For advocates of criminal justice reform in New Orleans, the Dec. 5 district attorney runoff election holds an opportunity to upend policies that funnel people into jails and prisons in the incarceration capital of the United States. 

“We are at a crossroads in our community,” said Gregory Manning, a pastor in the Broadmoor neighborhood. “It cannot be simply that we continue to lock people up and allow the criminal justice system and the jail system and the bail bondsman to benefit financially off of the incarceration of our people, especially African American people, people of color.”

Manning is a member of The People’s DA Coalition, a joint effort of more than two dozen criminal justice reform groups in the city. 

Throughout the primary campaign, four DA candidates felt the heat from local organizers. They faced demands to appear at forums and commit to a wide set of decarceral measures put forth by the coalition. And they broadly responded by expressing sympathies for the group’s goals, a rupture from the rhetoric of the departing DA, Leon Cannizzaro. 

On Election Day, none of the candidates garnered more than 50 percent of the vote. Now, Keva Landrum, a former criminal court judge who led with 35 percent of the vote, and Jason Williams, a member of the City Council who received 29 percent, are running head to head. 

Both have talked about advancing reforms, but their positions and records reveal a divide in how they would likely approach being a DA. Williams has promised more of a clean break with the office’s punitive past and embraced the People’s DA platform enthusiastically. 

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Earlier this year, Cannizzaro announced he would not run for re-election, throwing open the race for one of the most powerful public offices in New Orleans. 

During his tenure, Cannizzaro relentlessly reinforced the state’s carceral norms. He attacked efforts to bail people out of jail pretrial, fought to retain nonunanimous jury convictions, vowed to put more children in jail, and used habitual offender laws to increase sentencing. He is also facing a lawsuit that alleges his office issued fake subpoenas to jail crime victims and to pressure witnesses to cooperate.

“Louisiana and New Orleans, in particular, have been such an epicenter of draconian sentencing, racially disparate conviction rates and indictment rates for drug charges, for juvenile prosecutions, for life without parole, for habitual offender enhancements,” said Chris Kaiser, advocacy director of the ACLU of Louisiana. “All of these are things that a DA can unilaterally choose to reform on their own without the need to wait for broader policy reform from the legislature or city council.” 

Williams has worked as a criminal defense attorney with the Innocence Project New Orleans and championed criminal justice reforms as a City Council member. He pushed for a bail reform measure to lower the jail’s pretrial population, led the charge on reducing penalties for marijuana possession, and sponsored a successful ordinance to bring funding for the public defender’s office closer to parity with the DA’s office.This month, the City Council passed a 2021 budget that falls short of the funding requirements, but still gives a major boost to the public defender’s office.

However, Williams is facing a serious hurdle. This year, he came under a federal indictment for tax fraud. The trial date for the case is Jan. 11, 2021.

Williams has pleaded not guilty and he dismisses the charge as politically motivated. In October, he told The Appeal: Political Report that voters view the indictment as “an old-school political tactic” and that “I paid my taxes for all of those years that they’re talking about.” 

Landrum briefly served as DA from 2007 to 2008 before running for criminal court judge. Cannizzaro succeeded her in 2008. 

Last year, when Landrum was chief judge of the criminal court, she criticized Cannizzaro for blocking efforts to reduce the jail population through pretrial services. But at other times she has played a role in Cannizzaro’s agenda. The Lens found that she signed off on prosecutors’ controversial material witness warrants in at least 14 cases. And now Landrum shares some of the same campaign donors and endorsements as the retiring DA. 

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During her campaign this year, Landrum said she would never seek the death penalty, one of the tenets of the People’s DA platform. Williams has also vowed to not seek death sentences, closing the door to capital punishment in New Orleans no matter the outcome of the runoff. 

But on other important issues, Landrum has pushed back against reform policies and warned that her opponent would not be harsh enough in some cases. She also promised to be “tough on violent crime,” a continuation of the DA office’s highly punitive status quo.

This messaging matches parts of Landrum’s record. During her time as DA, she drew fire for coming down hard on marijuana possession. She prosecuted repeat offenses as felonies, charges that could result in five to 20 years in prison. Before her term, the office routinely treated such cases as misdemeanors, which carry much lower penalties. Critics accused her of racking up felony convictions to make it appear that the DA’s office was tackling violent crime after New Orleans was declared a “murder capital.” 

Landrum turned down an interview request by the Political Report for this story and did not submit responses to questions via email in time for publication. In October, Landrum told the Political Report that she disagreed that she had a punitive record. 

Her platform this year does not detail what she would do regarding drug-related offenses. In 2019, drug charges made up over 30 percent of all new prison admissions in Louisiana. 

On marijuana specifically, she said she would send cases to municipal court or else decline to charge them, a commitment that still fell a step short of several of her rivals’ commitments to drop all marijuana possession charges.

Williams, unlike Landrum, has run on dropping all marijuana possession cases. 

When it comes to other drugs, Williams told the Political Report that he would prioritize diversion and treatment options over imposing incarceration. (Some prosecutors around the country have run on ending charges for drug possession altogether.)

“I don’t believe that courts and jails have ever provided any real intervention as it relates to addiction,” Williams said in a Zoom interview. “My goal is going to be to find ways to have these cases diverted from court to a diversion program that would have robust Narcotics Anonymous, Alcoholics Anonymous, therapy, other community service measures.”

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Another contributor to mass incarceration is excessive sentencing. In Louisiana, nearly 40 percent of those imprisoned are serving maximum sentences that exceeded 20 years. However, there is little proof that lengthy sentences meaningfully prevent crime. 

“All the evidence for several decades points to the fact that people, even for violent offenses, age out of crime, so there is no reason that we need to be sending people to prison for life,” Kaiser, of the ACLU of Louisiana, said. 

Prosecutorial decisions by the district attorney fuel these long sentences. If the district attorney chooses to use the “multi-bill” statute, Louisiana’s habitual offender sentence enhancement, then minimum sentences would be increased for people with past convictions. And in Louisiana, charges like second-degree murder carry a mandatory minimum sentence of life without the possiblity of parole. 

“In our state, [life without parole] means you literally get carried out in a pine box,” Williams said. He said his office would be more stringent about bringing second-degree murder charges, which historically have been used very broadly to lock up people who are accused of being accomplices. 

“We want to have that conversation long before the case is set for trial, so you can make sure that you’re using a charge that takes into consideration the harm caused to the victim, but also takes into consideration that a person who makes a poor decision at 21 probably is going to be a very different human being by the time they are 60 or 50,” Williams said.  

Williams has said he would never use the habitual offender statute.

Landrum, by contrast, told The Political Report in October that she would still make use of the habitual offender statute, though she added she wishes to limit its use to “exceptional circumstances with supervisory approval.” 

According to the magazine Antigravity, lawyers familiar with her practices told the magazine that Landrum regularly inflicted high bonds and long sentences as a criminal court judge. 

Although the effect of harsh sentencing can be measured by the number of incarcerated people serving maximum or life sentences, it is not possible to measure its effect as a prosecutorial tool to compel plea deals. 

“The statistics don’t show you the number of people who maybe had a habitual offender enhancement hanging over their head when they decided to agree to apply for a lesser charge,” Kaiser said. “We have every reason to believe that’s a lot of folks.”

As a result, Kaiser says, many people get stuck in the legal system rather than fighting their charges—another factor that contributes to the wide reach of Louisiana’s prison industrial complex.

This disproportionately impacts Black Louisianans who are incarcerated at four times the rate of white people in the state.

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In New Orleans, the starkest racial divides in incarceration show up in the juvenile criminal legal system: 97 percent of juvenile arrests in New Orleans are of Black youth.

As with adults, the DA decides how to charge these arrested youth. Cannizzarro sent hundreds of children to adult court; between 2011 and 2015 he transferred over 80 percent of eligible cases involving 15- and 16-year-olds. As a City Council member, Williams criticized this practice. 

During the primary, Williams committed to not transferring minors to adult courts even when they were charged with serious crimes. Landrum told the Louisiana ACLU that she would only charge youth as adults “in extreme circumstances” but did not elaborate on what that would entail. 

Chief Public Defender Derwyn Bunton represented minors when Landrum was in charge of the DA’s juvenile division, as well as when she was interim DA. He said Landrum transferred youth to adult court in nearly all eligible cases.

“When, as a prosecutor, she has the advantage, she uses that advantage for conviction,” Bunton said in an interview with The Political Report. “She’s a prosecutor’s prosecutor.”

One particular case that stuck out to him was that of Travan Jones. In 2007, 15-year-old Jones was implicated in a murder. Bunton thought juvenile court could have been rehabilitative for Jones, but Landrum transferred his case to adult court where he was charged with second-degree murder, which carried a mandatory life without parole sentence. Jones eventually plead guilty to manslaughter. 

“[There needs to be] a real holistic approach,” said Ernest Johnson, director and co-founder of Ubuntu Village which works with youth affected by the criminal legal system. Poverty, trauma, and other factors need to be taken into consideration when looking at the criminal activity of children, he said.

Johnson helped co-write the Platform for Youth Justice which provides guidelines for reforming the juvenile justice system through the district attorney’s office. The platform calls for not transferring minors into adult courts and prisons, and recommends developmentally appropriate ways to hold them accountable. 

Manning, the pastor and member of The People’s DA Coalition, echoed Johnson’s view that the next New Orleans DA should address the factors underlying crime.

“Where do we begin to look at those factors and say, OK, what’s the root cause? Why is this happening?” he asked. Manning said poverty was among the root causes of violence, which means there is a need for more investment into community initiatives as opposed to harsher prosecution.

The People’s DA Coalition and other local groups have made these issues central to the DA election and have mobilized communities to get involved. Grassroots organizing has also shaped local judicial elections that delivered two public defenders to the bench in November, and an ongoing battle over jail expansion.

Kaiser said this kind of organizing is necessary to counter the powerful influence of the bail industry and others that stand to profit from tough-on-crime policies.

“For our part, what we can do is to elevate the power of people who are affected by these policies … and try to build political power as a counterweight to that,” he said. 

“We need folks in office who are going to go above and beyond what the minimum requirements are in law, and think really boldly about how to end mass incarceration in this state.”

The post A D.A. Runoff Will Decide New Orleans’ Criminal Justice Future appeared first on Bolts.

Republicans lost sheriff’s elections last week in populous Southern counties that have been close ICE allies. This is likely to bring an end to prominent ICE contracts in Georgia’s Cobb and Gwinnett counties and in Charleston County, South Carolina. 

These results are major wins for immigrants’ rights advocates who have long worked to change policies in these jurisdictions, which are home to more than 2 million residents combined.

“We celebrate the ouster of the sheriffs who were responsible for the targeting of community members, working in collusion with ICE,” Azadeh Shahshahani, legal and advocacy director of Project South, told The Appeal: Political Report. “These incredible victories are the culmination of more than a decade of fighting back by immigrants’ rights organizers against the devastating 287(g) program which led to untold numbers of families being torn apart.” 

Charleston, Cobb, and Gwinnett are all members of ICE’s 287(g) program, which deputizes local law enforcement to act like federal immigration agents within jails. The program has put thousands of people each year on ICE’s radar. Local officials justify this policy as a way to target people who commit violent crimes, though the vast majority of people affected were booked for lower-level offenses or were never convicted. As a result, people can be funneled into deportation proceedings and find themselves locked up in detention centers that are known for inhumane conditions. Project South is among the organizations suing ICE for failing to respond to a whistleblower complaint alleging that women in Georgia’s Irwin Detention Center were forced to undergo gynecological surgeries that could result in sterilization.

