Soon after Tyre Nichols’s brutal killing by Memphis police officers in January, the chairman of the city’s civilian review board, James Kirkwood, appealed to the city council to strengthen its oversight of police. “If you slap someone on the wrist for something they’ve done wrong, then covered it up and left it alone, they’re going to do it again,” Kirkwood, a pastor and former police officer, told the council, requesting more money, more staff, and more power to conduct independent investigations. 

Instead, what little power the board did have may soon vanish, as the Tennessee legislature draws closer to gutting civilian oversight over police in Memphis and other cities in the state.

Introduced in late January by GOP lawmakers, just weeks after Nichols’s death, Senate Bill 591 and House Bill 764 would dissolve community-led oversight boards in Memphis and Nashville, ending their ongoing investigations by the close of July and precluding the possibility of other cities establishing boards with similar powers. 

“This bill essentially strips away police accountability in our state, at the height of a police killing that was so tragic and brutal,” said Jill Fitcheard, the director of Nashville’s Civilian Oversight Board. “These state legislators want to cut away oversight and police accountability and dwindle it down until it’s nothing.”

The Republican legislature’s latest assault on Memphis and Nashville, the state’s two most populous cities, comes just weeks after its headline-grabbing expulsion of two young Black lawmakers, Memphis’s Justin Pearson and Nashville’s Justin Jones, for leading a gun control protest on the House floor. The state government has engaged in a series of other maneuvers in recent months to interfere with self-governance in Tennessee’s bluer and more diverse cities. 

The new bills would still allow local governments to set up what they call “police advisory review committees,” but local advocates and the Memphis and Nashville boards’ leaders—both former law enforcement officials—denounce these replacements as impotent. They would not be able to conduct independent investigations or take quick action on misconduct, and their members would no longer be appointed by community groups. 

“The new law takes away robust investigative power from the committee and sends it back to internal affairs and the respective local governments,” said Sekou Franklin, a professor of political science at Middle Tennessee State University. “So the police would basically investigate themselves.”

The timing of this legislation stings particularly in Memphis, where advocates had hoped that the national spotlight after Nichols’s killing would spur long-needed changes to the way the city polices and prosecutes its residents, including to the city’s decades-old civilian review process. And it threatens to erase hard-won gains in Nashville, where years of struggle and coalition building led to a successful 2018 voter referendum establishing a board made up primarily of community-nominated members with the ability to issue policy recommendations. 

“This is what the people want,” said Sheila Clemmons Lee, the mother of Jocques Clemmons, whose killing at the hands of a Nashville officer sparked the movement for community oversight there. “If you go back and look, see how many people came out to vote on this, plus the signatures that we had gathered for it—[this new legislation] is just saying that our voices don’t matter.”

In Memphis, renewed attention to police oversight after Tyre Nichols’s murder

Memphis’s Civilian Law Enforcement Review Board (CLERB) has been around since 1994, but it has often been condemned as underfunded and ineffective. In that, it’s hardly an outlier—many civilian review boards across the country, even those with more enumerated powers, struggle to achieve effective oversight of police. Barry Friedman, an attorney and scholar who published a 2022 report on civilian oversight boards, told Bolts in January that most boards are more symbolic than effective. All but six boards lack disciplinary authority. 

In 2020, then-law professor Steve Mulroy wrote an article in Memphis Lawyer urging the mayor to issue an executive order requiring the Memphis Police Department to cooperate with CLERB and ultimately comply with its directives. His recommendations weren’t followed. Two years later, Mulroy was elected district attorney of Shelby County, ousting the incumbent prosecutor on promises of reform, and he now finds himself tasked with dealing with a department whose deep-rooted problems have been exposed to the entire nation. The Department of Justice recently announced a review of Memphis’s policing practices, and they may be considering a comprehensive “pattern and practice” investigation as well.

Mulroy’s office swiftly moved to prosecute the Memphis police officers responsible for Nichols’s death, and he has continued to call for stronger civilian oversight, telling Bolts in February, “we need comprehensive CLERB reform.”

Cardell Orrin, executive director of the Tennessee branch of Stand For Children, has also criticized CLERB for its many shortcomings. He believes many people who file lawsuits against the Memphis police department aren’t even bothering to take their case to CLERB, given its low number of yearly investigations (Memphis looked into just five cases in 2022, to Nashville’s 102.) “Of course, all of that is moot if the state takes away any ability even to have citizen oversight of police departments,” he told Bolts. 

The introduction of the legislation that would abolish existing community review boards had shifted the goalposts: now, instead of pushing for stronger CLERB powers, advocates are left pleading for the preservation of any oversight at all. 

“It’s better to have the structure in place,” Orrin said, noting that CLERB could look very different under a mayor who was more willing to implement policies like the ones Mulroy had proposed. “If you get rid of it you don’t even have the option.” 

“It’s a walk in the wrong direction,” Kirkwood, who spent three decades in the Memphis Police Department before his retirement in 2017, told Bolts of the legislation. If only CLERB were adequately staffed, funded, and empowered to investigate and recommend changes to the department’s practices, “we could really do a whole lot,” he said. “I think our city deserves that.” 

“You give a lot of authority to these men and women when you put this badge on,” Kirkwood reflected. “And they can take freedom, they can take life, they can take peace from individuals. They can cause a lot of harm with the authority that you’ve given them—and that authority needs to always be in a place where it can be checked. Not just by police but also by the citizens.” 

