide protests against racism and police violence drew more widespread scrutiny to the criminal legal system, adding newfound pressure to Lacey’s campaign. Those changes could stand to benefit Gascón, a former Los Angeles Police Department assistant chief turned prosecutor who made his name in progressive circles as the co-author of California’s Prop 47, which reclassified many drug and theft charges from felonies to misdemeanors. 

As the political climate shifted over the summer, so have many of Lacey’s political backers. U.S. Representative Adam Schiff withdrew his endorsement over the summer, and Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti switched his endorsement from Lacey to Gascón. Gascón has gone from an insurgent candidate to the mainstream Democratic pick, with endorsements from Governor Gavin Newsom and U.S. Senator Kamala Harris. 

Los Angeles County, with the nation’s largest jail system and largest local prosecutor office, is considered a crown jewel in a nationwide push to elect progressive prosecutors. 

“My success will have a huge impact and my failure will have a huge impact as well,” Gascón told The Appeal: Political Report. “If I win and we can show that it actually works. It will really begin to devalue the scare tactics that are being practiced now by Trump, and by my opponent, and by police unions throughout the country.” 

Law enforcement groups have contributed at least $5,000,000 to defeat Gascón, whose campaign has received backing from wealthy progressive donors, including philanthropist Patty Quillin. (Quillin is the director of Meadow Fund, a donor-advised fund of the Silicon Valley Community Foundation. The foundation has given to The Justice Collaborative, which sponsors The Appeal, through Tides Advocacy.)

“It is probably the most important local election in the United States of America,” said former Los Angeles District Attorney Steve Cooley, a stalwart Lacey supporter. He said he believes Gascón would prosecute police officers “just to fulfill his campaign promise” and usher in a “new era” of higher crime. 

In an apparent awareness of shifting winds, Lacey has sought to boost her progressive credentials since March. She often touts her office’s establishment in January 2019 of a dedicated unit to divert defendants with mental illness away from prosecution. Lacey also announced the county had no plans to prosecute protesters for curfew violations, and she filed charges in June against an LAPD officer filmed beating a man in Boyle Heights. 

But when responding to calls for sweeping changes to Los Angeles’s criminal legal system, Lacey says she favors more police training and has accused Black Lives Matter of seeking disruption, not conversation, in her repeated refusals to meet with activists. 

“There are changes happening, there is training happening,” Lacey said during an event in August. “But I think this is an issue we all have to work together for, police officers are human beings as are the people that they stop.” Lacey’s office did not respond to requests for comment for this story.

Lacey’s supporters have been more direct in adopting Trump-like anti-reform rhetoric when framing the summer of protests and the stakes of the DA race.

“Who’s asking for what changes? Is it Black Lives Matter, is it Antifa?” said Cooley, who promoted Lacey during his DA tenure from 2000 to 2012. “They are anarchists, they are looters, they are arsonists, and they are rioters.” 

In a Fox News interview, Jamie McBride, the face of the Los Angeles police union, said Los Angeles is in “scary times” after a man shot two sheriff’s deputies in September, in what authorities described as “ambush.”

“We want to make sure this person is apprehended before the end of the year, as soon as possible, because I know and we know that Jackie Lacey is going to prosecute that individual to the fullest,” McBride said. “If George Gascón is elected, he is just going to give a strong talking to and that’s about it.” 

Maintaining the smaller jail population ushered in by coronavirus-related releases is also a heated election issue. Los Angeles County’s chronically overcrowded 17,000-person jail system was below capacity for the first time in 15 years after the jail’s population dropped to under 12,000 people at the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic. But the jail population has swelled back to over 14,000. Some of this rise is because the department of corrections has suspended transfers of convicted people from jail to prison. But Nikhil Ramnaney, president of the LA County Public Defender Union, said deputy district attorneys are pushing for bail and against alternatives that would keep defendants out of pretrial detention. “The preference is incarceration,” he said.

Lacey has pitched herself as a moderate reformer. In 2015, she spearheaded a program to divert people with mental illness away from prosecution. Lacey says she prioritizes victim rights while being open to alternatives to incarceration, but advocates have faulted the scope of her initiatives.

When it comes to diverting people with mental illness from jail and charging, Ramnaney said the culture of prosecutors remains bent toward unnecessary incarceration and the burden remains on public defenders to navigate the complex system of diversion programs. “It constantly feels like I have to re-educate DAs about community based resources, literally every single day,” said Ramnaney. 

Gascón centers his bid on reducing the criminalization of these lower-level behaviors tied to mental health, homelessness, or substance use. “LA County has come to a place where they use the most expensive and the most intrusive tools of the criminal justice system to deal with every behavior, and that is prosecution and incarceration,” he told the Political Report in January. “They incarcerate at four times the level that we did in San Francisco but they don’t have anything to show for it in terms of public safety.”

And Gascón promised to look for ways to “reinvest” criminal justice funds into “education, public parks, or other activities that are more likely to create safer and healthier communities over a longer period of time.”

Measure J, an initiative on the November ballot in Los Angeles County, captures the candidates’ different approaches to diverting people from the criminal legal system. The measure, crafted in the wake of the summer protests, would allocate 10 percent of LA County’s unrestricted general funds—around $300 million—toward alternatives to incarceration and community investment. It would bar that money from being funnelled toward law enforcement. 

Gascón has endorsed Measure J; Lacey has called it a rash response to an issue that requires more study and “courageous budgeting.”