Participation in the 287(g) program is up to the sheriff—much like many other forms of cooperation with ICE—and the Democratic nominees in each of these counties ran on terminating it, a stance they reiterated in interviews with the Political Report in September and October. The Republican nominees favored the 287(g) program, by contrast. The three Democrats prevailed.

Cobb County’s longtime sheriff, Neil Warren, lost to challenger Craig Owens. In Gwinnett County, a sheriff with notoriously aggressive policies toward immigrants retired, and the resulting open race was won by Kebo Taylor. 

And in Charleston County, Sheriff Al Cannon lost to Kristin Graziano, who told the Political Report in October that the 287(g) program is “contradictory to what we’re trying to accomplish in Charleston,” namely “building our communities back up and building trust.” Charleston has a separate agreement to help ICE detain people the agency arrests elsewhere, and Graziano indicated to the Political Report she opposed detaining people on noncriminal grounds.

These results add to a series of recent wins by candidates who pledged to cut ties with ICE. 

In 2018, North Carolina was the epicenter of that surge, driven by extensive grassroots activism. Five of its most populous counties elected new sheriffs who ran on no longer assisting ICE, including by terminating 287(g) contracts. They promptly did so after entering office. All five of the new North Carolina sheriffs who ran on improving immigrants’ rights are Black, as are Owens and Taylor in Georgia, even as sheriffs nationally are overwhelmingly white.

Then, in 2019, Democrats took over Prince William County, Virginia’s second most populous jurisdiction, and used their newfound power to quit the 287(g) program this year.

A broader blue shift also contributed to last week’s results in Charleston, Cobb, and Gwinnett counties. Joe Biden carried each county by more than any Democratic presidential candidate since at least 1976. The two Georgia counties, in particular, are longtime conservative bastions that have seen tremendous change in their population and politics. For instance, more than two-thirds of Gwinnett County residents were white in 1996, when Butch Conway was elected sheriff and made his county a national leader in targeting immigrants. Now, it’s about a third.

Still, advocates emphasize that it took a lot of work to get these partisan flips to translate into policy commitments by candidates. 

Aisha Yaqoob Mahmood, director of the Asian American Advocacy Fund, which has opposed cooperation with ICE in Georgia, told the Political Report in August that, “four years ago, nobody knew what this [287(g)] program did,” whereas this year it was a core campaign issue. “The last few years of organizing were very important for us to make sure that 287(g) becomes a top issue in this election, and it really has become that way,” she said. 

Other organizations, such as Mijente, Project South, the Georgia Latino Alliance for Human Rights, and SONG Power, fought to curtail ICE’s reach through these sheriff’s races, and through protests and community events. And in a project sponsored by the Georgia NAACP, the group Informed Georgians for Justice sent questionnaires to all Georgia sheriff candidates, inviting them to clarify their views on immigration and other issues. 

Georgia organizers had already scored a win in the June Democratic primary. Sheriff Ira Edwards lost in Athens to challenger John Williams, who took issue with the incumbent’shis record of helping ICE. Athens is not part of 287(g), but Edwards had honored ICE detainers, which are requests that he detain people beyond their scheduled release to give federal agents time to arrest them. 

Williams said he would not honor ICE detainers. “It’s almost a level of terrorism when people are living in fear to the point that they will not ask for help,” he told the Political Report in June, right after his primary win. Williams also won the general election last week.

Graziano and Owens, the incoming sheriffs in Charleston and Cobb, also said during their campaigns that they would oppose ICE detainers. But Taylor, the incoming Gwinnett sheriff, left the door open to assisting ICE in ways beyond the 287(g) program. Advocates have said they will push local officials to be bolder to protect immigrants.

Graziano told the Political Report she has learned from organizers in Charleston’s Latinx community, whom she wants “sitting at the table making the decisions that affect their lives.”

Elsewhere in the country, two Republican sheriffs who have championed ICE and who joined 287(g) won in counties that narrowly went for Biden in the presidential race. Bill Waybourn in Texas’s Tarrant County (Fort Worth) and Bob Gualtieri in Florida’s Pinellas County (St. Petersburg) defeated challengers who had pledged to terminate these contracts. 

But many candidates who called for winding down local relationships with ICE prevailed. Charmaine McGuffey won a heated sheriff’s race in Ohio’s Hamilton County (Cincinnati); earlier this year, she secured a primary win against a Democratic incumbent who had honored ICE detainers, which McGuffey vowed to oppose. In Massachusetts’s Norfolk County, voters ousted a GOP sheriff who had championed greater ICE cooperation.

And in Florida’s Miami-Dade County, Democrat Daniella Levine Cava flipped the mayor’s seat from the GOP. Cava ran on curtailing cooperation with ICE, which has been spearheaded by the retiring Republican incumbent Carlos Giménez, and on opposing a new state law that mandates that local law enforcement assist the federal agency. 

Change will be most swift in the three 287(g) counties that elected new Democratic sheriffs.  Since Election Day, the incoming Cobb and Gwinnett sheriffs have confirmed to the Atlanta Journal Constitution that they plan to exit the program. And Graziano told the Political Report in October that she would terminate the 287(g) contract “immediately” upon taking office. 

She confirmed her plans through a spokesperson this week. “It will be a simple process, and I intend on keeping my promise to rescind the contract with ICE,” she said.

The post ICE Suffered Blows in the South in Last Week’s Elections appeared first on Bolts.

Immigrants’ rights activists have been protesting local officials that help ICE arrest and deport immigrants, pressuring them to end those ties, and candidates for these offices have felt the heat. 

Most significantly, their work has upended the usually quiet landscape of sheriff’s races, helping drive upset losses for longtime incumbents in places such as Minneapolis and Charlotte, North Carolina, in 2018, and already this year—in spring primaries—in Cincinnati and in Athens, Georgia.

Will November’s general elections add to that trend? 

The GOP’s declining fortunes in longtime conservative bastions that have soured on President Trump—who has made hostility to immigration one of his defining rallying cries—have opened the door to political turnover in areas such as Atlanta’s northern suburbs. Those areas were long impregnable to Democrats and any candidates running on cutting ties with ICE. Elsewhere, some Democratic-leaning jurisdictions face a reckoning over their ICE-friendly policies.

Below I look at 12 of the most important state and local elections on the ballot this fall that will affect ICE’s reach and local immigration policy.

The list covers different sorts of offices. But the lion’s share are races for county sheriff. These officials have tremendous discretion on whether and how to respond to or collaborate with ICE. That’s because most sheriffs are responsible for running local jails, which hundreds of thousands of people go through every year, often with little to no oversight from other public officials. And these jails are a major funnel into the country’s deportation machine, especially when a sheriff is keen on making them so, as The Appeal: Political Report explained in July. 

For one, most sheriffs have sole authority over whether their county joins ICE’s 287(g) program. This partnership directly implicates sheriffs in harming immigrant communities by authorizing their deputies to act like federal immigration agents. Only 145 counties in the nation have 287(g) contracts at this moment, but that pool includes very populous jurisdictions—and that’s precisely where Nov. 3 could upend the local landscape: In counties that cover millions of residents—in Florida, Georgia, South Carolina, and Texas—candidates are running this fall on a promise of terminating existing 287(g) contracts. And that’s just the tip of the iceberg. Sheriffs also decide whether they will agree to detain ICE prisoners in exchange for payments; and whether to honor so-called ICE detainers, which are warrantless requests asking sheriffs to keep jailing a person past their scheduled release to give federal agents time to arrest them. 

All of these arrangements are on the line on Election Day, and with them the prospect that voters may slash ICE’s reach, as they did in 2018, regardless of what happens in the presidential race.

Arizona | Maricopa County (Phoenix) sheriff

No local official is as closely associated with repressive immigration practices as Joe Arpaio, Maricopa County’s sheriff from 1993 to 2017. Arpaio ran a detention facility known as Tent City that he himself called a “concentration camp,” and he engaged in racial profiling in defiance of a court order. Arpaio was ousted in November 2016 by Democrat Paul Penzone, who subsequently closed Tent City, and Arpaio fell short in his attempted comeback this year, narrowly losing to Jerry Sheridan in the Republican primary. But Sheridan is Arpaio’s former lieutenant, and could carry on Arpaio’s legacy if he beats Penzone in November. Writing in the Political Report, Jerry Iannelli stresses that Penzone has disappointed immigrants’ rights activists over his first term. But he also reports that Republican nominee Sheridan is directly implicated in the racial profiling of the Arpaio years and he has vowed to reopen Tent City.

Florida | Pinellas County (St. Petersburg) sheriff

Bob Gualtieri has been an enthusiastic champion of ICE, both through his powers as the sheriff of Pinellas County and through his leadership role in the state’s Sheriffs Association. He helped design a new arrangement for Florida sheriffs to circumvent legal concerns and keep detaining people when ICE requests it; and he has contracted his office into ICE’s 287(g) program. Gualtieri, a Republican, faces Democratic challenger Eliseo Santana who has vowed to terminate both of these partnerships if he is elected sheriff and to reject forms of discretionary assistance with the agency. “I will not have my agents be the agents of destroying families in our community,” Santana told me in a Q&A last week. “These types of agreements are hurting our community, are destroying the family, and it’s anti-American.”

Florida | Miami-Dade mayor

In January 2017, as President Trump entered the White House and took aim at “sanctuary cities,” Miami-Dade County’s Republican Mayor Carlos Giménez announced a major policy reversal that has helped ICE target undocumented immigrants: The county, Florida’s most populous, would honor ICE detainers by holding people in jail beyond their scheduled release if federal agents request it. (Local governments typically leave the discretion on this matter to sheriffs, but Miami-Dade is the only jurisdiction in the state that does not have one.) 

The candidates vying to replace him, Republican Esteban Bovo and Democrat Daniella Levine Cava, have long been on opposite sides of this change. Both were county commissioners in February 2017 when the commission ratified Giménez’s order, despite hundreds of residents demanding a return to sanctuary policies. Bovo voted to approve the order, and Cava opposed it. Cava is now running on curtailing cooperation with ICE, including fighting a new state law that mandates that local law enforcement assist the federal agency. “I think it’s overreach and a pre-emption on how we take care of our people,” Cava said at a summer forum.

Georgia | Cobb County sheriff and Gwinnett County sheriff

Cobb and Gwinnett, two counties in the Atlanta suburbs that have a combined population of over 1.5 million, have undergone a similar transformation. Longtime Republican bastions with harsh policies toward immigrants, they voted Democratic in the 2016 presidential election for the first time since 1976, a change fueled in part by a significant rise in the local Latinx population. Now these counties’ legacy of tightly helping ICE will be tested, Timothy Pratt wrote in the Political Report in September. The Republican sheriffs of Cobb and Gwinnett have both joined ICE’s 287(g) program. And in each county, the November election pits a Democrat who has committed to terminating the 287(g) contracts against a Republican who wants to stay in the program. But even if the program falls, advocates say, far more policy upheaval will be needed to stop the repression of the region’s immigrant communities.

Massachusetts | Norfolk County sheriff 

Jerry McDermott and Patrick McDermott, no relation, are facing off on Nov. 3. Jerry, the Republican incumbent, was appointed by the governor two years ago. Patrick, a Democrat, is the county’s registrar of probates. The incumbent championed a ballot initiative last year that would have undone a state court ruling and authorized sheriffs to honor ICE detainers, which come without a judge’s signature. He did not respond to a request for comment on how he would partner with ICE if elected to a full term. By contrast, and as I reported in the Political Report in August, his challenger says sheriffs should not honor ICE requests that a federal judge has not signed, and that he would not enter into new contracts like a 287(g) agreement. “These contracts make it harder to ensure that all members of the communities … feel safe and secure,” he said.