In Nashville, a hard-won civilian oversight board under threat

Before Nashville’s civilian oversight board was established, all complaints about police conduct were routed through the Nashville police department’s Office of Professional Accountability, akin to an Internal Affairs department. Clemmons Lee told Bolts that hundreds of allegations of misconduct and brutality went unaddressed every year, with the office ruling against the vast majority of complainants. “All of these incidents was just scooted to the side,” she said. “You know, it is what it is. It’s just the police. No, it’s not. These are lives we’re talking about.”

In 2017, the death of Clemmons Lee’s son Jocques at the hands of a white police officer renewed long-standing calls for civilian oversight in Nashville. “It was a very brutal fight,” recalled Franklin, who was closely involved. “Our city council didn’t want it…two mayors opposed it. We had to build coalitions with veterans groups, immigrant groups, human rights groups, Jewish groups, Muslim groups.”

As the resulting group, Community Oversight Now, organized, the fatal shooting of another black man—Daniel Hambrick—by another white officer further galvanized the effort. “We knocked on doors, we held town halls and meetings trying to educate people about the Community Oversight Board,” Clemmons Lee told Bolts. “And the people listened.” After a successful petition drive, a measure to establish a civilian oversight board was put on the ballot, and on November 6, 2018, it passed with 59 percent of the vote. 

The result: a robust board with 11 members, seven of whom must be nominated by community organizations or grassroots petitions—one of the most important components of effective civilian oversight boards, according to a 2016 paper by Udi Ofer, who then led the ACLU of New Jersey. The COB also enjoys a number of other qualities that Ofer highlights as critical to the success of such boards, including independent investigatory powers, and the ability to conduct audits and make policy recommendations, many of which the police department has accepted. 

The board lacks some important powers, such as the ability to discipline officers, and it still has its work cut out for it. “Even with all of that taking place we’ve had a slew of police shootings and killings in Nashville, but the COB has probably prevented more police violence,” said Franklin. “A lot of that could be undone.” 

“Once this oversight board is eliminated and [if] there’s no legal action—It will probably take decades to do something significant around police reform in the city of Nashville,” he added.

The Tennessee legislature continues to target its major cities

Nashville’s board has been under threat since before it was established. The city’s police union first took issue with the number of signatures on the petition, then sued to overturn the 2018 referendum’s results, in a case that they appealed all the way to the Tennessee Supreme Court. They lost each time.

“We faced so many different hurdles,” Franklin said. “And then—the one avenue that they have access to that we don’t have is state lawmakers.” 

In 2019, the Tennessee legislature took up the fight, removing subpoena powers from the board. (Now, only the city council can compel witnesses to testify on behalf of the boards). In 2021, it required board members to complete a police academy course or risk losing their voting power. Pretty much since its inception, Fitcheard said, Nashville’s board has been “plagued with this cloud of legislation takeover.”

The new bills’ sponsors, Republican Representative Elaine Davis and Republican Senator Mark Pody, neither of whom represent either Memphis or Nashville, have said they want to standardize oversight procedures across the state. But Pody has also said that police feel like they are “under a microscope” under the current system. And both Pody and another supporter have made vague claims about oversight board members abusing their power but have not provided specifics. In a recent senate committee hearing, Senator Richard Briggs, a Republican from Knoxville, alleged that Tennessee Bureau of Investigations (TBI) Director David Rausch had told him that board members were interfering with crime scenes and that the bill would allow the TBI to “gather all the evidence without it being interfered with or contaminated by these outside boards.” 

“It startled me,” Fitcheard told Bolts, to hear these allegations repeated by multiple sources given that no one had ever contacted her about them. “It was just fabricated, it’s not true.” Her lawyer reached out to Rausch asking for specifics, but received no response. 

Bolts reached out to Pody, Briggs, and TBI Director Rausch to inquire about these allegations and request any available evidence that the events described took place. Pody and Briggs’ offices did not respond. Rausch’s office confirmed that a conversation between Briggs and Rausch took place, but would neither confirm the content of the conversation nor offer a response to any of Bolts’ other questions. 

This legislation is progressing through a legislature that has been especially zealous in intervening in the local governance of its major cities, actions that one Nashville lawmaker called an “attack on democracy” in an interview with Bolts last month. This move comes on top of a recently-passed bill cutting the size of Nashville’s metro council by half, and a tabled bill that would have ended runoffs in local elections, which could have hampered Democratic candidates in the majority-liberal Nashville and Memphis. 

“How far can a state body go before it clearly starts to infringe upon the rights of the citizenry in localities?” Orrin asked. “And, you know, that’s a question at some point for the courts to decide.” (Nashville is currently suing over the attempt to halve its council). 

This state-level preemption of local governments isn’t unique to Tennessee. The Local Solutions Support Center, a national organization that aims to strengthen local democracy, has tallied over 600 preemptive bills across all 50 states that it deems “abusive”—instances of states using their power to overrule local governments and shut down legislation around such issues as abortion, housing, voting rights, and now, police oversight. LSSC attributes much of this push to the American Legislative Exchange Council, the right-wing group of lobbyists and legislators known for replicating identical legislation in states across the country. (ALEC, for instance, is behind many of the country’s critical infrastructure laws, which Bolts reported on earlier this month.) 

The Tennessee legislature’s actions also appear to be largely retaliatory. The expulsion of Pearson and Jones, the lawmaker duo dubbed “The Justins,” came after the two young lawmakers led a gun control protest in the wake of a mass shooting in Nashville. Nashville politicians have complained that the bill targeting the council is a response to local lawmakers’ refusal to host the 2024 Republican convention. To Orrin, the timing of the civilian oversight legislation, introduced so soon after Tyre Nichols’s death, felt like a deliberate attempt to shut down the police accountability that Memphis residents were demanding. “Clearly it was because of the questions that were raised,” he said. 