Neither candidate has specifically endorsed slashing police budgets in the wake of George Floyd’s killing in Minneapolis, despite local calls to slash funding for law enforcement. 

Gascón said he expects a surge of progressive voters looking to oust Trump to benefit his bid this time around. But the county of Los Angeles is vast, with over 10 million people. And while it is known as a Democratic stronghold, it has a history of leaning more conservative on criminal justice issues. Lacey’s predecessor was a Republican. 

In March, Lacey performed best in the majority-white suburbs of Los Angeles and in precincts that are plurality Black, while the progressive bloc of Gascón and Rossi captured rapidly gentrifying areas, and liberal cities like West Hollywood and Santa Monica, according to a Los Angeles Times analysis. Gascón and Rossi also combined for 55 percent of the vote in majority Latinx precincts.

There are some indications that increased awareness of criminal justice issues could hamper support for Lacey. The conservative-leaning editorial board of the Los Angeles Daily News, endorsed Gascón in February, along with the Los Angeles Times, which endorsed Gascón a second time in September. Meanwhile, the Los Angeles City Council voted 12-2 to cut the LAPD budget by $150 million in July, a move that would have been unthinkable before May.    Lacey is now struggling to balance presenting herself as a moderate reformer while police unions tout her as the law-and-order candidate, said Jim Newton, a UCLA lecturer for public policy. 

“It’s both a blessing and curse,” Newton said of the LAPD union’s endorsement, which brought a flood of money and engaged campaigners. “I think it has probably become more of a handicap in recent weeks than she probably expected.” 

Connie Rice, a civil rights attorney who has worked on reforming the LAPD for decades, was skeptical that fearmongering about rising crime would give Lacey a substantial boost. “That doesn’t seem to be resonating because crime is still at historic lows,” she said. “I don’t think this is about law and order right now in LA County. I think it’s about progress in changing policing and prosecutorial cultures … so I don’t see it playing out in this county in the way it has the potential to play out in the more racially isolated and less racially and ethnically pluralistic Midwest.”

———

For many of her critics, Lacey’s perceived unwillingness to prosecute police officers for fatal shootings defined her second term. “If we get her out we’ll be dancing in the streets for weeks,” said Melinah Abdullah, an organizer with Black Lives Matter Los Angeles, which has been campaigning against Lacey. 

Four years ago, she ran for re-election unopposed, becoming the first Los Angeles district attorney in decades to win without a challenger. Shortly before the election, LAPD officer Clifford Proctor killed an unarmed and unhoused Black man named Brendon Glenn. Lacey ultimately declined to prosecute the officer in 2018—a decision that went against the recommendation of the police chief. 

Black Lives Matter activists began protesting outside Lacey’s office every week, hoping she would be forced to reckon with police violence.  “This has been one of the biggest lifts we’ve undertaken,” said Abdullah.

Last year, protesters started appearing at Lacey’s house and shouting her down at public events. And a day before the March primary, Lacey’s husband pointed a gun at protesters outside his home and threatened to shoot. He now faces misdemeanor charges. 

During the summer, the protests in front of Lacey’s office swelled from dozens to thousands.“In the beginning, yes, it was just us, a handful,” said Trisha Michael who has been protesting with Black Lives Matter since her twin sister, Kisha Michael, was killed in Inglewood, one the 88 incorportated cities within the district attorney’s jurisdiction. Michael said community members were looking to the police chief and others for police accountability, but now those calling for change have realized that Lacey is “the big fish to fry.” 

And even as Black Lives Matter protests swept the nation in the summer, two more men—Dijon Kizzee and Andres Guardado—were shot dead by law enforcement in Los Angeles County, sparking renewed protests. 

In late September, Lacey recused herself from deciding whether to prosecute an LAPD officer in the deadly shooting of Daniel Hernandez. The officer involved in that shooting is Toni McBride, the daughter of the LAPD union head who helped facilitate a million dollar donation toward Lacey’s re-election, creating a likely conflict of interest, according to the California attorney general. Her decision to hand authority over to the attorney general is out of character, with one observer saying political pressure forced her hand. Days after her recusal, Gascón pledged to reopen investigations in four fatal police shootings, including the killing of Glenn, saying that public trust in Lacey’s decision-making has been “shattered” by law enforcement money.

Gascón has also been criticized for not prosecuting police for fatal shootings, and similarly drew the ire of protesters in the Bay Area. As San Francisco DA, he declined to press charges in all of the 49 police shootings that occurred under his watch. In one case, Gascón declined to charge the officers who shot Mario Woods over 20 times, a killing that inspired quarterback Colin Kaepernick to take a knee during the national anthem before NFL games. Gascón even filed for a restraining order against a protester who accosted him outside his home. 

Lacey and her supporters have sought to paint Gascón as a political chameleon whose rhetoric on reform contradicts his record as a former police officer and San Francisco DA. “The same law Mr. Gascón is following in San Francisco is the same law I follow in LA County,” Lacey said at a town hall in August. “Why am I being judged differently?” Gascón has also said that, while he was DA, he was restricted by the law at the time dictating what was an acceptable use of force, which he said made it difficult to press charges.

Gascón has stressed in response that, unlike Lacey, he advocated in the legislature for changing state law to make police prosecutions easier. He backed the original version of AB-392, which tightened the standard for police use of force; the legislature ended up adopting a weaker version of the bill last year. Gascón told the Political Report in January he would keep asking the legislature for stronger standards. 