Michigan | Oakland County sheriff

Sheriff Mike Bouchard, a Republican in a county that may be poised to reject President Trump in November, has honored ICE’s detainer requests, and as a leader in the Major County Sheriffs of America, he has worked to extend that practice throughout the country. “If ICE is coming after someone in the jail, it’s for a criminal charge,” he told Detroit News in 2017, downplaying the fact that most people in jail have not been convicted. In November, Bouchard faces Democratic challenger Vincent Gregory, a former state senator who told the Political Report that he would break with Bouchard’s policy on detainers. “I would NOT honor the request from ICE to hold the prisoners without a Court Order,” he said in an email. But Gregory also volunteered that immigration has not been central to conversations he has had during the campaign, and he does not feature the issue on his website.

North Carolina | Governor

In 2018, buoyed by the activism of advocacy groups such as Comunidad Colectiva, Action NC, El Pueblo, or Siembra NC, North Carolina saw a wave of wins by sheriff candidates—all Black Democrats—who ran on cutting ties with ICE in five of the state’s most populous counties. They promptly did just that upon entering office. This enraged Republicans, who run the state legislature. Last year, they passed a bill to require that sheriffs collaborate with ICE. But Democratic Governor Roy Cooper vetoed the legislation, effectively protecting sheriffs’ ability to not do ICE’s bidding. Cooper is up for re-election against Republican Lieutenant Governor Dan Forest. If Forest wins, it would likely hand the GOP control of the state government, enabling them to revisit the 2019 bill. But the state could also swing in the other direction; a Cooper win may be accompanied by legislative gains for his party, strengthening the new sheriffs’ hand.

Ohio | Hamilton County (Cincinnati) sheriff

This is the only election featured here that has a candidate who wants to scale back collaboration with ICE, and one who wants to ramp it up. The incumbent sheriff, Jim Neil, is a Democrat who attended a Trump rally in 2016, honors ICE detainers, and has faced protests from activists. He could not overcome that record in the Democratic primary, losing to Charmaine McGuffey, a former sheriff’s deputy who is running a reform-minded campaign, as Teresa Mathew reported in the Political Report. McGuffey told Mathew that she would no longer honor detainers if elected. 

Now McGuffey faces Republican Bruce Hoffbauer, a police lieutenant who has said the county should be even more active in partnering with ICE than it has been under Neil; he did not respond to a request for comment on how he intends to partner with ICE, though. (Neil has endorsed Hoffbauer since his primary defeat.) Hoffbauer is also running on increasing enforcement against what he calls “street-level crimes” such as drug offenses, which could increase arrests and jail bookings. This approach to policing, combined with a goal of helping ICE arrest people held in the local jail, could lead to even more people being funneled into deportation proceedings.

South Carolina | Charleston County sheriff

Charleston County may have voted for Democrats in the last three presidential elections, but it also has a Republican sheriff, J. Al Cannon, who has made it one of ICE’s closest allies in the state. Charleston is one of only four South Carolina counties in ICE’s 287(g) program, enabling deputies to facilitate defendants’ transfer into ICE custody. Cannon also has an agreement to detain people that ICE arrests elsewhere, including during raids, which has drawn protests. This record is on the line in November. Cannon, who has been in power since 1988, faces Kristin Graziano, a sheriff’s deputy he put on leave when he learned that she was running against him. 

Graziano, a Democrat, told me this week that she would “immediately” terminate the 287(g) program. “It’s contradictory to what we’re trying to accomplish in Charleston,” she said, namely “building our communities back up and building trust.” She added that she would not honor ICE detainers, and would “end completely” agreements that involve detaining people on non-criminal grounds. Graziano, whose website takes the rare step of laying out her views in both English and Spanish, said she has “learned” from “dialogue” with advocates from the Latinx community, whom she wants “sitting at the table making the decisions that affect their lives.”

Texas | Tarrant County (Fort Worth) sheriff

In this county of nearly two million residents, Republican Sheriff Bill Waybourn has been a vocal cheerleader for Trumpian immigration politics. Speaking at a White House event in 2019, he praised ICE for “standing on the wall between good and evil for you and me,” and defended jailing people who face criminal charges on immigration grounds because otherwise “these drunks will run over your children and they will run over my children.” But Tarrant County has rapidly shifted toward the Democratic Party during the Trump era, and this has made Waybourn vulnerable to Democratic challenger Vance Keyes, a former police officer who says he is running to end the incumbent’s “fear mongering tactics.” The ICE out of Tarrant County coalition has fought Waybourn’s participation in ICE’s 287(g) program. Keyes has vowed to terminate it if he is elected. 

Tarrant is by far the most populous Texas county in 287(g). There are only two other 287(g) counties that were carried by a Democrat in a federal race in either 2016 or 2018, a mark of potential competitivenss: Williamson County (Georgetown) and Nueces County (Corpus Christi). In each, the incumbent sheriff is a Republican with a Democratic opponent; but neither of the challengers answered my requests for comment on their views on immigration and 287(g), nor do they indicate a position on their website, in a stark contrast with Keyes’s willingness to tackle the issue in Tarrant. 

Texas | Travis County (Austin) district attorney

Travis County may elect as its next DA a candidate who describes himself as an “immigrant rights activist.” José Garza, a former public defender and leader of the Workers Defense Project, an organization focused on labor and immigration law, ousted the incumbent DA by an overwhelming margin in the Democratic primary. He is now favored against Republican candidate Martin Harry, given the county’s large Democratic lean. Garza told me in June that he wants to avoid immigration consequences for people facing criminal charges or convictions. “A simple proposition for me is that no one should face a more severe punishment simply because of their status,” he said, noting that for some cases it would be a matter of keeping the penalty for a crime under one year, which is a threshold that triggers deportation. 

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This is not an exhaustive list of every local election whose result will shape immigration policy; there are thousands of elected offices that will be decided on Nov. 3. I have selected elections in counties that are at least somewhat politically competitive, as well as elections that pit candidates with clear political differences.

The post These Twelve Elections Could Curb ICE’s Powers appeared first on Bolts.

In New Orleans, the office of the district attorney has a fraught reputation. Former prosecutor Jim Williams, while photographed for Esquire in 1995, showed off a model electric chair he kept on his desk with the photos of men he had placed on death row. Longtime District Attorney Harry Connick was criticized by Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg for displaying indifference to the rights of defendants. And the office is broadly known for its aggressive prosecution tactics. 

Current District Attorney Leon Cannizzaro, who was first elected in 2008, has followed suit. He has attacked efforts to bail people out of jail pretrial, fought to retain nonunanimous jury convictions, vowed to put more children in jail, and used habitual offender laws to increase sentencing. He is also facing an ongoing lawsuit that alleges his office issued fake subpoenas to jail crime victims and to pressure witnesses to cooperate. 

When Cannizzaro announced he would not run for re-election this year, it threw open the city’s DA race. Criminal justice reform advocates see it as a golden opportunity to bring change to New Orleans and its pervasive reliance on incarceration.

The race has come to be defined less by the four candidates who are running, and more by a group of criminal justice reform organizations that joined to form the People’s DA Coalition, driven by the diagnosis that this prosecutor’s office has been pivotal in fueling Louisiana’s record-high incarceration rate. 

“Those of us who work in the criminal justice system are keenly aware of the outsized power of the District Attorney,” said retired judge Calvin Johnson, a key leader in the coalition, which represents more than 30 organizations, including the Southern Poverty Law Center, New Orleans Workers Center for Racial Justice, Court Watch, and the Innocence Project New Orleans. The coalition also includes formerly incarcerated people, public defenders, crime survivors, and others affected by the criminal legal system. 

According to Johnson, the organizers behind the coalition started talking over a year ago about the upcoming election. At the time, they didn’t know whether Cannizzaro would choose to run again. But they did know that in the six years since he had been re-elected, there had been a sea change of criminal justice reform work in Louisiana. In 2017, Governor John Bel Edwards signed a bipartisan law that reformed sentencing statutes and made a considerable dent in the state’s prison population; Edwards won re-election last year in the face of attacks on this record. In 2018, voters passed a constitutional amendment to end nonunanimous juries, which tended to silence Black jurors.  

In New Orleans, these statewide successes for criminal justice reform have contradicted Cannizzaro and his policies. 

“In every case, the district attorney defines who, what, why, how, and, importantly, whether to prosecute,” Johnson said. “This fundamentally shapes our system of mass incarceration.” 

Four candidates are vying to take charge of the office—and potentially to change its practices—in the November election. If no candidate gets more than 50 percent of the vote on Nov. 3, the race will head to a December runoff.

The candidates are Keva Landrum, Cannizzaro’s predecessor; Arthur Hunter, a former criminal court judge; Jason Williams, a City Council member; and Morris Reed, a former criminal court judge. Reed has been largely absent from candidate forums and doesn’t appear to be mounting an active campaign. He didn’t respond to requests for comment.

Landrum became acting DA in 2007 when Eddie Jordan resigned. She held office for only a year because she won a seat as a criminal court judge in 2008. But in that short time she drew national attention for coming down hard on marijuana possession by prosecuting repeat offenses as felonies, charges that could result in five to 20 years in prison. 

“I would disagree that I had a punitive record,” Landrum told The Appeal: Political Report, noting that filing felony charges matched state law. Before her term, the office routinely treated such cases as misdemeanors, which carry much lower penalties. Critics accused her of racking up felony convictions to make it appear that the DA’s office was tackling violent crime after New Orleans was declared a “murder capital.”

Hunter and Williams have both said they would drop all marijuana possession cases if elected. Landrum told The Lens she would either drop those cases or transfer them to a lower municipal court. Since her earlier term, New Orleans has adopted policies to encourage police to issue summons for marijuana, which are prosecuted in municipal court.

The platform of the People’s DA Coalition goes far beyond asking candidates to decline to prosecute marijuana cases, though. It calls for the next DA to commit to other robust reforms, including refusing to seek the death penalty, not prosecuting minors as adults, adopting full data transparency, and no longer using a multi-bill, habitual offender statute that considerably increases minimum sentences for people with past convictions. 

On the campaign trail, all the candidates are vowing to break with the office’s status quo of harsh practices with policies more aligned with a reform approach. But contrasts are apparent.

Williams is the only candidate who committed to the platform in its entirety during a Sept. 23 candidate forum the coalition hosted. 

“I could have written [the platform], or they could have written mine,” Williams said in a follow-up interview with the Political Report. “I think this coalition helps the people of the city who don’t have as much time and who may not have this level of education to really start to understand how some of these things [in the DA’s office] impact them.”

In particular, Williams is the only one of the three leading candidates to pledge to never make use of the habitual offender statute to enhance defendants’ sentences. 

He is also the only candidate who said during the forum that he would not prosecute minors as adults when they were charged with serious offenses. The City Council and Cannizzaro have in the past clashed over the incumbent DA’s practice of transferring nearly all armed robbery cases committed by 15- and 16-year-olds to adult court.

Williams cites his record as proof that his commitment to the coalition’s platform is genuine. He previously worked as a criminal defense attorney, including with the Innocence Project New Orleans. In 2008, Williams ran for DA on a reform-minded platform against Cannizzaro but lost. He has served on the City Council since 2014. On the council, he has worked on bail reform meant to lower the jail’s pretrial population, sponsored a city ordinance to reduce penalties for marijuana possession, and established public databases tracking the criminal justice system in the city. And this summer, Williams sponsored a successful ordinance to bring funding for the public defenders’ office closer to parity with the DA’s office. 