The bill that would abolish civilian oversight of police is now on the verge of becoming law. It has already passed the Senate 26-5 and is currently moving through House committees. If the bill passes the House, where Republicans enjoy a large majority, it would head to the desk of Tennessee’s governor, Republican Bill Lee, who has signed the bills weakening the state’s oversight boards in past sessions.

“They’ll continue to get away with murder”

Activists don’t have to look far for evidence of what may soon change with the bill’s passage. The legislation would authorize cities to retain some police committees—whether they choose to convert their existing stronger boards within 90 days to fit the bill’s far weaker requirements, or create a new body later on. And its sponsors say that they are modeling these new bodies off of Knoxville’s existing police review committee.

Kirkwood and Fitcheard both said that Knoxville’s model, which was established in 1998, is outdated and insufficient to the task. “Policing has changed greatly since then,” said Fitcheard. Moreover, she said, “They haven’t been funded well.” She added, “Up until the last few years, it just had one person reviewing complaints. So how effective is that?” (Nashville’s board receives over $2 million annually and has several full-time staff). 

According to the bill’s most recent version, the new boards would need to have members who are appointed by the mayor rather than community residents. They would not be allowed to investigate any incidents that occurred before Jan. 1, 2023, meaning that some currently open cases would never receive any conclusion or closure. And even for incidents after that date, obstacles to accountability would accumulate. 

The committees would be prohibited from taking up cases before all other avenues—Internal Affairs investigations, civil suits, and criminal cases—were completed. Given the yearslong delay this would entail, Kirkwood told Bolts, “a complainant probably would walk away.”

And when a committee does complete an investigation, it would boomerang back to the local police department’s Internal Affairs. In Nashville, the office is run by a woman who, in her previous job as an assistant DA in Nashville, failed to disclose potentially exculpatory evidence in a murder case against a teenager—in this case, that a central witness for the prosecution was arrested with the murder weapon in his possession. 

Clemmons Lee contemplated a future Nashville without its civilian oversight board. “It’s gonna get worse,” she said. “They’ll continue to get away with murder after murder after murder after murder.”

The post “Our Voices Don’t Matter”: Tennessee Moves to Gut Police Oversight appeared first on Bolts.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Still, Moses believed she was eligible to have her rights restored. She sought guidance from the probation office and received written confirmation that she was indeed eligible. But Tennessee’s rules for restoring voting rights are so dizzyingly complicated that even state workers get it wrong. In fact, Tennessee had banned Moses from voting for life. And after Moses followed a probation officer’s bad guidance and tried to register to vote, prosecutors threw the book at her.

Shelby County DA Amy Weirich took Moses to trial for illegally registering to vote, and then trumpeted her conviction and sentence when a Memphis judge sent Moses to prison for six years in January. The case sparked an outcry after The Guardian revealed that the state had given Moses faulty guidance and had already identified its error at the time of the conviction. The judge pointed to prosecutors’ failure to disclose evidence showing that Moses had been misled to order a new trial and Weirich then announced that she would drop the charges. 

“Nobody, including Pam Moses, should ever face criminal charges for attempting to restore their voting rights,” Tikeila Rucker, an organizer with the group Memphis for All, told Bolts. “How or why DA Weirich sent a community activist, advocate, and voting rights activist to jail for six years is incomprehensible.”

To Rucker, Moses’s prosecution was an effort to suppress democracy in the county’s Black community. “Moses is an example to the people: don’t you have the audacity to fight for change, to be the change, to step up against authority,” Rucker said. “That right there is the subliminal message.”

Moses also believes that she was targeted due to her race, political beliefs, and public activism on behalf of Black Lives Matter. “I think that the goal was to scare people,” she told Bolts shortly after being released in March, “but it could boomerang.”

Whether the aggressive prosecution of Moses boomerangs for Weirich will be tested on Thursday, when voters will decide whether to keep her in office.

Weirich, a Republican, faces Democratic nominee Steven Mulroy, with the winner securing an eight-year term. Although Shelby County leans blue, Tennessee holds the general election for county offices over the summer, and lower turnout could scramble expectations. In addition, many residents like Moses remain barred from voting.

Mulroy, who beat two other Democrats in the party’s primary in early May, is a fixture in local politics, having served as a county commissioner from 2006 to 2014. Now a law professor at the University of Memphis, he is running for on a platform that emphasizes criminal justice reform. In candidate questionnaires and media interviews, he has pledged a slate of changes to local practices—including working to reduce pretrial detention, decreasing the transfer of minors into adult court, and prosecuting fewer lower-level offenses like drug possession.

These are all major issues in Shelby County, a majority-Black county of more than 900,000 residents. Local advocates have denounced local bail practices as discriminatory and unconstitutional, and a report released last year by a court-appointed inspector documented that people are held pretrial in the county jail “for months or years.” Moreover, Shelby County prosecutes far more children as adults than other counties in Tennessee, a process that is initiated by the DA’s office, and nearly all of the youth transferred to adult court are Black. (The rate was 97 percent in 2018 and 95 percent in 2019, according to The Memphis Flyer, compared to an overall county population that is 54 percent Black.)

Shortly after Moses was released from prison in March, a coalition of local advocates, including members of Memphis for All and Just Audit, called for a racial equity audit of Weirich’s office. 

“The reality is that disparate treatment of the Black community is continuing to take place and has taken place for far too long,” said Rucker, who is also demanding an audit. 

Andrea Woods, an attorney at the ACLU who has criticized bail practices in Shelby County, told Bolts that the harsh prosecution of Pamela Moses offers a window to how Weirich’s office approaches other cases. “Fundamentally, it’s symptomatic of a county where the DA is over-prosecuting and criminalizing Black people,” Woods said. “There’s rampant overcriminalization and racial disparities, which the DA is a key driver of.”