Attorney Arnoldo Casillas who represented the family of Amilcar Perez-Lopez, a San Francisco man shot five times in the back while allegedly holding a knife said he is cautiously optimistic that Gascón would usher in stricter oversight of police shootings despite not prosecuting the officers who shot Perez-Lopez. “Right now Gascón is not beholden to them,” Casillas, who now represents the family of Daniel Hernandez in a civil lawsuit, said of pressure from local law enforcement. “I think there is a window of opportunity to set a new standard.” 

Abdullah, the Black Lives Matter organizer, says their protests will continue irrespective of the November result. “We did tell [Gascón] that when you’re elected, you know, we’re going to have to protest you, too,’” said Abdullah. 

“We’re not going to let them just sit there,” she added. “They’re going to be pressured by the people as well.” 

CORRECTION: An earlier version of this article misstated the number of police shootings that occured in San Francisco during Gascón’s tenure as district attorney.

The post The D.A. Primary in Los Angeles Narrowly Went to a Runoff. Now That the Election Is Here, the Stakes Are Even Higher appeared first on Bolts.

Margaret Moore, the district attorney of Travis County, Texas, has faced a spate of stinging criticism from progressives, whether for prosecuting low-level drug charges or failing to hold police officers accountable. In response, she has blamed them for being too obstinate and not grasping the intricacies of the prosecutor’s job. 

“The frustration is fomented by those who do not understand the system,” she said this week about the protests over her handling of the killing of Mike Ramos by an Austin police officer in April. 

On Tuesday, though, voters signaled that the frustration was widespread.

Moore lost resoundingly in the Democratic primary runoff to José Garza, a former public defender who works as a labor and immigrants’ rights attorney at the Workers Defense Project, and who ran on no longer treating the criminal legal system as the remedy to social problems. Garza leads 68 percent to 32 percent as of the count available on Wednesday morning.

Local progressives scored a separate win on Tuesday for the position of county attorney, which handles misdemeanors. Delia Garza, the Austin City Council member who prevailed, also talks of shrinking the system’s scope.

“It’s been just an incredible night,” Dominic Selvera, a defense attorney who was active in José Garza’s campaign, said on Tuesday about both results. 

José Garza will now face Republican Martin Harry in November; he will be strongly favored given the county’s heavily Democratic lean. Delia Garza has no general election opponent.

In an interview with The Appeal: Political Report, José Garza prided himself for being among the advocates Moore has fought with, and he vowed to “create space” for activists to hold him accountable. In conversations this week, many local advocates expressed confidence that he would remain an ally given his past and current roles. Chris Harris, an organizer for criminal justice reform, said his win could be “incredibly meaningful” in part because of his “willingness to listen to those directly impacted by the criminal legal and immigration systems, as well as advocates.” 

But, Harris added, “how meaningful will depend on the community’s ability to stay engaged …  and keep him to his promises.”

—

Garza’s most emblematic promise, at least when it comes to shrinking the criminal legal system, is to decline to prosecute cases of drug possession and sale for under one gram, a policy that would effectively decriminalize small quantities of any controlled substance in Austin.

“Using our resources to prosecute these offenses increases the likelihood that people will commit future crimes, and that makes our community less safe,” Garza told the Political Report in June.

Cate Graziani, policy and operations director of the Texas Harm Reduction Alliance, thinks that implementing this policy “would have a huge impact” given these cases’ prevalence. “There’s a huge opportunity having a DA who understands that the war on drugs is harmful,” she said. 

In 2017, the county saw nearly 1,700 cases where drug possession of less than one gram was the primary reason for arrest, according to a report released by a coalition of advocacy groups, including the Texas Harm Reduction Alliance. (The report does not include arrests over drug sales.) An additional 1,200 arrests involved possession alongside other charges. African Americans were a vastly disproportionate share of these arrests.

Moore has said she is intent on resolving these low-level drug cases without sentencing people to incarceration. But she defends continuing to prosecute people over them, and requires that defendants plead guilty before entering diversion programs. 

Garza’s commitment, by contrast, is to entirely take the DA out of those cases. For Graziani, this means that he is recognizing that the criminal legal system cannot “help people access treatment” by “requiring somebody to seek help when they may not be ready or able.” She adds: “A harm reduction approach completely outside the criminal justice system, no coercion necessary—that’s central for people who have struggled with substance use for a long time.”

Moreover, Garza is going a step further than other progressives who have recently run for DA. While they have promised not to prosecute drug possession, he is extending that commitment to sales as well.  

Decriminalization advocates applaud that extension. “If we want to truly talk about a public health approach to drug use, we have to talk about the drug sale,” said Graziani. “A lot of times, especially when we’re talking about a gram or less, the user and the dealer are one and the same.” 

The scope of Garza’s promise reaches further than what is typical for drug policy reform in the U.S., according to Leo Beletsky, a professor of law and health sciences at Northeastern University. Decriminalization efforts have typically left out distribution and sales due to misleading tropes about “dealers” being “predatory and undeserving,” he said. This “failure to look beyond simple possession” weakens reforms since “law enforcement often compensates by recasting possession crimes as distribution,” a maneuver that Garza’s proposal would hinder. 

But Garza would continue prosecuting drug possession and sales above one gram. 

This ceiling means keeping law enforcement officers actively involved against drug use. “History suggests that decriminalization based on specific weight has limited impact,” Beletsky said, pointing to a study of drug law reform in Mexico he co-authored. “Piecemeal decriminalization is not in and of itself sufficient to change police practice and build alternative systems.”