However, Williams is facing a serious hurdle. This year, he came under a federal indictment for tax fraud. The trial date for the case is set as Jan. 11, 2021. 

Williams has pleaded not guilty and he dismisses the charge as politically motivated. “I paid my taxes for all of those years that they’re talking about.” he said. “[Voters see this] an old-school political tactic.” 

Hunter is also pointing to his record as evidence that he would bring reform to New Orleans. A former police officer and attorney, he became a judge in 1996. In that role, he notes that he has advocated for indigent defendants and helped found a re-entry program.   

“Every lawyer who has ever stepped foot in [Hunter’s] courtroom has nothing but the best to say about him,” Bruce Reilly, deputy director of Voters Organized to Educate, a local advocacy group that has endorsed Hunter, told the Political Report. He added, in reference to Hunter’s response to the group’s questionnaire, “Hunter also said that he would be willing to spend a night in jail in order to know what it is like for people who are arrested. That really speaks to his empathy.”

Hunter has expressed reservations about the coalition’s platform on some key issues, resisting its call for candidates to draw lines in the sand against punitive practices that fall within a DA’s discretion. He indicated he remains open to prosecuting minors as adults. He similarly told the Political Report that he would continue using the habitual offender statute; but he added he would lobby the legislature to repeal Louisiana’s habitual offender laws and abolish capital punishment.

And at the Sept. 23 forum, Hunter was the only candidate to indicate he may still seek the death penalty, a position he confirmed to the Political Report. Landrum and Williams both indicated they would not do so, a stark break with the office legacy. 

Supporters argue that Hunter may not be willing to rule out using some statutes, but that his record shows him exercising his discretion well: As a judge, Hunter ruled that the state should pay $180,000 to a man who was wrongfully convicted and threw out the conviction of a domestic violence survivor who murdered her abusive husband.

“I believe in rehabilitation, redemption, and second chances,” Hunter said. “I will take care to only bring charges of second-degree murder, which carries an automatic life sentence, in extraordinary circumstances.” Louisiana has the nation’s highest share of people serving a life without the possibility of parole sentence; it is one of two states that imposes an automatic life sentence for second-degree murder. 

Reilly expects that whoever comes out ahead between Williams and Hunter on Nov. 3 will draw more support from reform-minded advocates, should only one make it to a runoff.

“The conservatives and bail bondsmen and maybe some other people will vote for Landrum, but I doubt it will be enough to stop the possibility of a run-off,” Reilly said. “I know the troops will rally behind whoever is more successful [between Williams and Hunter] if there is a runoff.” 

Landrum has made the case that she is the only candidate with the necessary experience to be DA. She points to her prosecutorial experience, and to her work as chief judge of the Orleans Parish Criminal District Court until early this year. 

“The best way to change a system is to work within it and learn that system,” Landrum told The Political Report. She added that the criticisms that she isn’t reform-minded enough are an effort to distract from the fact that she is the most qualified candidate running in the race. “It is an affront to women, as if we could not stand on our own skills and leadership to run this office.”

During the Sept. 23 forum, Landrum would also not commit to some of the key tenets of the coalition’s platform, like whether she would prosecute a child in adult court. Unlike Hunter and Williams, she did not indicate that she would oppose arresting defendants on grounds relating to their immigration status. Elsewhere, again unlike her rivals, she did not express support for the summer’s ordinance advancing funding parity for the public defender’s office.

She has also said she would still make use of the habitual offender statute, though she wishes to limit its use.  

“The multi-bill statute was enacted to protect citizens and shield our community from violent offenders who continue to engage in that activity,” Landrum told the Political Report. “It’s become a sword instead of a shield in order to coerce plea bargains, even in nonviolent cases. … My policy is going to be that we will not utilize the multiple bill except for in exceptional circumstances with supervisory approval.”

When pressed, Landrum did not specify what circumstances would justify its use. 

The People’s DA Coalition will not endorse a candidate, but individuals and organizations within the coalition are excited to talk about what needs to change.

Jerome Morgan, an advocate with the coalition who was convicted of murder and later exonerated, says he was wronged by Canizzaro who sought to reinstate his conviction even after evidence proved Morgan not guilty. Morgan, who is supporting Williams in the election in his personal capacity, told the Political Report that he cares about the next DA having a clear commitment to reform and a moral compass, even when it is difficult or against the status quo. 

Morgan stressed that he is most hopeful about the prospect of the coalition holding the next DA accountable, whomever it might be. The coalition plans to continue as a watchdog group after the election and host yearly forums with whoever is elected.  

“For a long time, it was a norm [for the DA] to support unjust practices and racist ideologies,” Morgan said. “I am excited to be a part of the coalition, because we are setting a new norm. No longer will the DA have so much unchecked power.”

The post How New Orleans Activists Are Pushing D.A. Candidates to End Mass Incarceration appeared first on Bolts.

As President Trump cheered this summer for a harsh response to Black Lives Matter, Bob Gualtieri, the Republican sheriff of Florida’s populous Pinellas County (St. Petersburg), helped ensure that protesters arrested at a demonstration would be denied bail by spinning a story that the chief judge later called misleading.

After the mass shooting in Parkland in 2018, Gualtieri was chairperson of a state commission investigating it that ended up recommending armed teachers in schools, an action he staunchly defended. 

And amid legal challenges to Florida sheriffs’ policies of detaining people for ICE, Gualtieri helped design a new arrangement for sheriffs to circumvent legal concerns and keep assisting the federal agency. 

These activities have made Gualtieri a cause célèbre for the national right. He was named Sheriff of the Year by the National Sheriffs’ Association in 2019; in 2020 he was appointed to Trump’s commission on policing.

But they have also made Eliseo Santana, a longtime employee of the sheriff’s office who is running as the Democratic nominee, intent on defeating him on Nov. 3.

“The current sheriff is the poster child for the Trump administration,” Santana told me this week. Gualtieri also presided over the Florida Sheriffs Association over the last year.

In a Q&A with The Appeal: Political Report, Santana denounced many of Gualtieri’s emblematic stances. He explained he was “horrified” by the sheriff’s proposal to arm teachers and more broadly called on the state to revisit the new mandate for schools to have armed officers. He said he opposed the state’s “Stand Your Ground” statute, which Gualtieri invoked in 2018 to justify his decision to not arrest Michael Drejka, a white man who fatally shot a Black man after confronting him over a parking spot. And he pledged to terminate Pinellas County’s existing contracts with ICE, including the county’s membership in the agency’s 287(g) program, which authorizes sheriff’s deputies to act like federal immigration agents.

“I will not have my agents be the agents of destroying families in our community,” he said when asked about his views on collaborating with ICE.

Santana’s platform goes beyond ending policies that have put Gualtieri on the national map, though. He outlined decarceral goals that are still relatively rare to hear from sheriff’s candidates.

He made the case that fewer people should be booked into the jail. “An arrest can lead to greater insecurity, and with greater insecurity we have higher levels of crimes and violence,” he said.

He said he would set a presumptive standard of not arresting people for some low-level offenses like driving on a suspended license or simple drug possession, instead issuing them a warning or a citation for which they have to appear in court. Sheriff’s deputies make arrests at their discretion. Further north in Florida, Gadsden County Sheriff Morris Young has drawn national attention for his policies of minimizing arrests; some sheriffs elsewhere have also put in place cite-and-release policies.

Santana also explained he wants to shift some of the sheriff’s budget, both internally toward programs that aren’t premised on arresting people, and also to services and agencies outside of law enforcement that he says would be better equipped at handling mental health issues.  

Pinellas County is a narrowly divided county that voted for President Barack Obama in 2012 and then Trump in 2016, before swinging back to supporting Democrats in the 2018 elections for governor and U.S. Senate. Because of a law that the state’s Republican Party passed last year, all of Florida’s elections this fall will exclude residents from voting  who have not been able to pay off their court debt linked to felony convictions.

The interview was condensed and lightly edited for clarity.

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You have stated in a candidate questionnaire that: “We need to re-allocate resources away from community domination and towards community service.” What do you mean by this?

When we have a response model, when the police is called on by 911, and they respond to a situation, they are imposing themselves as an outside force. If we were in a life and death situation, that would be a very important response. But the majority of calls for help are not that extreme. Often, they’re based on some kind of mental illness crisis, drug abuse, or family disturbance. The majority of our resources and funding has been for that rapid response—take care of the situation and then leave—whereas I see community policing as an essential element. It is imperative that we have a peace officer get to know the neighborhood, and instead of being reactive to a situation that has become a crime, they can be proactive. So that’s the reallocating of the funds—from building a tank, getting machine guns, having a bulletproof vest, and then going in there controlling the situation, arresting somebody, and taking them away. We need to move away from that model.

When you speak of reallocation, are you only thinking of shifting funds to other law enforcement programs? Would you also favor steering funds toward programs that operate outside of law enforcement & the sheriff’s office? 

As sheriff, I am responsible for the well being and safety of people within Pinellas County. It is not to arrest people; my responsibility is to keep everyone safe. If I see that there is a need to address a core issue, and by redirecting my funds toward that I see a direct reduction in crime and in the population of the jail, I’d rather spend that money at the front end than at the hind end.

So what comes to mind right now in Pinellas as needing more funding for community services that are not in the law enforcement umbrella? For instance, programs are being set up in some places for civilian departments to respond to 911 calls involving issues relating to mental health or homelessness, rather than law enforcement officers. Is that something you’d like to see?

Absolutely. I will build up the necessary support to back that from the municipalities and the county. When you have a call going through 911, we need to be able to screen it, to see if the person calling is asking because their child has a mental crisis. We need to have a specialist that can handle that type of a situation right off the bat and not a law enforcement officer whose only training is to arrest and to take people in.

If we’re able to spend this money at the front end and get people the help they need without incarcerating them, it’s not just saving some money, it’s also keeping people out of jail.

Let’s talk more about reducing the jail: There’ve been calls to reduce incarceration around the country, of course, and often people look at the role of prosecutors. What could you from the office of the sheriff accomplish in that regard?

Individual deputies have the ability, when they confront minor level infractions, of forgetting about it and giving a verbal warning, or doing a citation to have them appear before court, or arresting the individual. As sheriff, I set the direction on how that is going to happen. When there is a minor infraction that is not going to lead to a threat to our community, I do not want somebody to be arrested and taken to jail. So that will leave two alternatives, up to the individual officer: Either they’ll give out a citation for appearance, or a verbal warning. 

When we take somebody out of the community and arrest them, and put them in jail for two or three days until they see the magistrate, if they have a job it is very likely they just lost it, and when they apply for another job, they have to list that they’ve been arrested and that makes it very difficult for them to find additional work. An arrest can lead to greater insecurity, and with greater insecurity we have higher levels of crimes and violence. 

What policies would you put in place to have clear standards of not arresting people for lower level offenses, given that moments of individual discretion can feed inequality in terms of who benefits from that second chance and who does not.

It comes with training. When you leave something to the discretion of an individual, then their own biases, whether they know about them or not, come into play. And so it is important that when we give them this ability of choice, we also give them the training to be able to recognize what they carry with them. I will be putting in body cameras. It will allow me as this ultimate supervisor to see that they are doing the protocol and applying it equally to all the individuals. 

Again in the interest of identifying how you would narrow the possibility for arrest, are there specific types of behavior for which you would set a presumption of non-arrest? For instance, I’m thinking of cases of simple drug possession, or behaviors tied with homelessness.

Yes to all of what you said. One of the things is when somebody is driving and they do not have a driver’s license, or have an expired tag. 