Weirich’s campaign did not respond to questions about Moses’s case and her broader record as DA. She has said elsewhere that the fault lies with the Tennessee Department of Correction (TDOC) rather than by her office, and that her staff was unaware that the TDOC had acknowledged the mistake. “When reporters or political opportunists use the word ‘state’ they need to be crystal clear that the error was made by the TDOC and not any attorney or officer in the office of the Shelby County District Attorney,” she said in a statement after Moses’s conviction was overturned.

Mulroy, who says Moses should have not been prosecuted for registering in the first place, says Weirich’s handling of the case “fits a pattern.” “Overcharging and overreach is a theme with this prosecutor and has been for many years,” he told Bolts in a phone interview. “Pile on as many duplicative charges as possible to intimidate the defendants into a guilty plea that they might otherwise nor feel comfortable agreeing to.” 

Mulroy says Weirich’s actions in Moses’s case also exemplify her predilection to impose a “trial penalty,” where prosecutors seek steep punishment if defendants don’t accept the initial plea deal offered. Weirich significantly ratcheted up the prison sentence she sought against Moses after Moses refused Weirich’s offer to plead guilty. “I gave her a chance to plead to a misdemeanor with no prison time,” Weirich said in February. “She requested a jury trial instead. She set this unfortunate result in motion and a jury of her peers heard the evidence and convicted her.” Mulroy says jumping from an offer with no prison time to seeking a sentence of six years is retaliation. “That’s not justice,” he told Bolts.

Under the state’s byzantine rules, it can be tricky for Tennessee residents who have lost the right to vote to determine whether they’re eligible to have them restored, and how to go about it. Tennessee is among just eleven states that does not automatically restore voting rights when people complete a sentence, and this places a heavy burden on them. The U.S. Department of Justice’s guide to rights restoration, released earlier this year, includes a three-page flow chart to help Tennesseans figure out their rights; rules vary based on the date of conviction, whether the conviction includes the word “infamous,” and the exact charge of conviction. Tennesseans who have lost the right to vote must also pay off all court debt to regain the right. 

“You add all of that up, and you ask a layman to figure it out, and it’s pretty darn hard,” Mulroy said. “I studied this for a living and even I find them confusing.”

Mulroy indeed practices and teaches election law—an unusual background for a DA candidate, but one that has become very relevant in the race. He is an advocate for ranked-choice voting, has helped file lawsuits to expand voting rights, for instance to facilitate mail-in voting during the pandemic, and recently wrote a book on the topic. He told Bolts that he thinks this experience is relevant to his seeking the DA’s position given how criminal law is wielded to decide whether people are allowed to vote. 

“The Pamela Moses case is a perfect example of the intersection between the two,” he said. “We have a racialized criminal justice system.”

Other states also have a maze of complicated restoration rules that threaten steep criminal consequences over errors, and zealous prosecutors threaten to ensnare people who make mistakes, like Crystal Mason, a Texas woman who wrongly thought she could vote while still on probation and was targeted by a conservative local prosecutor for casting a provisional ballot that wasn’t counted. This is a strong dynamic in Tennessee due to the large numbers of people who have lost their rights. Roughly 450,000 Tennesseans were barred from voting in 2020, according to the Sentencing Project; 39 percent of them were Black, compared to an overall state population that is 17 percent Black. Many more who are eligible to vote may not know it or worry about pursuing the option because of the example Weirich set with Moses. 

“It does instill fear in the citizens when harsh laws are passed that criminalize what could be innocent behavior,” Linda Harris, a Memphis attorney who ran in the Democratic primary for DA and lost to Mulroy, told Bolts. 

“What we’re talking about is individuals …who want to vote, they want a part of selecting other leaders,” Harris said. “So why is that a crime? Why is it a crime for people to want to vote? I don’t understand it.”

Mulroy says that, if elected, he would try to counter any chilling effect felt by residents who are unsure about their eligibility. “If I were DA, people should not worry about having their right to vote killed or intimidated by a prosecutor who is looking for ways to prosecute voters,” he said. “If a person is honestly unsure, and thinks they have a good faith basis for thinking that they can register or they can vote, then they won’t have to worry about being prosecuted if it turns out they’re wrong.” 

He also criticized the felony disenfranchisement laws at the heart of Moses’s case, as well as other voter restrictions championed by state Republicans like voter ID rules.  “We’re really just preventing huge numbers of people from voting who should be allowed to vote,” he said. 

But Mulroy also did not rule out prosecuting people for registering to vote when ineligible, only saying that ”these kinds of crimes” would be a “very low priority” for his office. He told Bolts that DAs shouldn’t rule out whole categories of charges, as they should consider individual circumstances. He has also said he worries that making categorical promises would invite state Republicans to intervene and transfer cases to other prosecutors. 

He has staked similar positions on the death penalty and abortion. “It is definitely the case that it would be a very low priority for me,” he told The Daily Memphian about prosecuting abortion cases. “Prosecutors should never say never, in large part because there’s a Tennessee law that would allow for the appointment of an independent prosecutor and basically stripping jurisdiction over that class of offenses away from the DA. But also just as a general prudential matter, DAs should not be in the habit of overruling things or ruling things out forever in the abstract.” He has also criticized Weirich for lobbying for harsher laws on reproductive rights.

On Thursday, Shelby County voters will decide the practices of the DA’s office and decide these major issues. And yet thousands of residents will be barred from participating because of their past entanglements with those same systems. Moses herself is permanently prohibited from voting, but she has called people to action, telling Bolts, “If you can’t get your right [to vote] back, support the people who are going to Nashville pushing for laws to be changed, show up with them: There’s strength in numbers.”