In addition, other law enforcement agencies such as the Austin police could continue arresting people for behaviors that fall under Garza’s promise, disrupting their lives even if the DA’s office eventually does not file charges.

Graziani vowed that, if Garza were to win in November, the Texas Harm Reduction Alliance would focus on the quantity threshold, and on broader policing practices. “Our job as community advocates is to continue pushing to end the war on drugs and we certainly won’t have done that if we end the prosecution of only up to a gram,” she said.

—

Garza’s call for reducing the scope of the criminal legal system extends beyond drug policy. “We use our criminal justice system like a rug that we sweep our problems underneath so we don’t have to look at them,” he said in June. “The first important step is to remove that rug so that we can see these challenges for what they are.” But many of the low-level offenses that he wants to decriminalize fall under the jurisdiction of the county attorney’s office since they would be charged—if at all—as misdemeanors. 

Delia Garza, the winner in the county attorney election, holds a similar perspective. She has said she would not prosecute offenses linked to poverty, such as theft of food. And she backs a reduction in the Austin Police Department’s budget as part of the demands by the Austin Justice Coalition to invest in programs outside of law enforcement. 

These two candidates’ mirroring victories on Tuesday could considerably strengthen the hand of progressives in Travis County. This, in turn, could provide José Garza allies he will need in his ambitions of transforming conversations around criminal justice in Texas.

In a state governed by conservative Republicans, he says that he is relishing the opportunity to use the bully pulpit of the DA’s office to promote an alternative view. 

When asked about his support for incarcerated people having an opportunity for release after spending at least 10 years in prison, for instance, he granted that there would be many who are ineligible because of state statutes. Still, he said, “we have an obligation to advocate for their relief, if for no other reason than to bring light and attention to how broken that aspect of our criminal legal system is.” And Garza has said he would not join the Texas District and County Attorneys Association, calling the group, which lobbies on behalf of state prosecutors, “one of the largest impediments to progress” in the state legislature.

Garza also said he would advocate for ending felony disenfranchisement, making him the latest in a wave of candidates from Oregon to Virginia to support the argument that no one should lose the right to vote. He promised to not seek cash bail and to oppose building a new jail.

In a testament to the growing national interest in DA races, Garza received endorsements from prominent progressives such as U.S. Senators Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren and former U.S. Housing and Urban Development Secretary Julián Castro, who is from Texas. He was also endorsed by the Working Families Party and by the Austin Democratic Socialists of America.

As recently as on Super Tuesday, in March, many of these same politicians and groups suffered rough losses in Texas. That same day, Austin’s DA race was already a rare promising spot for progressives; Garza led Moore 44 to 41 percent, triggering Tuesday’s runoff since neither crossed 50 percent.

Still, between March and July, Garza grew his lead to 36 percentage points from three.

Selvera attributes this sea change to Ramos’s killing in April and to the resurgence of Black Lives Matter protests in May and June. He himself lost a bid for county attorney in March. “People are seeing what’s wrong with the system,” he said. “It opened a lot of people’s eyes to the injustice of what’s going on.”

Explore our coverage of other DA elections nationwide.

The post In Austin Prosecutor Races, Wins for the Left and a Milestone for Drug Decriminalization appeared first on Bolts.

As the COVID-19 pandemic leaves millions across the country out of work, Oklahoma and Oregon saw a pair of victories on Tuesday for the rights of low-income people.

Oklahoma voters expanded the Medicaid program, the latest triumph for organizers who are putting this issue on the ballot in a string of conservative states. 

And Oregon ended the suspension of driver’s licenses over unpaid fines and fe, a practice that can trigger mounting economic and legal trouble for people who cannot afford their court debt. Criminal justice reform advocates now want public authorities to more fundamentally cut off their regressive budgetary reliance on fines and fees.

Oklahoma expands Medicaid

Oklahomans approved a ballot initiative on Tuesday that will expand the Medicaid program, as provided by the Affordable Care Act.

As a result of this narrow vote, an estimated 200,000 people will newly qualify for public health insurance in one of the most conservative states in the country.

The initiative circumvents state Republicans who have long refused to expand the program. Their opposition has left hundreds of thousands of lower-income Oklahomans in a coverage gap, ineligible under current rules and yet too poor to qualify for government subsidies to purchase a private plan. GOP Governor Kevin Stitt opposed the initiative after wavering on weaker expansions over the past year.

Oklahoma is the fifth state to expand Medicaid through a ballot initiative, after Maine in 2017, and Idaho, Nebraska, and Utah in 2018. Oklahoma’s version amends the state constitution, which will limit the state government’s ability to delay or overturn it, and could hinder potential efforts to add restrictions such as work requirements.

Still, millions nationwide will remain cut off from the Medicaid program because of a failure to expand it in Florida, Missouri, Texas, and 10 other states where Republicans control at least part of the state government. Missouri is voting on an expansion measure of its own on August 4. The Fairness Project, a national group, helped organize Oklahoma and Missouri’s initiatives, and has signaled plans for future pushes in other states.

Besides extending access to healthcare across Oklahoma, the Medicaid expansion could relieve the pains of rural hospitals, who have eyed it as a lifeline for years. Still, the measure was carried by significant wins in the state’s urban cores.