And, depending upon the infraction, like with homelessness or drugs, give the deputy the ability of doing a referral to the proper professional that would be able to assist them and resolve some of these issues, so they’re not a repetitive thing.

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You’ve talked about training. One problem that’s continually exposed is that rules only go so far if there’s a culture of impunity or lack of accountability. So what can you do as sheriff to make sure that these rules have any teeth and consequences? For instance, what can you do to ensure you are not hiring people with a history of misconduct?

The deep cultural change within the agency occurs from the very top. I will follow up on this situation and make sure that every single officer knows that this is my values, this is what I would do and they have to act accordingly. The body camera is essential to give me some of that feedback. And it’s not just making sure that we screen and eliminate those that come with baggage, we also need to have the training process be reflective about values. If the training officer has extreme biases, every new person coming in is going to have that bias.

Would you be in favor of creating a civilian review board with an oversight role over the sheriff’s department and with independent powers like those of issuing a subpoena to the sheriff’s department if they choose to?

Absolutely. It is beyond necessary. The civilian review board, someone that has full access to all of the records and all of the information pertaining to what we’re looking at, is essential. 

Another aspect of reducing the jail population, beyond reducing arrests, is what happens once people are booked in jail. Do you feel like the pretrial policies of the county are appropriate at present? How can you as sheriff change pretrial detention?

The system that we have is attacking people that are not economically well. When you have no credit, when you have no asset, then you have to have cash to be able to bond out. If you do not have the money, then you’re held hostage in the jail until a family member or somebody comes up with the money to let you go. And that to me is offensive, it’s something that needs to be eliminated. I do not want to have somebody be in jail because they’re poor. That comes from the state legislators, and also with different courts. So I would be coordinating with them to eliminate that so we have less people detained in precourt processes that are not a threat to our community. But even more than that, let’s stop arresting people that don’t need to be in jail.

When the pandemic began, county officials made a concerted effort to reduce the jail population by releasing people on their own recognizance, and also arresting fewer people. Do you think policies like that should be extended to non-pandemic times?

The process that we have now should continue. Obviously the people that were released, they didn’t need to be in jail, they were not a threat to our community. And after the pandemic, they’re still not a threat to our community, and they don’t need to be in jail. 

It took a crisis to be able to get people to wake up and reduce our jail population. But it’s always been a crisis. It’s just that they had not been aware of it.

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Your opponent led a commission on the Parkland shooting, and among its recommendations was to enable arming teachers as a form of school protection. What is your position on that? 

I was horrified. And then he lobbied the state legislature so that they would pass a law saying that every single school in the state of Florida has to have an armed individual within the school. And that is law as we speak. When we have an armed law enforcement officer in a school environment, it is minorities that are impacted greatly by having more arrests, and the school-to-jail pipeline becomes even more of a reality. I will hand pick the school resource officers, the deputies that will be assigned to the schools, to make sure that they have the right mindset. They will have to take the law enforcement hat off and provide services that have nothing to do with arresting our young men and women that are there. It’s mandated by the state that we have to have an officer, so this for me is the best option to comply with the law.

Some places around the country responded to the Black Lives Matter movement this summer by removing such school resource officers from schools. You are stressing it’s a state mandate, but would you want to see the state revisit that mandate and rethink their role?

Absolutely, I would definitely welcome that. 

I want to ask you about another law: Florida has a so-called Stand Your Ground statute, and Sheriff Gualtieri invoked it in not arresting Michael Drejka in 2018. Do you think that he made the right decision given state law, and do you think that law should remain in place at all or would you favor the state repealing it?

When you have a sheriff that uses a law to justify a murder of an individual, then obviously that law is not written properly. We don’t need that law. The way it’s being used is justifying murder by certain people. But even people that want “Stand Your Ground” thought that his decision not to arrest that individual was wrong, so it’s beyond the law. 

Sheriff Gualteri has also championed local cooperation with ICE. He helped design a new form of agreement for ICE to pay sheriffs for immigrants they detain and turn over. Separately, Gualtieri has joined ICE’s 287(g) program, which enables deputies to fulfill some of the capacities of federal immigration agents. If elected sheriff, would you maintain your office in either of these relationships?

Those contracts will immediately be ended. I will not have my deputies be agents of ICE. I will not have my agents be the agents of destroying families in our community. These types of agreements are hurting our community, are destroying the family, and it’s anti-American. I am going to advocate strengthening our families, keeping our community safe and eliminating this type of agreement that makes our deputies ICE agents. 

In 2018, Florida legislators passed a constitutional amendment that expanded the right to vote to most people who complete their felony sentence. Last year, state Republicans adopted a law to require repayment of court debt before people’s voting rights are restored. What is your reaction to the resulting situation? After all, the people affected won’t be able to vote in your own election.

Our state legislators, led by the majority Republicans, have betrayed the will of the people. I as a citizen voted to make sure that they’re able to have the rights restored. And for them to turn around and negate that is a betrayal of the will of the people, and I will personally make them accountable, the legislators, when I go to the ballot box on November the third.

If you’re elected sheriff, people detained in the jail for misdemeanors or pretrial will still retain the right to vote. What will you do to ensure that they can exercise their voting rights, and are you going to allow groups access to the jail to help register people or give them information about their rights? 

Absolutely. I am a member of the League of Women Voters, and I served as the vice president for the League of Women Voters in this county for several years. That’s my core value. If somebody is in a jail facility, and they have not been convicted, and it’s Election Day, they have full rights to be able to vote, and we will see whatever we need to do to ensure that they’re able to cast their vote.

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Explore the Political Report’s coverage of other prosecutor and sheriff elections in Florida this year.

The post The Sheriff Candidate Who Is Challenging “The Poster Child for the Trump Administration” appeared first on Bolts.

In April, as Arizona advocates warned that prisons would become an incubator for the COVID-19 pandemic and demanded that public officials reduce the state’s incarcerated population during the crisis, Maricopa County Attorney Allister Adel wrote an opinion article stating that activists are “exploiting a public health emergency to forward a political agenda.” 

In the following months, the novel coronavirus spread in Arizona’s crowded prisons and jails, infecting hundreds of prisoners and staffers. This spread was fueled not just by state officials’ reluctance to decarcerate once the pandemic’s risks were known, but also by decades of “tough on crime” policies that have made Arizona’s incarceration rate one of the nation’s highest.

That carceral legacy, and the prospects of the “agenda” Adel denounced in April, are now at stake in November’s general election. Adel, a Republican, was appointed to the county attorney position last October when her predecessor resigned to take a seat on the state Supreme Court. She will face Democratic challenger Julie Gunnigle, a former prosecutor who is running on a pledge to lower Maricopa County’s incarceration rate by 25 percent.

Such a reduction could transform the criminal legal system in the county, which is home to Phoenix and nearly 4.5 million residents. The top prosecutor can set policies that influence what crimes are prosecuted and how, what charges prosecutors bring, what sort of sentences prosecutors seek, and who to keep in jail before trial.

Advocates who have scrutinized Gunnigle’s track record as a former Cook County, Illinois, prosecutor have called into question whether she would follow through on that promise, as The Appeal reported in August. Still, she has outlined policies that would mark a significant departure from Maricopa County’s decades under the leadership of Republican county attorneys who favored punitive policies and harsh sentences.

Since taking office in 2019, Adel has largely maintained the office’s status quo and pursued severe sentences. The Appeal reported last week, for instance, that her office is seeking to sentence a 61-year-old man, Brian Stepter, to eight years in prison for failing to return a rental car on time. 

But public opinion about the criminal legal system is shifting in Arizona, and so has the state’s political landscape. A 2019 poll commissioned by FWD.us showed voters strongly support measures like allowing imprisoned people to earn time off their sentences. Those measures have stalled in the state legislature, in part due to the opposition of past Maricopa County prosecutors. The county has long been a Republican stronghold, but it has shifted away from the GOP and it is one of the most hotly contested jurisdictions in the year’s presidential election.

“The stakes are incredibly high,” said Analise Ortiz, campaign strategist for the American Civil Liberties Union of Arizona’s Smart Justice campaign. “The Maricopa County Attorney’s Office is the third-largest prosecuting agency in the nation. It cannot be understated the sheer impact this office has on mass incarceration in Arizona. And because criminal justice advocates have had such trouble passing reform at the state legislature, the county attorney’s office is where the most change can happen.”

Besides deciding their next prosecutor, county voters will also settle a sheriff’s race that features former Sheriff Joe Arpaio’s longtime lieutenant.

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For years, the Maricopa County Attorney’s office has been led by prosecutors who have deployed harsh charging and sentencing policies. Charge stacking, or bringing multiple charges related to a single offense, has been commonplace. So has the use of “Hanna priors,” a practice unique to Arizona in which prosecutors are allowed to charge people as “repeat offenders” if their indictment includes multiple charges, even if they have never been convicted of anything in the past. Former County Attorney Andrew Thomas, who was in office from 2005 until 2010, also implemented a policy, known as “plead to the lead,” which required people to plead guilty to the most severe charges against them in order to accept a plea deal. 

Adel’s predecessor, Bill Montgomery, who led the office for almost a decade after Thomas’s departure, was also a staunch opponent of statewide reform proposals. He used his bully pulpit to sink legislative efforts to reduce sentences and implemented punitive policies as a prosecutor. He faces a federal civil rights lawsuit for allegedly turning the county’s marijuana diversion program into a money-making scheme that exploited poor people.

Though Adel has stated that she is “different from [her] predecessor,” her charging and sentencing decisions have often belied that claim. The eight years in prison that Stepter faces are over five felony charges, fitting the office’s pattern of overcharging. Adel has also pursued DUI charges—more than four years after the crime occurred—against a veteran who had since turned her life around. And in her past as a prosecutor in the vehicular crimes unit, Adel sent a young man to prison for 51 years for causing a car accident that injured four people. In June, she told The Appeal she stands by that sentence. 

Lorna Romero, a spokesperson for Adel’s campaign, told The Appeal: Political Report in an email that Adel has continued to use charge stacking and Hannah priors. She said that “prosecutorial discretion is key.” Romero said that Adel has ended her predecessors’ plead to the lead” policy, though stressing that the requirement may still be used on a case-by-case basis. In December, Adel said she was evaluating the policy; this is the first time her office has said it is no longer in place. 

Gunnigle has pointed to numerous policy changes she would pursue in Maricopa County to reduce incarceration. Her most striking proposal is to stop filing criminal charges on a range of low-level offenses. In July, she told The Appeal: Political Report that she would altogether decline to prosecute sex work, as well as crimes linked to poverty and homelessness such as trespasing and shoplifting. She has also said she would decline to prosecute cases involving personal possession of marijuana. (Adel’s spokesperson did not indicate categories of offenses the incumbent will decline to prosecute, but said that Adel favors a “treatment first” approach.)

Gunnigle has also promised to end the use of cash bail to the extent permitted by state law, and to lobby for legislative changes, like ending mandatory minimums.

Gunnigle told the Political Report that she would roll back the harsh charging rules that have been used by the county attorney’s office. She said she would stop prosecutors from charge stacking and using “Hannah priors.” She also opposes the “plead to the lead” policy.  

Gunnigle has faced criticism for her involvement in the heavy-handed prosecution of a woman who spent 18 months in jail on computer tampering charges, but she has maintained that the charges were warranted. She also said the case taught her that prosecutors need more options for dealing with mental health issues in the criminal justice system. 