The post Tennessee DA Faces Voters, Months After Prosecuting Activist for Wanting to Vote appeared first on Bolts.

This guide walks you through how concretely the 2022 midterms will shape abortion access. 

We identify nine questions that touch on reproductive rights that state and local elections will decide, and the critical battles that will help answer them. The guide successively covers the meaning of state constitutions, the viability of new laws, and matters of law enforcement.

This guide is just one small slice. The elections mentioned, which cover 21 states, are by no means exhaustive: There are many other races playing out along similar lines for offices that will wield power over these issues for years to come. Still, we hope to give you a taste of the enormous range of powers held by state and local officials, and some of the ways that candidates on all sides are getting creative in how they’d use these in the wake of the Dobbs decision.

What are the candidates running for prosecutor saying in your county, if there’s an election? What about those running for sheriff and attorney general, governor and judge? The very need to ask these questions underscores the magnitude of the loss of federal protections, though local and state conflicts over the issue are by no means new; and that means many candidates already have long histories and some ideas when it comes to how they will approach abortion access.

1. Will voters affirm or reject state constitutional protections for abortion access?

Never have there been more referendums on abortion than this year. In six states, voters will weigh in directly on the issue, and more indirectly in a seventh, and the results could establish new bulwarks against the right’s efforts—or else open the door to new restrictions.

These stakes are clear in: Kansas’s August referendum… 

In a landmark ruling that’s now styming Kansas conservatives, the Kansas Supreme Court ruled in 2019 that the state constitution’s equal protection clause protects access to abortion. But voters will soon decide whether to adopt a constitutional amendment, championed by Republicans, that would overturn that ruling and lift its protections; the election is scheduled for the lower-turnout August primary. 

… and a likely Michigan referendum in November.

Pro-choice organizers in Michigan this week submitted more than 700,000 signatures on behalf of a constitutional amendment that would enshrine abortion rights, far more than the amount needed to get the measure on November’s ballot. If enough signatures are verified, voters will decide the fate of the state’s pre-Roe abortion ban. A progressive win here would be one of Election Night’s defining stories since it would protect access to abortion in a populous swing state, one where governance has long been out of reach for Democrats due to GOP gerrymanders. (That may change this year too.)

Also keep an eye on:

California and Vermont already enable access to abortions, but this fall they could become the first states to explicitly codify the right to abortion and contraception in their state constitutions. 

Inversely, Kentucky conservatives are championing an amendment that would say that the state constitution provides no protections for abortion. Kentucky courts have not affirmed such a right, so this referendum would not overturn existing protections. Still, pro-choice groups have asked judges to do so; that door would all but close if the amendment passed. In Montana, voters may decide that a fetus born alive counts as a legal person. Finally, and more indirectly, Alaska holds a referendum, as it does every ten years, on whether to hold a constitutional convention that may change the state constitution; this matters because the Alaska Supreme Court has ruled that the state constitution’s privacy clause protects abortion access, and some conservatives who favor an abortion ban in Alaska hope for a ‘yes’ win to overturn that precedent.

2. Will new state judges affirm abortion rights, or strike down abortion protections?

State supreme courts are critical battlegrounds for reproductive rights. Nearly a dozen have established that their state constitutions recognize abortion rights. But that landscape is in flux as progressive and conservative litigators aim for new rulings. Upcoming judicial elections will tip the scales in many states; most states elect supreme court justices this year.

These stakes are clear in: Michigan’s supreme court elections…

Governor Gretchen Whitmer and pro-choice organizations want Michigan courts to strike down the state’s pre-Roe ban and find a right to access abortions in the state constitution; the state’s supreme court has yet to rule, and its makeup is a question mark. Democrats enjoy a 4-3 majority on the court, but one justice from each party (Richard Bernstein, a Democrat, and Brian Zahra, a Republican) is up for re-election. Republicans must carry both seats to flip the court.

… and a supreme court election in Montana.

Montana’s supreme court, unlike Michigan’s, has already affirmed that the state constitution protects abortion. But conservatives are asking the high court to overturn that ruling—at the same time as they’re working to push the bench further right. In a heated judicial election this fall, they are backing Jim Brown, a former counsel for the state’s Republican Party, over Justice Ingrid Gayle Gustafson, an incumbent who was appointed by a Democratic governor. 

Also keep an eye on:

The partisan majority of supreme courts is on the line in three other states—Illinois, North Carolina, and Ohio—with a combined seven elections between them. These races may be decisive in future cases that touch on abortion rights. Of the three, North Carolina stands out: Abortion remains legal there but the situation could rapidly shift if the GOP makes further gains (see below), making it critical for Democrats to maintain their supreme court majority.

In Kentucky, pro-choice advocates hope to get courts to affirm a right to abortion in the state constitution but a fervently anti-abortion lawmaker is running for a seat on the supreme court. Similarly, conservatives hope to oust a moderate supreme court justice in Arkansas. Finally, eleven justices face retention elections (meaning a yes-or-no vote on whether they should stay in office) in Florida and Kansas, where state jurisprudence is especially fragile right now.

See also: Your State-By-State Guide to the 2022 Supreme Court Elections

3. Will states elect governors who will veto new abortion restrictions?

In some places where abortion remains legal, all that’s standing between virulently anti-abortion legislatures and new restrictions is the veto pen of a pro-choice governor. But for how long?

The stakes are clear in: Pennsylvania’s governor race.