The expansion could also assist efforts to reduce the criminalization of substance use. Without coverage, people are blocked off from treatment, and are often arrested by law enforcement. This connection already resonated in the 2018 campaigns in Idaho and Nebraska, and again in Oklahoma this year. Gerard Clancy, president of the University of Tulsa, made the case last year that expanding Medicaid provides access to medication to fight opioid addiction and ease withdrawal symptoms. In recent years, Oklahomans have repeatedly approved ballot initiatives to ease the state’s punitive approach to drug policy, including a major measure in 2016 to reduce drug possession from a felony to a misdemeanor. 

Oklahoma’s elections on Tuesday also saw Mauree Turner, a community organizer who works at the ACLU of Oklahoma, unseat an incumbent state lawmaker in a Democratic primary in Oklahoma City on a platform focused on advancing both criminal justice reform and public health.

“We are currently operating in a system that relies on incarcerating our community members suffering from poverty and mental health issues, rather than dedicating time to provide resources they need,” Turner, who still faces a general election in November, writes on her website. She describes Oklahoma’s failure to expand Medicaid as “carving folks, that are already suffering, out of a chance to seek help if needed.”

On Tuesday, a majority of Oklahomans agreed with her.

Oregon takes a step against the harm of court debt

Oregon will stop suspending driver’s licenses over unpaid fines and court fees. 

The Democratic-run legislature passed emergency legislation this week during a special session, and Governor Kate Brown signed the bill into law on Tuesday.

License suspensions affect hundreds of thousands of Oregonians—roughly one in 10 adults, according to state advocacy organizations, a share that is consistent with, if not lower than, in other states—and they compound cycles of poverty. “This is just one of many examples in which we are unnecessarily burdening members of our community to the point of instability and failure,” Bobbin Singh, executive director of the Oregon Resource Justice Center, told me. He views the new law as an important step in “moving away from criminalizing poverty.”

In taking away many people’s main mode of transportation, these suspensions cut off access to work and make it harder for people to pay off debt in the first place.

“If someone is unemployed or underemployed, unsheltered, or has a family, regularly paying fines and fees, much less paying them off, is extremely difficult,” Alexes Harris, a sociologist at the University of Washington who studies monetary sanctions, told me in April when Virginia adopted a similar law. “Adding the burden of suspending or revoking their driver’s licenses creates more disadvantages that have a cascading effect.”

Those who continue using their cars to get to their jobs can get prosecuted for driving on a suspended license, and these prosecutions—much like the original financial obligations—are very racially disparate.

Twenty-six percent of those prosecuted for driving on a suspended license are Black and Native, according to the Oregonian. These groups make up 4 percent of Oregon’s population. 

Oregon is the ninth state to prohibit driver’s license suspensions over unpaid fines and fee. It joins California, Idaho, Kentucky, Montana, Mississippi, West Virginia, Virginia, and Wyoming, according to the Fines and Fees Justice Center’s comprehensive national tracker.

Advocates are pushing similar bills in other states, including Illinois and New York.

More work remains in Oregon as well to end the criminalization of poverty, and to break the connection between the unequal criminal legal system and access to transportation. For one, Oregon’s new law does not end the suspension of driver’s licenses over a failure to appear in court.

Moreover, it does not waive the underlying financial obligations, which are disproportionately imposed and universally burdensome. 

The COVID-19 pandemic and its economic havoc has added urgency to the fight against the widespread imposition of fines and fees. The Fines and Fees Justice Center, for instance, is calling on state and local governments to discharge all outstanding court debt, or at least suspend its collection.

“There are many insidious fines and fees that only create additional harms, exacerbating instability, and that do not serve the public interest,” said Singh. “My hope that the legislature and advocates will continue to identify these burdens and be equally committed to removing them as they did in this instance.”

The post Oklahoma and Oregon Deliver Two Measures Of Relief For People Facing Poverty appeared first on Bolts.

As Black Lives Matter protests call to reduce the scope of law enforcement to boost other public services, the movement’s demand is also echoing in district attorney elections.

Its next test will come on July 14 with the Democratic primary for DA in Travis County (Austin) where José Garza, a former public defender who now works as a labor and immigrants’ rights attorney at the Workers Defense Project, is challenging Margaret Moore, the incumbent DA. 

Garza is making the case that we criminalize too many issues that would be better taken care of outside of law enforcement and DA offices. “We use our criminal justice system like a rug that we sweep our problems underneath so we don’t have to look at them,” he said in a Q&A with the Appeal: Political Report, transcribed below. “The first important step is to remove that rug so that we can see these challenges for what they are, and treat them in the way that we know will best keep our community safe.”

He added, “Public safety is a good job, it is access to healthcare, it is a good school to send your children. Public safety is stability.”

When it comes to decriminalization, Garza’s most emblematic promise may be that he will not prosecute cases of drug possession or sale of quantities under one gram.

Local reform advocates have faulted Moore’s office for continuing to file charges over low-level drug cases, The Appeal reported in December. Moore says she steers those cases to alternative modes of prosecution to reduce incarceration. By contrast, Garza’s promise to outright decline charges goes a step beyond other recent platforms by progressive candidates who have run on declining possession cases but did not extend that to sales. 

In the course of the Q&A, transcribed below, Garza did not mention other charges he would decline to prosecute, noting that Travis County has a separate office (the county attorney) that handles misdemeanor-level  charges, and he confirmed he would continue charging cases of drug possession above one gram. But he also made the case for ending the incumbent’s requirement that people plead guilty before entering diversion programs. I also asked him why he opposes building a new jail, how he would protect noncitizens from deportation, and how exactly he proposes to provide people meaningful opportunities for release after 10 years. 