“This election is a referendum on leadership,” Gunnigle said in an interview on “The Briefing,” The Appeal’s daily livestream show. “For the last 40 years, we have seen what a county attorney office that has been led by individuals who put themselves first instead of people they serve, what that looks like. Now more than ever, we need criminal justice reform, and we need it now.” 

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In the months leading up to the general election, Adel herself has announced a number of changes at the county attorney’s office, though critics have dismissed her efforts as insufficient.

“The critics are upset that she is a principled and effective leader who is actually getting things done,” Adel’s campaign spokesperson said in an email to the Political Report.

In August, Adel implemented a new policy allowing anyone who was arrested for simple marijuana possession to avoid prosecution if they obtain a medical marijuana card. Critics have pointed out that the policy only helps those who can afford a card, while poor people continue to face prosecution. 

Also over the summer, Adel published a dashboard with prosecution data on the county attorney’s website, stating that she did so to “support my vision for a more transparent process.” But, according to the ACLU of Arizona, who had sued the county attorney’s office to release the data, Adel fought to withhold the information and released it only after the ACLU won the lawsuit. And the data shared on the website is unclear, as it lumps all drug crimes into one category, which, the ACLU claims, obscures the fact that the office prosecutes simple drug possession more than any other crime.

In recent years, reform advocates in Arizona made a strong push for the state legislature to change sentencing statutes so that these sorts of reforms are not up to individual prosecutors, but Adel’s predecessor was instrumental in derailing those changes. Adel has not committed to supporting specific reforms, including proposed changes to Arizona’s “truth in sentencing” law, which requires imprisoned people to serve at least 85 percent of their sentences before they can be released. 

Statewide debates may already shift next year because a progressive candidate, Laura Conover, is set to become prosecutor in Pima County, the state’s second most populous jurisdiction. Conover, who won a contested Democratic primary in August and is now uncontested, ran on championing reforms at the legislature, unlike that county’s retiring incumbent.

Adel’s office also recently supported an enhanced sentencing statute that allowed prosecutors to seek harsher sentences for gang members. Earlier this month, the state Supreme Court unanimously found the statute unconstitutional and ruled that sentences against gang members who threaten people cannot be enhanced unless there is a connection between the crime and the defendant’s gang membership.

And Adel recently came under fire for making a dismissive joke about transgender people, and has since apologized.

Whether Adel remains in office or Gunnigle takes over, criminal justice reform advocates like those at the ACLU of Arizona are vowing to monitor what goes on at the county attorney’s office.

“Accountability is crucial, regardless of who is in these positions,” Ortiz said, explaining that it would be crucial to ensure that reforms apply across the board. “We will be looking at individual cases. … We are going to be doing a lot of data analysis. We also plan to have a court-watching presence. We want to make sure prosecutors don’t ask for cash bail, and charges aren’t being stacked.”

The post How One Election Might Strike a Blow to Mass Incarceration in Arizona appeared first on Bolts.

Cooperation with ICE, qualified immunity, and drug policy have emerged as major flashpoints in the sheriff’s election in Norfolk County, Massachusetts. 

In this populous county just south of Boston, a Republican incumbent is set to face voters for the first time this fall, two years after being appointed to the job. The Democratic primary will determine his general election opponent on Sept. 1, and it features three challengers with varying commitments to reforming the criminal legal system.

This special election, triggered by the resignation of Sheriff Michael Bellotti, is a dress rehearsal of sorts for the state’s 2022 elections, when all sheriffs’ offices will be on the ballot.

Massachusetts has a national reputation as a liberal bastion. But many of its jails make headlines for tight cooperation with ICE, a punitive approach to the opioid crisis, and abusive detention conditions. The sheriffs’ races in 2022 will provide new openings to put these issues on the table and to get sheriff candidates to be explicit about the policies they’ll implement.

The Appeal: Political Report reached out to all four contenders—Republican incumbent Jerry McDermott, and his three Democratic opponents—with questions on how they would handle matters ranging from immigration to voting rights and policing. McDermott did not answer the questions, but his three challengers replied at length.

On some issues, they shared a similar perspective. For instance, they all committed to allowing voting rights groups to enter the county jail in order to help detained people vote. Although most people held in jails are eligible to vote if  they have not been convicted of a felony, in practice sheriffs often hinder their access. But contrasts arose from there on a set of major issues.

Qualified immunity

Legislative efforts to restrict or end qualified immunity, the legal doctrine that often shields law enforcement officers from civil lawsuits, have not succeeded so far in Massachusetts. 

Only one of the four candidates—Democrat Bill Phelan, the former mayor of Quincy—said he wants the elimination of qualified immunity. The incumbent sheriff, meanwhile, has worked to preserve it.

Qualified immunity often makes it difficult to hold police accountable for wrongdoing by shielding officers if the rights they violated were not “clearly established.” Courts have used this doctrine to dismiss cases that don’t fit the exact factual patterns of prior cases. For instance, when a Massachusetts woman left a hospital where she had been admitted for bipolar disorder in 2013, she was tased by an officer looking to bring her back; courts granted the officer immunity from allegations of excessive use of force. 

In June, Colorado eliminated qualified immunity in its state courts. But the bills debated in Massachusetts were weaker to start with, and law enforcement groups have fiercely lobbied against them. The head of a police union appealed to President Trump, warning that the proposals are a “complete assault on the people who are paid to protect the citizens.”

Jerry McDermott, Norfolk’s sheriff, joined that pushback in a Boston Herald article in July. He wrote that weakening qualified immunity “could cause unneeded confusion and lead to a hesitation to act” on the part of officers. He also downplayed the need for structural change: “The fact that the overwhelming majority of police officers and correction officers are capably and admirably serving their communities … is being overlooked.”

Phelan, by contrast, told the Political Report that qualified immunity “should be removed.” 

“I do believe it is important to allow victims to bring such actions when they have been wronged and don’t believe the defense of Qualified Immunity should preclude them from doing so,” Phelan said in a written message.

But Phelan also added that it is the municipalities that employ these officers—rather than officers themselves—that should be on the hook for any civil judgment that would result from ending qualified immunity. His argument is that this would “protect” the families of police officers “from financial ruin” while enabling cases to proceed and making public authorities accountable. 

Neither of Phelan’s two opponents in next week’s Democratic primary said they favored ending the qualified immunity defense.

Patrick McDermott, the county’s registrar of probates, replied that the question “requires a more comprehensive analysis and full discussion.” He instead stressed support for other policies such as implicit bias training and a civilian review board.

James Coughlin, a retired state police detective, said in a written message that he favors preserving qualified immunity as a “protection afforded to a group of public servants” who are put in situations where “a decision to act has to be made immediately.” 

Coughlin added, “Qualified immunity is lesser than the absolute immunity afforded to the lawmakers who want to take it away from honest, hard working public servants.”

Immigration

Massachusetts leaves its sheriffs a great deal of discretion as to how much to cooperate with ICE.

Each of the three Democrats committed to not contract with ICE, promising not to detain people whom ICE arrested elsewhere. Nor would they deputize local jail staff with the powers of federal immigration agents under the 287(g) program, which is surprisingly common in Massachusetts.

Jerry McDermott has not entered either of these types of contracts since he became the sheriff in 2018. In 2019, though, he championed a ballot initiative that would authorize sheriffs to honor so-called ICE detainers. (This initiative would have undone a 2017 court ruling that barred Massachusetts sheriffs from honoring detainers.) Detainers are ICE requests, not signed by a judge, that a sheriff keep holding someone beyond their scheduled release to give federal agents time to come and take custody.

Phelan and Patrick McDermott, unlike the incumbent sheriff, both said they opposed detainers. 

Coughlin said his policy would be “to release [people] on their scheduled release date.” But he also went furthest among the Democrats in laying out how he would cooperate with ICE. He would “make sure ICE has at least 48 hours notice” before someone’s release, he said, so it can “make arrangements to take custody of that inmate prior to their scheduled release date.”

Patrick McDermott, by contrast, told the Political Report he would not notify ICE of people’s scheduled release, unless a federal judge were to require it. Phelan also said he would not but that he may make an “exception” if there is “a specific imminent risk of harm to an individual.” 

Immigrants’ rights advocates have pushed for laws that ban sheriffs from notifying ICE.

Drug policy

Jerry McDermott, the sheriff, has joined a pilot program that enables people in the jail to access medication-assisted treatment for substance use issues. He has described it as a way to reduce overdoses, and to create a “continuum of care” once people leave the jail. 

This program comes on the heels of heated legal disputes in Massachusetts over whether sheriffs should be required to provide such medication, which can lessen withdrawals and cravings.

McDermott’s three Democratic challengers said that they too would enable people to access medication-assisted treatment as long as they are jailed.

But each also stressed that fewer people with substance use issues should be detained in the first place, and that more should be done to divert them from incarceration. 

“A person who is arrested and charged with possession of narcotics and has a non-violent history which indicates the person is suffering from substance use disorder, should not be sitting in a jail cell,” Coughlin said. To make the case against incarceration, Phelan cited data from the state’s Department of Public Health. “People recently released from custody are 120 times more likely to die of an overdose compared to the rest of the adult population,” he noted. 

A disagreement emerged, though, over Section 35. That’s a state statute that enables a judge to order that someone be involuntarily committed for up to 90 days for substance use treatment. 

Coughlin said that Section 35 can be a “necessity” or “a last resort,” though he emphasized that “voluntary treatment should always be tried first.” Patrick McDermott similarly called it a “last resort for families who are desperate in obtaining help for their loved ones.”

But Phelan took a different route: He made the case that Section 35 is not efficient, and that it should end. “Involuntary commitments have increased dramatically during the opioid crisis and because of a dearth of beds in treatment centers, many of those people end up in jail,” he said. 

According to WBUR, Massachusetts may be the only state that uses correctional facilities to involuntarily commit people who have not committed a crime. There are growing voices demanding that addiction treatment be dissociated from law enforcement altogether. A commission recommended in 2019 that Section 35 not be used to commit people in jails and prisons.

Leo Beletsky, a professor of law and health sciences at Northeastern University who sat on that commission, says that many families do see this statute as a lifeline, but that this reflects the failure to properly build and fund treatment programs. People who do want to seek treatment are often unable to afford it or secure bed space, he said, which pushes families to turn to Section 35 as an only option.

“We need to build community treatment capacity, so that we can deflect and divert people into treatment when and if they’re ready, and we should lower barriers to treatment and have it be available on demand for free in every shape or form that people might want,” Beletsky said. “That would be the public health perspective.”

Phelan echoed Beletsky’s view. “We should have services for substance use disorders readily available and affordable for people when they need them in a hospital setting,” he told the Political Report. “To what extent do we perpetuate the problem by utilizing a less than optimum form of treatment to take care of people who are an imminent risk to themselves?”

Patrick McDermott also made the case for more investments in “long-term care” and in treatment programs, though adding that this should increase both “voluntary and involuntary” placements.

Phelan added more broadly that he would champion criminal justice reform by using the office’s “bully pulpit towards a goal of less incarceration for non-violent offenses,” including by advocating for “eliminating cash bail” and for decriminalizing some drug possession cases. 

Beletsky said people who are involved in public health would assist in such efforts. “Look, we want to help [sheriffs] get out of the business of dealing with addiction,” he told the Political Report. “There are other people who are trained and equipped and funded to deal with addiction.”

Aug. 26: The article has been updated to reflect the latest fundraising information available from the state.

The post Policing And Ties With ICE On The Menu In Norfolk County’s Sheriff Race appeared first on Bolts.

Florida’s Aug. 18 primaries were marred once more by the exclusion of hundreds of thousands of voters due to harsh felony disenfranchisement statutes and to the confusion wrought by the state’s 2019 mandate that people with felony convictions pay off their court debt before voting.