Abortion rights have survived in this state despite Roe’s fall because the GOP legislature has to deal with the veto power of Governor Tom Wolf, a Democrat who supports abortion rights. But this status-quo is precarious: Wolf is term-limited and Republicans have nominated far-right lawmaker Doug Mastriano, who has long fought access to abortion, to replace him. The contrast is stark between Mastriano and the Democratic nominee, Attorney General Josh Shapiro, who has opposed new abortion restrictions for decades.

Also keep an eye on:

The Democratic governors of Kansas and Michigan, Laura Kelly and Whitmer, have each used their veto pen to block anti-abortion bills passed by GOP lawmakers. But that shield could soon disappear: Each is up for re-election this fall. That said, each state’s situation is complex: Michigan already has a ban on the books, but Governor Gretchen Whitmer wants state courts to strike it down; in Kansas, the right to an abortion is protected by a court ruling that voters may overturn this summer.

Inversely, Democrats could break the GOP’s control of Arizona and Iowa by flipping these state’s governorships. Arizona’s legal landscape on abortion is in flux, while Iowa’s high court overturned abortion protections in June, opening the door to new restrictions. In New York, where Republican Lee Zeldin would be the first governor opposed to abortion rights in at least 50 years, access would remain broadly protected but Zeldin has signaled he’ll look for ways to chip away.

4. Will states elect legislatures that want to restrict or protect abortion?

Governors are only one part of the puzzle when it comes to new laws; legislative control is just as fundamental. Simply put, will each chamber be favorable or hostile to abortion rights—and if they disagree with their governor, will lawmakers have the votes to override a veto?

These stakes are clear in: North Carolina’s legislative elections.

North Carolina Governor Roy Cooper, a Democrat who supports abortion rights, is sure to be in office through 2024. At the moment Republicans, who control the legislature but lack veto-proof majorities, cannot get restrictions past him. Will that change this fall? If November is very rough for Democrats, the GOP could make enough gains to sideline Cooper.

Also keep an eye on: 

Republicans have failed to override Kansas Governor Laura Kelly’s veto of anti-abortion bills, but even if Kelly wins a second term, they may have an easier time next year if they grow their legislative majorities. Republicans also have outside shots at seizing control of Nevada, New Mexico, and Minnesota state governments if they manage to flip both the governorship and legislature. In the first two states, abortion is currently legal but not protected by state courts; in the third, a court ruling protects abortion but the GOP may still push for some new restrictions.

Inversely, legislative gains by Democrats could protect abortion in Pennsylvania and Michigan, where the party has a stronger shot than it has in decades thanks to fairer maps. Finally, keep an eye on Democratic primaries in Maryland and Rhode Island, where progressive groups like Pro-Choice Maryland are targeting Democrats who oppose abortion. This can matter even where Democrats have supermajorities (as in Maryland) if they need to override a Republican governor’s veto.

5. Will cities and counties empower law enforcement to enforce bans or investigate pregnancy outcomes?

Besides changing state constitutions and laws, proponents of reproductive rights face a vast host of challenges having to do with how to mitigate the harms of existing bans, and that includes the threat of arrest, prosecution, and incarceration. First up are the sheriffs and police chiefs in charge of arresting and investigating people. A few police chiefs and sheriffs in blue-leaning areas like New Orleans have said they would not enforce abortion bans. How might this play out in the midterms? Police chiefs are typically appointed by city governments (which often have more leeway to direct police practices than they utilize), while sheriffs are directly elected.

The stakes are clear in: Wisconsin’s sheriff elections.

The sheriff of Dane County (Madison) put the question of abortion enforcement at the center of Wisconsin’s sheriff elections when he said he would not enforce the state’s 1849 ban on abortion. “Our sheriff’s office has a very strict budget with regards to our time and where we decide to put things,” Kalvin Barrett, a Democrat, told Bolts. He is now running for re-election against Republican Anthony Hamilton, who did not respond to Bolts‘s questions about his position on the issue. Bolts reached out to other candidates running for sheriff in the state. In Milwaukee, the state’s most populous county, all three candidates echoed Barrett’s stance and said they would not use the department’s resources to investigate abortion cases. (All are Democrats.)

In Eau Claire County, where three candidates are running, only Democrat Kevin Otto told Bolts that he would follow Barrett’s footsteps. “I would not enforce the laws on abortion because of the lack of resources and interference into a person’s health matters,” he said. Otto’s Democratic opponent David Riewestahl said it was too early to definitively answer the question, while Republican candidate Don Henning replied he would “investigate complaints as they arise.” 

Also keep an eye on:

Many cities in states with severe abortion restrictions (or that risk having them soon) will elect their municipal governments this year, and the role that their local police departments play in enforcing abortion bans should be central issues. Those cities include Little Rock, Arkansas, Tallahassee, Florida, and Lexington and Louisville, Kentucky.

6. Will counties elect prosecutors who have pledged not to charge abortion cases?

Prosecutors have historically enjoyed vast discretion over what cases to charge, which has made them a highly visible line of defense against the criminal consequences of bans. Already, dozens of prosecutors have said they won’t press charges in cases that involve abortions. As a result, reproductive rights are a major fault line in a host of upcoming elections that pit candidates who say they would enforce restrictions—and candidates who say they’ll decline cases. 

These issues were already present before Dobbs, as zealous prosecutors investigated pregnancy outcomes, as Bolts reported in June. Just last month, a conservative California district attorney lost his re-election bid after prosecuting two women who had experienced stillbirths.