Garza also said he would systematically present police violence cases to a grand jury; he faulted Moore for still not having done this with the 2019 police shooting of Mauris DeSilva, even though one of the officers involved then shot and killed another man, Mike Ramos, in April. He has staked other positions that his opponent does not share, including support for fully ending the use of cash bail and a commitment to never seek the death penalty.

Garza and Moore are facing off in this runoff because no candidate crossed the 50 percent threshold in the March 3 Democratic primary. 

That day, Moore received 41 percent, behind Garza’s 44 percent. A third candidate, Erin Martinson, also ran on a reform-minded platform and was eliminated after receiving 15 percent; she has since endorsed Garza, as did U.S. Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont earlier this month.

The runoff winner will face Republican Martin Harry in the general election and will be favored given the county’s heavily Democratic lean.

Garza said the hardest part will begin after the election is over. “Making the changes that we’re committing to is going to take advocates and members of the community continuing to be engaged and continuing to hold the district attorney’s office, law enforcement, the city council, and the county commissioners accountable,” he said.

The interview has been condensed and lightly edited for clarity. 

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I want to start one of your most significant proposals in terms of the national conversation on prosecutorial policies, which concerns drug prosecutions. Local advocates have faulted the current DA’s office for prosecuting low-level drug cases; DA Moore has said she has reformed approaches to drug policy to steer defendants toward alternative court programs that reduce incarceration, though that has meant the DA’s office is still involved and charging people. By contrast, you have said you would not prosecute cases of drug possession or sale under one gram. Why is that the better approach, taking prosecution out of the picture for those cases?

I believe it is time to end the prosecution of low level-drug offenses for a couple of reasons. One, every day that a person struggling with substance use stays in jail, the likelihood that they will commit another crime goes up. Using our resources to prosecute these offenses increases the likelihood that people will commit future crimes, and that makes our community less safe. The other thing that we know is that prosecuting these offenses is one of the greatest drivers of racial disparities in our criminal justice system. 

The other reason is there are other things that we should be spending our resources on that would make us more safe. In Travis County, the district attorney’s office brings more drug cases than any other kind. At the same time, in the last four years, our district attorney’s office has not charged a single police officer who has killed a member of our community with the crime. At the same time, survivors of sexual assault feel like they can’t get justice in our system. 

So that’s to answer your question why I think it’s so important to get the criminal justice system out of treating substance abuse disorder. 

Now, what we know does work is harm reduction policies. Here in Travis County, if a person feels like they need medically assisted services to fight their addiction, and they don’t have insurance, there is a wait of upwards of nine months, sometimes close to a year. For someone battling substance use disorder, that time can be the difference between life and death. It’s time to reimagine what the job of a district attorney should be. I think one of the primary jobs is to be an advocate for the kinds of interventions that we know will keep our community more safe. 

So, to broaden this point of getting the criminal legal system out, one of the demands of the Black Lives Matter movement right now is to shrink the role of the police, and rethink whether something is relevant for law enforcement to intervene. Should there be a parallel effort to shrink the role of the DA, if not cut the DA’s budget?

In this country, in this state, in the most progressive county in the state, we use our criminal justice system like a rug that we sweep our problems underneath so we don’t have to look at them. As a public defender, I saw firsthand the way we use our criminal legal system as a rug to sweep people under after they have been failed by our broken education system, our broken mental health system. The first important step is to remove that rug so that we can see these challenges for what they are and treat them in the way that we know will best keep our community safe. 

Generally speaking, for the last 400 years in this country, we have been sold this lie, that what public safety is, is locking up as many Black and brown people as we can. We’ve been told that if we just lock up enough people of color, that will keep us safe. But what we know from lived experience and from the data and the evidence is that public safety is a good job. It is access to healthcare. It is a good school to send your children. Public safety is stability. 

Through that lens, we all need to be evaluating how we are using our limited resources in ways that best create stability and public safety. For example, it does not keep our community most safe to send law enforcement to intervene when someone is having a mental health crisis. I think the same analysis needs to be applied to the district attorney’s office. As a starting place, we need to look at some of these crimes that haven’t been prosecuted and haven’t been taken seriously that we know will keep our communities more safe. Sexual assault is a crime that we need to take very seriously; there’s, I think, a rape culture and a sexual assault crisis in Travis County that we’ve got to make sure we have the resources to tackle head on. The same is true with violence by law enforcement against members of our community, particularly people of color. The district attorney in Travis County recently explained the office’s inaction on these kinds of crimes by saying, ‘well, we don’t have the resources.’ 

Can you say more about what systems that are outside of the criminal legal system and outside the DA’s office you think should be expanded in Travis County?

Drug policy we’ve talked about extensively, but I want to reiterate how much infrastructure is still necessary to smartly and adequately address that. We have to make some significant investments in support for people experiencing homelessness in our community, and that starts with housing. It also includes education. In Travis County, all juvenile offenses are within the jurisdiction of the district attorney’s office, and I think the district attorney’s office has a huge role to play to make sure that we are not running kids through our criminal legal system.

One specific thing that the county is spending money on is building a new jail. That is estimated to cost $79 million. Do you support or oppose the construction of that jail?

I oppose that. We are going to greatly reduce the number of people sitting in our jail. We know that the jail is not at capacity now. And so the math doesn’t add up that we would be planning to incarcerate more people. Look, 70 percent of people sitting in the Travis County Jail have not been convicted of a crime. We also know that the majority of people sitting in the Travis County Jail are not charged with violent offenses. Just by tackling the cash bail system and by ending the prosecution of low-level drug offenses, we are going to take a huge step in reducing the number of people who are coming through our jail. 