Voters in Orlando’s metropolitan region still signaled for the second time in four years that they wanted the state’s Ninth Judicial Circuit to embrace criminal justice reform. 

Monique Worrell, the most progressive candidate in a four-way Democratic primary for state attorney in Orange and Osceola counties, prevailed on Tuesday. She will be heavily favored to win this blue jurisdiction in November against independent candidate Jose Torroella. 

“Our communities cried out for criminal justice reform, and their cries were answered,” Desmond Meade, the executive director of the Florida Rights Restoration Coalition who supported Worrell, wrote on Twitter on Tuesday night. 

In 2016, Aramis Ayala won the prosecutor’s race with a reform-minded platform, becoming the first Black state attorney in Florida’s history. During her term, Ayala clashed with other public officials who pushed back against her agenda. When Ayala announced a policy of never seeking the death penalty. Republican Governor Rick Scott stripped her of cases eligible for the death penalty. Ayala, who is one in a number of Black women 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 reelection. 

“Ayala has been a nationally visible leading proponent of criminal justice reform, and any time that happens, there are folks that either want to turn back the clock or advance the momentum,” Micah Kubic, executive director of the ACLU of Florida, told Samantha Schuyler in The Appeal: Political Report this month. “That is what is on the ballot on the 18th of August.” 

Worrell’s primary win is a vindication for Ayala, who endorsed her. Worrell, who worked as the head of the conviction integrity unit in Ayala’s office, was also backed by other prominent progressives, such as U.S. Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont.

But if she wins in November, Worrell would face a broadly similar political context as Ayala since Republicans still run the state government. The shadow of retaliation was evident during the primary campaign, Schuyler reported. Worrell has not reiterated Ayala’s pledge to never seek the death penalty, and she said she is aware that reform opponents “will use any means necessary.” Other candidates indicated they were likelier to roll back Ayala’s policies.

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 Schuyler wrote, “Florida transfers more children into the adult system than any other state in the country,” most of them for nonviolent offenses.

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. 

As state attorney, Worrell would at least not have to contend with one of Ayala’s chief local adversaries, Osceola County Sheriff Russ Gibson. Gibson, who complained to Scott about Ayala’s death penalty position, lost his re-election bid in a Democratic primary on Tuesday to Marco Lopez. Lopez did not respond to a request for comment.

There were many other elections for prosecutor and sheriff on Tuesday.

A new prosecutor in Broward County

Further south, in Broward County, the prosecutor’s office will most likely undergo reforms after 44 years under the same state attorney who managed it with a punitive outlook. But the county came within two percentage points of veering far further to the left.

Harold Fernandez Pryor, a defense attorney and former prosecutor who ran on qualified reform proposals, won the Democratic primary with 21.2 percent of the vote. Joe Kimok, a Bernie Sanders-endorsed defense lawyer and former prosecutor who ran as the most decarceral candidate, ended up as the runner-up in this eight-way race, with 19.9 percent of the vote. Kimok had pledged to not prosecute cases linked to marijuana, sex work, and poverty, and to end the use of cash bail, as Jerry Iannelli reported in the Political Report last week. The candidate endorsed by the retiring prosecutor, who was least sympathetic to reform, came in third, and the candidate endorsed by the local police union came in fifth.

Pryor is now heavily favored to be the county’s first new state attorney since 1976. In this blue bastion, he will face independent Sheila Alu and Republican Gregg Rossman in November. If he wins, he would be Broward’s first Black state attorney.

Pryor has promised “change from within,” but did not respond to Iannelli’s questions on what exact policies he would implement to make it so. He has said he opposes the use of cash bail for lower-level offenses; he has also said he would advocate for repealing Florida’s “Stand Your Ground” law. In a questionnaire with the Orlando Sun Sentinel, he mentions “combating racial sentencing disparities in the criminal justice system” as one of his three priorities; asked how he would lower disparities, he mentions changes in office culture, including recruiting “a diverse force of prosecutors,” implicit bias training, and audits, though not changes to charging and sentencing policies. He also tells the Sun Sentinel he will be open to seeking the death penalty.

Miami’s longtime prosecutor secures a new term

Miami-Dade County’s 27-year state attorney, Katherine Fernandez Rundle, defeated reform challenger Melba Pearson by a comfortable margin on Tuesday.

The election drew most attention in recent weeks due to Rundle’s record on law enforcement oversight. She has never charged a police officer for killing someone while on duty; she also took no action in 2012 when four prison guards allegedly placed a man under a 180-degree shower for hours until he died. Rundle, who will face no opponent in November, stressed in her victory speech that she had heard her critics and would re-examine Miami’s system.

Sheriffs ousted in Alachua and Clay counties

In Alachua County (Gainesville), Sheriff Sadie Darnell lost against Clovis Watson Jr., a legislator and former police officer, in a Democratic primary unfolding against the backdrop of COVID-19 outbreaks in the local jail. Watson has indicated some support for policing reforms, including fewer arrests over low-level offenses. The results could be felt in statewide politics: Darnell, who endorsed Republican Rick Scott in the race for U.S. Senate in 2018, is the former president of the state’s sheriffs association. The Gainesville Sun’s editorial board notes that Watson has backed reforms the association has fought, such as reducing mandatory minimums. 

In Clay County, Sheriff Darryl Daniels lost to Michelle Cook in the Republican primary over an abuse of power scandal that led to his arrest last week. Separately, in June, he released a video warning Black Lives Matter protesters that he would “handle” them by making “special deputies” out of the county’s gun owners.

In other closely watched primaries, the incumbent sheriffs prevailed in Broward County, Hillsborough County (Tampa), and Orange County (Orlando).

Voters set up the general election

Of the 19 judicial circuits that are electing prosecutors this year, just 6 will feature multiple candidates in November—and most of those are highly unlikely to be competitive because of how staunchly they lean toward one party or the other. 

Two districts could be competitive. In the 13th (Hillsborough County, Tampa), Democratic incumbent Andrew Warren is allied with reform DAs nationwide. He faces Republican Mike Perotti, who works at the sheriff’s office and criticized Warren for his reform outlook when he launched his bid. “Decriminalization, reduced sanctions, and justice reform cannot overshadow individual accountability and victim advocacy,” he said in a statement declaring his candidacy in February. In the 16th (Monroe County, Key West), Republican incumbent Dennis Ward faces Democrat Donald Barrett, who mentions among the reasons for his run that he is looking for alternatives to “warehousing people in jails.” But his campaign website currently provides no policy commitments. Barrett also used to work as the county’s chief deputy prosecutor under Ward.

The state’s most consequential county-level election this fall may be the sheriff’s race in swing Pinellas County (St. Petersburg). 

Republican incumbent Bob Gualtieri is a nationally prominent sheriff who has championed closer cooperation with ICE and advocated arming teachers in the wake of the Parkland High School mass shooting. On Tuesday, Democrats nominated Eliseo Santana, a former communications maintenance supervisor at the sheriff’s office, who has stressed wanting to counter the “militarization” of police and roll back Gualtieri’s assistance with federal immigration enforcement. He also said in a League of Women Voters’ questionnaire that he “agree[s] with the strategy” of reallocating funding toward social programs. “Crime does not exist in a bubble, and we need a whole-community approach to addressing it,” he writes. 

Florida is voting for all of its elected sheriffs this year, and all but one of its state attorneys.

The post Progressive Candidate Wins Orlando’s Primary for Prosecutor, and Four Other Florida Takeaways appeared first on Bolts.

The circle of progressives elected to prosecutors’ offices on platforms of cutting incarceration will gain three new members come 2021, due to elections and related events over the past week.

In Pima County (Tucson), Arizona, and Washtenaw County (Ann Arbor), Michigan, longtime chief prosecutors with punitive records retired this year, triggering competitive three-way Democratic primaries to replace them. And in both counties, the most progressive candidate prevailed on Tuesday. Although this only secures them the nomination, Laura Conover and Eli Savit are each set to win office in November since no one has filed to run against them.

“This is a movement,” Savit told The Appeal: Political Report on Wednesday. “For decades in this country, the only way you could have won a county prosecutor race was to be tough on crime. I never would have even thought of the possibility of running on a decarceral platform but for the success of these progressive prosecutors across the country.” 

In Colorado’s San Luis Valley (the 12th Judicial District), Alonzo Payne rode an endorsement from U.S. Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont to clinch the Democratic nomination in a June primary, ousting a sitting district attorney. But he had to wait until last week to find out that no one filed to run against him in the general election. 

Now virtually certain to be DA, Payne is eager to use the office to advocate for broad progressive goals like Medicare for All. He says expanding public services and fighting poverty are indispensable to ending mass incarceration. 

“The state shouldn’t be viewed as only a criminal justice system, but it should be viewed as a lever for economic justice,” he told the Political Report. “It’s all interconnected, it’s all tied together. If you don’t have a good house, you don’t have electricity, my guess is you’re involved in the criminal justice system.”

Conover, Payne, and Savit join a slate of other progressives who have already won prosecutor’s offices this year, most notably in Portland, Oregon. Still other showdowns loom in November, including in Los Angeles and Maricopa County (Phoenix), Arizona. 

Reform-minded prosecutors also defended their turf on Tuesday. St. Louis Circuit Attorney Kim Gardner and Wyandotte County DA Mark Dupree, two Black prosecutors under attack by police unions, beat back challengers. 

But the story this week was the new counties that voted in progressive candidates. 

“This is an alliance nationwide, but it has to be one county at a time and I’m so excited the movement is growing,” Savit said.

Initially associated with the nation’s biggest cities, successful efforts to overhaul the criminal legal system through the ballot box have spread to suburban and rural jurisdictions.

Payne is determined to make the most of this. “I want San Francisco and Boulder to say, how the hell did he do that in the [San Luis] Valley?,” he said. “We can get it done because we agree that people should be treated fairly regardless of their socioeconomic status, and maybe we do teach the liberal bastions how things can be done by these country bumpkins over here.” He added, “And if you’re looking for a fishbowl to put some practices in place, I’m gonna be the first person to offer ourselves up as that experiment.”

Eli Savit: Washtenaw County, Michigan

On paper, a candidate friendly to criminal justice reform may seem par for the course in this left-leaning jurisdiction that includes Ann Arbor, but Savit insists that a “tough on crime” mentality has reigned in the prosecutor’s office, fueling racial inequalities. “Washtenaw County has a reputation of being one of the most progressive counties in Michigan, and we always vote Democratic,” he said, “but if you scratch the surface of our justice system, you see some of the most pronounced inequalities in our state.” 

All three candidates touted criminal justice reform during the campaign, but meaningful policy differences emerged in their answers to policy questions from the Political Report.

Savit, for one, was the only candidate to rule out seeking a sentence of life without the possibility of parole for a minor, a sentence banned in 23 states and Washington D.C. but not Michigan.

He also committed to not request financial conditions for pretrial release. “I categorically oppose cash bail and will not seek it in any case,” he said. “One’s wealth must never play a role in their detention.”

Savit has also said he would “generally” decline to prosecute cases relating to addiction; that’s in contrast to seeking convictions and incarceration, or else pursuing diversion programs that still involve charging people for substance use. But in a follow-up, he did not provide a commitment as to the exact circumstances this “generally” covers, only stating that “pre-charge deflection is my priority.”

Savit, finally, argues for abolishing felony disenfranchisement to enable all adult citizens to vote, including from prison. 