The stakes are clear in: Maricopa County’s prosecutor race (Phoenix)…

Four years after questioning Christine Blasey Ford during Brett Kavanaugh’s Supreme Court confirmation hearings, Rachel Mitchell is now the chief prosecutor of Maricopa County in Arizona, home to 4.5 million people. If courts greenlight the state’s new restrictions on abortion, Mitchell has said she would enforce them. But Maricopa is holding a special election this year, which adds further uncertainty since presumptive Democratic Julie Gunnigle has ruled out pressing criminal charges, as Bolts reported in May in partnership with The Appeal. “As Maricopa County attorney I will never prosecute a patient, a provider, or a family for choosing to have an abortion or any other reproductive decision,” Gunnigle said. “Not now, not ever.”

… and in the prosecutor’s race in Florida’s Pasco-Pinellas (St. Petersburg) counties… 

Florida’s Pasco and Pinellas counties, which share a state attorney, have not had a contested election for prosecutor in 30 years despite being home to a combined 1.5 million residents. And what a time to have one: Their judicial district hosts a special election, much like Maricopa, and the two contenders are at odds on whether to enforce the state’s existing ban on abortions after 15-weeks. (Florida laws may soon get harsher still.) Democrat Allison Miller, a local public defender, says she will not prosecute people providing or obtaining an abortion, unlike Republican incumbent Bruce Bartlett, appointed to the job by Governor Ron DeSantis.

… and in the Texas DA elections.

A group of Texas DAs issued a joint statement this spring vowing to not prosecute abortion. And though just a portion of Texas counties vote for a DA this year, November’s elections will shape whether that group grows or shrinks. Democratic DAs who signed that statement are running for re-election in Bexar and Dallas counties. And in two populous counties that have trended bluer, Democrats are hoping to flip the DA offices. “I will not allow the persecution of our neighbors by cynical politicians bent on establishing a theocracy in Texas,” Kelly Higgins, the Democratic nominee in Hays County, wrote on Facebook after the Dobbs decision. In Tarrant County, where a staunchly punitive incumbent is retiring and former President Trump has gotten involved on behalf of the GOP nominee, Democratic nominee Tiffany Burks told Bolts she “does not have any plan to prosecute women or anyone who facilitates an abortion, doctors or whomever.”

Importantly, the discretion of Texas DAs may be strongly tested by conservatives going forward, as lawmakers and the attorney general are working out ways to kneecap these local officials.

Also keep a eye on:

Iowa’s most populous county (Polk, home to Des Moines) is sure to have a new prosecutor come next year, and Democratic nominee Kimberly Graham told Bolts in June she would not prosecute cases linked to abortion; the state supreme court in Iowa struck down abortion protections in June, plunging reproductive rights in the state in greater vulnerability. In Shelby County (Memphis), one of the few staunchly blue counties in Tennessee, Republican DA Amy Weirich has pointedly rejected the idea of issuing a blanket policy on not enforcing abortion ban; Steve Mulroy, her Democratic opponent in the August election, has said prosecutions “should be extremely low priorities” and he has assailed Weirich for lobbying for a harsher law.

See also: Which Counties Elect Their Prosecutors in 2022?

7. Will states elect attorneys general who want to interfere with local prosecutors?

Prosecutors are imperfect bulwarks since any policy they set is at the mercy of the next election, but also because conservatives have mechanisms at their disposal to supersede DAs—and they are plotting to set up more. Chief among them: Attorneys general. In some states, they have the authority to bring criminal charges on their own, and if not to bury providers under civil lawsuits. 

But this authority can cut both ways. Pro-choice candidates are signaling how they too would try to use the powers of this office for the opposite end, namely to stop the prosecution of abortions. When the conservative DA of California’s Kings County prosecuted two women over stillbirths, for instance, Attorney General Roy Bonta blew up the cases through media appearances and convinced a judge to reopen a case.

The stakes are clear in: Michigan’s attorney general election…

While a series of Michigan prosecutors have ruled out prosecuting abortion, they face a major obstacle: The Michigan attorney general’s latitude to step in is greater than in many other states. Democratic incumbent Dana Nessel has ruled out doing so, but she’s up for re-election and her likely general election opponent, Matt DePerno, has indicated he is in favor of enforcing bans.

… and the Arizona attorney general election.

Kris Mayes, Democrats’ likely nominee for Arizona attorney general, wants to go a step further: She is not just ruling out prosecuting people herself, but she also proposes stopping others from doing so. She says she would use her office’s supervisory authority over all local prosecutors, an authority that is broader in Arizona than elsewhere, to direct all of Arizona’s county attorneys to not enforce bans on abortion. But the Republican candidates in this race largely oppose abortion rights; were they to win, they may flex their power and try to supercede Democratic prosecutors who are refusing to bring criminal charges. Either way, legal questions about the extent of the attorney general’s authority will remain, likely leading to more clashes.

Also keep an eye on: 

Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, a Republican, is among the country’s most militant officials in restricting abortion and has vowed to help local prosecutors enforce the state’s harsh laws; he may also bring ruinous civil lawsuits against providers. His opponent Rochelle Garza could not be more different. She has worked on defending access to abortion as an attorney and says she would set up a reproductive rights unit in the office if she wins, which is always a tough proposition for a Texas Democrat—though Paxton’s own criminal indictments may give her an additional opening. In Georgia and Ohio, two states that are looking to implement severe restrictions, Democratic nominees Jen Jordan and Jeffrey Crossman are also speaking on the issue; Jordan says she would issue legal opinions to undercut local prosecutors who are bringing criminal charges, for instance, and Crossman refuses to defend the law in court. Their Republican opponents, Georgia Attorney General Chris Carr and Ohio Attorney General Dave Yost (who responded skeptically to a 10 year-old rape victim who sought an abortion), are currently defending abortion restrictions in court.

8. Will states elect governors who promise clemency?

In states that have already banned or severely restricted abortion, a pro-choice governor, on their own, won’t shield people from arrest and prosecution. But some governors may at least have the authority—by themselves or through appointees to a board, depending on state rules—to issue clemencies for people who are convicted of violating criminal codes.