Are there other categories of charges that you want to altogether decline to prosecute?

Nothing off the top of my head. We have talked a lot about sex work. The reality is that the majority of those offenses are prosecuted in the county attorney’s office. [Editor’s note: That office has jurisdiction over misdemeanor charges, while the DA’s office has jurisdiction over felonies.] That’s something I would want to take a close look at to ensure that there aren’t related offences being charged by the district attorney’s office for those underlying set of facts.

So you would support the county attorney’s office not charging some categories of cases that are prosecuted as misdemeanors? 

Absolutely.

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I want to turn to the offenses you say you would prosecute. If you want to keep the criminal legal system out of substance use, why continue prosecuting drug possession over one gram? 

I talk a lot about pulling back the carpet of our criminal legal system. To answer this question, I want to use a different analogy: We also use our criminal legal system as a crutch, and what we have learned from the way we have proceeded in other areas—and homelessness is a big one here in Travis County—is that we have a real responsibility to build out the infrastructure that is necessary to replace our criminal legal system. The reality is that infrastructure does not currently exist in Travis County. So I think it is important to start this conversation at a gram or less, to allow us and our community to build out the infrastructure necessary to keep our community safe, and I think once we have done that we can begin to ponder the question about whether it makes sense to be charging these offenses at higher amounts at all.

One contrast in this election has been over conditions of entry into diversion programs that promote alternatives to incarceration. You have said that you would not require that people first plead guilty before having access to such a program. Your opponent, DA Moore, has said that a guilty plea is a key way to “take responsibility” and that “we do not allow defendants who maintain their innocence to enter diversion.” Why are you proposing to change that?

Because that’s not how substance abuse disorder works. People don’t treat their substance abuse disorder because they’ve been threatened with a guilty conviction on their record or or even because they’ve been convicted of a crime. It has very little bearing on whether a person is ready and willing in that moment to battle, if it is an addiction, to battle that addiction; and if it’s not an addiction, it has even less bearing on it.  The other reason is that saddling people with criminal convictions creates more instability in our community, and that makes us less safe. It makes it harder for people to get a job, it makes it harder for people to apply for student aid, to apply for housing and have a place to live. Ultimately, that makes our community less safe.

Let’s talk about some of these consequences of criminal convictions. One such consequence, if you’re not a citizen, is that you could face deportation, depending on the charge and sentence. Would you adopt policies to shield people from this, and what would that look like? 

As an assistant federal public defender. I saw so many families that were absolutely ripped apart because of criminal convictions in their past that I don’t think made our community more safe. As a starting place, a simple proposition for me is that no one should face a more severe punishment simply because of their status. It is absolutely contrary to our notions of justice and fairness that two people accused of committing the same crime could face such a different outcome. 

How do you do this? We know that under the definition of a crime of violence, that if a penalty is of one year or more, that could trigger deportation. And so if someone has been convicted and is going to, for example, be on probation, we could simply reduce the probation time, when it’s a year, to less than a year, by five days, by two days. There are a myriad of other things we can and should be doing, and I think it’s really important to make sure that we are prioritizing the changes that our immigrant community here in Travis County prioritizes.

Another tremendous consequence of a felony conviction is loss of voting rights. You’ve signed on to support voting rights for all, which means ending felony disenfranchisement. Changing state law on whether people lose their voting rights is not under a DA’s control, but whether someone is convicted of a felony in the first place is. How would this shape how you act as DA?

The state capitol is right down the street from the district attorney’s office. I’ve spent my entire career as an advocate for working people for people of color, and that’s not going to change once this election is over. So that’s number one. And I think it should weigh heavily on all district attorneys. I think there are a range of things that a district attorney’s office has a responsibility to consider, including people’s ability to vote. There are a number of steps taken around the country to help line prosecutors more fully understand the consequences of our criminal legal system. I know some prosecutors require their line attorneys to visit jailed frequently.

You mentioned earlier a need to be proactive about police misconduct. Over the last month, there’s been renewed attention to the killing of Mike Ramos by an Austin police officer, and some proposals to change police rules in response. But one message of the protests has been that changing the rules that exist on paper does little if there’s a culture of impunity and a lack of consequences remains. What as DA can you do to fight that culture of impunity?

The community deserves a district attorney that is independent from police, particularly when it comes to these kinds of offenses. And so the first thing is, I have never received and I have pledged never to receive financial campaign support from police organizations. 

Right now, the district attorney makes decisions about whether a case of police misconduct should be presented to the grand jury, and in many instances decides not to present the case to the grand jury. For example, in the case of Mike Ramos, Officer Taylor, who is alleged to have shot and killed Mike Ramos is alleged to have been involved in the shooting and killing of another man, Mauris DeSilva, who was in the middle of a mental health crisis when his neighbors called the police in 2019. That case, of DeSilva, is still sitting on the district attorney’s deck. The change we would be making is to present all of those cases to the grand jury in a timely manner. I have pledged that we will present these cases to the grand jury within 30 days of receiving them, and that if by 30 days, we are not prepared to present to the grand jury, we will issue a public statement explaining, in a way that won’t compromise our investigation, why it is we are not yet prepared to take it to the grand jury. 