“There’s no reason not to do so,” he said. “Folks that are serving time are quite literally under the control of the State. They deserve to have their voices heard. And there is no plausible justification for denying the franchise to those who are serving time. It’s not a public-safety risk, it doesn’t offer a deterrent to crime, and it doesn’t promote rehabilitation.”

Savit’s two opponents shared this position—rare unanimity on this issue in a DA election, though a growing number of prosecutors, let alone other public officials, are now embracing this view.

Payne, the incoming Colorado DA, agrees as well. “A person is a person and a vote is a vote, and every person should have a vote,” he said.

Alonzo Payne: San Luis Valley, Colorado

In talking to Payne about his goals as a DA, it is immediately apparent he is eying a big picture in which mass incarceration cannot be fixed without economic programs that target poverty.

“The biggest thing out there is poverty, people are broke” he said when asked what about the criminal legal system made him run. “I’m looking forward to providing some sort of justice to the people that I’ve grown up with.” 

That perspective shaped all of his answers, for instance on bail reform. “You’re not going to run anywhere [if you are released pretrial],” he said of the arguments that imposing bonds is needed due to flight risk. “Good Lord, you barely have enough to pay your electricity bill.”

The 12th District includes a set of small rural counties in Colorado’s San Luis Valley, a region that faces major economic difficulties and high rates of poverty. 

After he received Sanders’s endorsement, Payne says, he was submerged by “more donations that I knew I would be able to use during a campaign,” and he is now looking to donate leftover funds to Move Mountain, a local nonprofit.

He makes the case that the staple proposals of Sanders’s presidential platform, such as universal health care—“I mean, you can go beyond Bernie, and basic income,” he added—are necessary to “solve those social issues that brought [individuals] to the criminal justice system. If you’re not looking at the seeds that cause the problem, you’re always gonna have wheat.”

Laura Conover: Pima County, Arizona

Conover, a former public defender and criminal defense attorney, secured the Democratic nomination on Tuesday in Pima County, Arizona’s second most populous jurisdiction. Here again, no one else is running in the fall.

Conover and Jonathan Mosher, a longtime deputy prosecutor who was her main opponent, both touted their support for reform during the campaign. But Meg O’Connor reported last week on a series of discrepancies between Mosher’s record and campaign positions. Moreover, Mosher ran with the support of Barbara LaWall, the incumbent Democratic prosecutor. Over her 24 years in office, LaWall pursued punitive policies toward drug offenses and sought the death penalty.

Conover’s win marks a break from LaWall’s politics. She has pledged to never seek the death penalty, which would be a significant turnaround from LaWall’s approach. Conover was an organizer with the the Coalition of Arizonans to Abolish the Death Penalty in the 1990s.

Conover has also said she would decline to prosecute cases of marijuana possession, and she indicated that she wished to reduce the prosecution of “low-level, victimless” offenses, such as drug paraphernalia or sex work. 

But when pressed by the Political Report, Conover declined to offer a firm commitment that she would not charge such offenses, as a growing number of victorious progressive candidates have done, only saying she would “deprioritize” them. Similarly, she said she would move away from some of LaWall’s charging and sentencing practices that trigger harsh sentences, but did not express a categorical policy against them, signaling they may still be used.

The biggest change may be in the politics Conover brings to statewide debates; She has committed to fight for statutory changes that would reduce incarceration, whereas LaWall steadfastly lobbied against sentencing reform in the state legislature and helped sink even bipartisan reforms. 

Conover also leaned into her defense background and past experience as an advocate to make the case that she was the most credible candidate for advancing criminal justice reform. “They need a person from outside to shift that culture,” she told the Political Report last week.

None of Conover, Payne, and Savit have worked in a prosecutor’s office before.

Explore our coverage of other DA elections nationwide.

The post Progressives Score New Wins in Prosecutor Elections, Adding to the Movement’s Breadth appeared first on Bolts.

But the year’s most condensed stretch of primary elections with direct stakes for the criminal legal systems is coming up this week.

Arizona, Kansas, Michigan, and Missouri finish voting on Tuesday, and Tennessee on Thursday. Hawaii’s elections end on Saturday. In that stretch, we will know if Sheriff Joe Arpaio completed the first step of his comeback bid in Arizona’s Maricopa County, if the St. Louis and Detroit prosecutors secured new terms, if roughly 270,000 people in Missouri gained Medicaid access, and much more.

The Appeal: Political Report has published primers on six of these races. Here’s a recap to prepare for what is ahead this week—and a bonus overview of three other elections that are worth watching on Tuesday.

Missouri: A public initiative could expand Medicaid and curb the overdose crisis

Amendment 2 | Aug. 4

Missouri voters will decide on Aug. 4 whether to expand the state’s Medicaid program under the Affordable Care Act, which could grant public health insurance to an additional 270,000 state residents. (Oklahomans narrowly approved a similar initiative in June.) If Amendment 2 passes, Missouri could take a new approach to the overdose crisis by “steering more resources toward treatment programs that can counter criminalization,” Zachary Siegel reports in The Appeal: Political Report. “A high percentage of people incarcerated have a substance use disorder diagnosis and could benefit from treatment instead of going to jail.”

Read Zachary Siegel in The Appeal: Political Report.

Maricopa County, Arizona: The terrain is rapidly changing in a bastion of punitive politics

County attorney | Aug. 4 (Democratic primary)

A string of public officials have made Maricopa County, home to Phoenix and to nearly 4.5 million people, one of the nation’s bastions of carceral politics. But now Democrats have the chance to flip the prosecutor’s office and to overhaul the county’s sentencing and charging practices. The Aug. 4 Democratic primary is only the first act in this election, since the winner will then face the Republican incumbent, Alistair Adel, in November. But the result will determine the stakes of the general election, since the three Democratic candidates are laying out reform proposals of varying scope.

Julie Gunnigle, a former prosecutor, and Will Knight, a former public defender, have vowed to end some of the harshest charging and sentencing practices; Knight is the only candidate to commit to decline to prosecute all personal drug possession cases, and to advocate for shrinking the resources of the prosecutor’s office in a bid to shrink the criminal legal system.

Read Meg O’Connor’s primer on the candidate’s platforms, and her reporting on Gunnigle’s background as a prosecutor.

Pima County, Arizona: A battle over whether the prosecutor’s office needs an outsider

County attorney | Aug. 4 (Democratic primary)

During her 24 years as the chief prosecutor of Pima County, Barbara LaWall pursued punitive policies and helped fill state prisons. She is stepping down this year. Whether that coincides with policies more amenable to criminal justice reform remains to be seen. Three Democrats are running to replace her, and they are debating how their professional backgrounds shape their credibility to overhaul criminal justice in Pima County. Two candidates are longtime prosecutors; a third is a former public defender who is highlighting that experience as a strength. “They need a person from outside to shift that culture,” she said.

Read Meg O’Connor in The Appeal: Political Report. 

Wayne County, Michigan (Detroit): A stark contrast on whether children should be sentenced to life without parole

Prosecutor | Aug. 4 (Democratic primary)

Twenty-three states have banned sentences of life without the possibility of parole for children, but in Michigan these remain common. Now they are defining the prosecutor’s election in Wayne County. Longtime incumbent Kym Worthy has taken a hardline approach, while her challenger in the Democratic primary, Victoria Burton-Harris, has vowed to fight for the resentencing of all juvenile lifers currently in prison. Burton-Harris has also vowed to make a slate of other changes, including not using sentencing enhancements, not prosecuting simple drug possession cases, and never charging overdoses as homicides.

Read Kira Lerner in The Appeal: Political Report.

St. Louis, Missouri: A prosecutor faces voters after years of attacks from the police union

Circuit attorney | Aug. 4 (Democratic primary)

Kim Gardner won the St. Louis prosecutor’s race in 2016 on a platform of holding the police more accountable. Since then, she has sustained continual fire from the local police union and from Missouri’s Republican officials. In the Aug. 4 Democratic primary, she faces a rematch against a former prosecutor whom she defeated four years ago, but a lot has changed in the intervening years. “Nationwide political shifts toward criminal justice reform have emboldened activists to expect more from Gardner, and they have pushed [her opponent, Mary Pat Carl] to soften her language compared to 2016,” Rachel Cohen reports. “Still, local activists view this race as a referendum on the fierce pushback that Gardner has faced.”

Read Rachel Cohen in The Appeal: Political Report. 

Honolulu County, Hawaii: Open prosecutor race could flip the state’s punitive culture

Prosecutor | Aug. 8

Keith Kaneshiro, Honolulu’s chief prosecutor, has a history of derailing criminal justice reform, but he is not seeking re-election due to a major corruption scandal. This has opened the door to an upheaval in the state’s criminal justice politics. The seven candidates vying to replace him differ sharply on whether they would change this punitive culture; one has called for the state to overhaul policies that fuel mass incarceration. Jacquie Esser hopes Honolulu will join the nationwide wave of counties that have been electing public defenders as decarceral prosecutors, and her platform echoes that of Chesa Boudin, who became San Francisco’s DA in January. The Aug. 8 elections will likely decide the two candidates who move to a November runoff.

Read The Appeal: Political Report’s primer.

Bonus: Also watch these three Aug. 4 races

Maricopa County, Arizona | Sheriff (Republican primary)

Will Joe Arpaio complete the first step of his attempted comeback? As Maricopa County sheriff for 24 years—from 1993 until losing a bid for re-election in 2016—Joe Arpaio detained people in horrid conditions that were continually denounced for human rights abuses. He held immigrants outdoors, often in blistering heat and in chain gangs, or in a facility known as Tent City that he called a “concentration camp.” He oversaw a string of gruesome jail deaths. And he assisted federal immigration enforcement, conducting street patrols that courts and government reports found amounted to systematic racial profiling. After Arpaio ignored rulings that he must stop racial profiling, a judge found him guilty of contempt of court. But President Trump pardoned him in 2017. Arpaio, who lost his re-election bid in 2016, is now attempting a comeback. On Aug. 4, he faces a GOP primary against two opponents (Mike Crawford and Jerry Sheridan, his former deputy). The GOP nominee will then face Sheriff Paul Penzone, the Democrat who ousted Arpaio four years ago and then promptly undid his signature policies, including closing Tent City and restricting cooperation with ICE.

Douglas County, Kansas (Lawrence) | Prosecutor (Democratic primary)

A defense attorney, Cooper Overstreet, is running for DA in Lawrence, Kansas, against longtime incumbent Charles Branson, Akela Lacy reports in The Intercept. The differences between the candidates are on full display in the prosecutor’s office’s treatment of a 2014 murder case, Katie Moore and Katie Bernard report in the Kansas City Star.

Washtenaw County, Michigan (Ann Arbor) | Prosecutor (Democratic primary)

Three Democrats are vying to replace Ann Arbor’s retiring prosecutor in the Aug. 4 primary, which will also determine who wins in November. All three promise to change county practices, but disagreements emerged in the policy questions the Political Report asked them. Eli Savit said he would never seek life without parole for minors; his two opponents, Hugo Mack and Arianne Slay, left the door open to such charges. Savit also said he would “generally” decline to prosecute cases relating to addiction rather than pursue diversion programs within the criminal legal system (but he did not provide a commitment as to the exact circumstances this “generally” covers). And he vowed to never seek cash bail, which his opponents say runs counter Michigan’s current statutes on pretrial detention, which they say they favor reforming. Of interest: All three said they favored abolishing criminal disenfranchisement and not stripping people of the right to vote, including when they are prison—rare unanimity on this issue in a DA election, though a growing number of prosecutors are embracing this view.

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Stay tuned for Florida’s Aug. 18 elections, and explore our ongoing coverage of the 2020 local elections.

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