The other change is we are going to expand the kind of cases that a special unit within the district attorney’s office investigates and prosecutes. Currently, there is a special unit that investigates and prosecutes essentially acts of violence committed by law enforcement while on duty. We will expand the scope of a special unit to all cases of police misconduct, whether on duty or off, whether an act of violence or not, to begin to hold law enforcement accountable.

I’ve also pledged to make sure that we no longer allow law enforcement who engage in this conduct to participate, erode, corrupt our criminal legal system. We will publish a public “do not call” list of law enforcement officers who engage in misconduct, including officers who have a record of incorrect information in their statements and reports. 

So, a “do not call” list meaning that you would not rely on the testimony or work of those officers in subsequent cases?

That’s correct.

I want to return to grand juries. There have been concerns about what accountability is viable through grand juries, in that among other things it clouds the process in secrecy and lets a DA evade responsibility. How would you make your process in Travis County avoid such pitfalls?

First, I should just say that under state law in Texas it is the only way to charge an officer in this kind of conduct is with the use of a grand jury. Generally speaking, grand jury proceedings are secret, and there have been attempts in the state legislature to change that so there would be more transparency and accountability for grand juries. I fully support those reforms and would use the authority of our office to advocate for those changes. The other thing is that these cases can be difficult; this is a specialized area of the law. The district attorney’s office should be recruiting and hiring those kinds of attorneys who have a proven track record of success when it comes to holding law enforcement accountable. 

I’d like to ask you about another policy area: The scope of incarceration in the U.S. is driven in part by very lengthy sentences. In Texas, one in eight prisoners are serving a life sentence. You’ve said that you support providing people with a meaningful opportunity for release after 10 years. Here I want to pursue a line of questioning that Keri Blakinger, now a reporter with ProPublica, began: Texas law creates constraints on the availability of such reviews, so what would you be able to do, as a DA, to promote meaningful opportunities after 10 years? 

It starts on the front end, making sure that the district attorney’s office is not pursuing charges that could result in those kinds of sentences in the first instance, particularly when we can continue to serve the interests of justice without that. I have also said that, when we win, pursuing sentences of 20 years or more will be the exception, not the rule. On the back end, I think there are two pieces. One is that the district attorney’s office has an obligation to be an advocate for changes in the law at the state legislature: We know that after a person turns 50 years old, the likelihood that they will commit another crime falls through the floor, and so from a public policy standpoint, it doesn’t make sense to continue to spend our resources in this way. The second thing is that the district attorney’s office has to be an advocate for relief for people who continue to sit in jail, who have shown progress in rehabilitation. I think even if there are instances where the law limits eligibility, we have an obligation to advocate for their relief, if for no other reason than to bring light and attention to how broken that aspect of our criminal legal system is.

When you say that more than 20 years would be an exception, can you say more that might flesh out the scope of circumstances you’re envisioning to clarify what would change?

I’ll be honest, I don’t have data in front of me now that would give me a sense of which offenses are associated in Travis County with those kinds of long sentences. But I think that is one of the first things that we would have to review, what is triggering these long sentences. Then, the district attorney’s office has an obligation to advocate for much lower sentences where that’s what’s in the interest of the safety of our community. 

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In the fall, DA Moore said about a coalition of local criminal justice reform activists that she gets “everything they’re aiming for” but that she questioned their “tactics” and “demands” because “they’re very hard-line about how you get there.” If elected DA, how close a relationship would you want to have with these activist groups? 

Let me just start by saying that I am an advocate. I lead one of the groups that the district attorney is referring to. Winning this election is going to be the easy part, and making the changes that we’re committing to is going to take advocates and members of the community continuing to be engaged and continuing to hold the district attorney’s office, law enforcement, the city council and the county commissioners accountable. I intend to be the kind of DA who wants to be held accountable, and who creates space for advocates and members of our community to hold all of the actors in our system accountable. 

It has been so important to me to be in this fight to start making sure that the district attorney’s office belongs to our community. For so long, district attorneys and sometimes just people in the law act as if, unless you have a law degree, unless you’ve spent your career locking people up, you just don’t get it. You couldn’t possibly understand all the detail and nuance that goes into these jobs. And I fundamentally disagree with that. We have seen and we know that people who have been touched by our criminal justice system, who have been hurt by our criminal justice system, are perfectly capable of understanding what change is necessary and leading and implementing that change. 

Are you concerned that the role you would play as DA will make those relationships difficult, in a context in which some advocates question the premise that the criminal legal system is capable of being reformed?

I think of course there’s going to be a tension. I should also mention I also served in the Obama administration, and so have been in another role. What I have seen on both sides, is that it is that tension that often yields the best results. It is that push, it’s a willingness as a system actor to listen and to be held accountable, it is that tension that creates the change that we need. So I welcome that tension. But again, we have been electing career prosecutors as district attorneys since the office has existed, and we can see for ourselves what the results are.

Texas is governed by Republicans, who have often used Austin as a foil in state politics, and in recent years the governor has gone after Dallas DA John Creuzot, among the more reform-minded prosecutors in Texas. Are you concerned about implementing parts of your platform in that context?

Not at all. I believe deeply that the overwhelming majority of Texans are with us on these issues. I believe that substance use disorder is a crisis that is ravaging all parts of Texas, whether it’s rural Texas or urban Texas, and that communities all across the state understand the devastating impact on families of using a criminal legal system to address that problem. But they can only be with us if we’re willing to make the change that people are demanding. We have an obligation and a responsibility to show people a different way of governing in the state of Texas.

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