The stakes are clear in: Wisconsin’s governor race.

Democratic Governor Tony Evers has said he would grant clemency to anyone convicted under the state’s 1847 ban on abortions. But Evers is up for re-election this fall, and his GOP opponents have made it clear they support enforcing the ban. 

Also keep an eye on: 

Wisconsin governors have broader discretion than most to grant clemency; many other states dilute that power considerably. 

Still, at least one other state is electing a governor who will have somewhat direct authority to issue pardons: Ohio. Republican Governor Mike DeWine faces Nan Whaley, Dayton’s Democratic mayor, who is an abortion rights supporter and says she would veto new restrictions. She did not respond to a request for comment on clemency powers. The issue has also come up in Arizona, where the governor shares power with a clemency board. Democrat Marco Lopez has said he would support pardoning people convicted over abortions; Katie Hobbs, the other Democrat in the race, supports abortion rights but did not reply to a request for comment on clemency. 

Kentucky’s Democratic governor, who has broad authority over pardons and is only up for re-election in 2023, has not said how he would use his own clemency powers.

9. Will new judges bless gerrymanders that would lock in anti-abortion majorities?

Before overturning Roe v. Wade, this conservative U.S. Supreme Court also refused to rein in partisan gerrymandering. And there’s a direct connection to abortion rights: The GOP in many states has drawn maps that lock in legislative control, making it extraordinarily difficult for pro-choice majorities to emerge even if most residents vote for them. A few state courts have guarded against this dynamic—but their judgements are now on the line.

The stakes are clear in: North Carolina and Ohio’s supreme court elections.

These two states’ supreme courts have each struck down GOP gerrymanders, though Ohio lawmakers have for now circumvented those rulings. But new court majorities may emerge in November—five justices will be elected across the two states—and re-open the floodgates of gerrymandering, as Bolts reported in March. Friendlier courts could enable the GOP to draw maps that last the full decade and enshrine anti-abortion majorities. (Note that, while North Carolina is sure to have new congressional maps by 2024, it will be tricky for Republicans to justify drawing new legislative maps before the end of the decade due to legal idiosyncrasies, but they may try if they think they’ve secured a high court would rubber stamp their maneuver.)

And there will be no rest for the weary. Virginia Governor Glenn Younkin indicated that he may push for severe restrictions if the legislature were favorable to it, which has already marked the state’s elections for the state Assembly and Senate in the fall of 2023 as critical for abortion.

The post Your Guide to Local Elections Where Abortion Is on the Line This Year appeared first on Bolts.

Two weeks ago, Moses was granted a new trial after The Guardian revealed errors by state officials in her case, though the charges still hang over her head. Moses was released on bond on Feb. 25.

Moses spoke with Bolts about her ordeal and what led to it—Tennessee’s harsh disenfranchisement rules, a punitive and discriminatory local court system, and the suppression of Black voters. Moses, a Black Lives Matter activist in Memphis who was barred from voting after a 2015 guilty plea, has denounced these practices long before her recent prosecution.

More than one in five Black adults are barred from voting in Tennessee due to criminal convictions, compared to seven percent of the rest of the state’s population, a number that reflects vast racial disparities in who is prosecuted and how severely. Last week a local group of advocates demanded a racial equity audit of Shelby County DA Amy Weirich’s office, pointing to past scrutiny into its practices; Weirich responded by calling their demand “divisive and inflammatory.” In addition, people seeking to regain voting rights are faced with Tennessee’s notoriously confusing and burdensome process of even determining eligibility, let alone actually restoring their rights.

Moses says this legal labyrinth keeps people from even trying to reclaim their right to vote. While she believes the attempt to punish her for getting it wrong—or rather, for following the state’s faulty guidance—is meant to intimidate others from exercising their rights, she also says she hopes that people will instead be inspired to press for change. 

How has this ordeal impacted your life?

My life is just not the same. You can’t just come back out of jail and pick up where you left off, especially with the loss of my dog. It’s just really hard. I don’t sleep much, I’m up all night, and when I do sleep, I don’t sleep well. 

Just being in jail and separated from your family is a tragic thing. But to have to be in jail and see all the other injustices, it’s a humbling experience. I feel like I shouldn’t have been there, but there’s nothing I can do about what has happened. I just have to move forward. 

Why was it important for you to register to vote and have your rights restored? 

At the time I was seeking public office, and you had to be properly registered in order to run. I was trying to follow the law and the instructions that I was given by the Shelby County Election Commission. And it was important because we live in a state where the poverty rate is very high, as well as the illiteracy rate. The simple things that we take for granted, such as schools, and parks, and things that I always had access to—it was disturbing seeing how you can’t even go swimming at a public pool anymore because they close all those things down. It was important for me to give the people in my community a voice so they can have those types of opportunities, because I felt like it would make the city safer. I was really doing this for Memphis, not just myself.

Tennessee’s rights restoration rules are notoriously confusing and burdensome. What was it like navigating them and trying to figure out if you were eligible? 

What made my situation so hard was that it wasn’t clear when my sentence was over. It wasn’t clear when I came off probation, what kind of probation, what year, what month, what day, what my jail credit was. Nothing was clear. And so, as a person that didn’t understand, I went to the custodian of records with the department of corrections, seeking guidance, and they said I was off of it. I presented them with a form that I also took to the court that said that I still owe court costs, which for some reason has something to do with your right to vote, but they signed the papers anyway. And then I took it to the department of corrections. They signed it. They verified it twice. That’s what made it so complicated: All these different layers of people and process that you have to go to just to get one thing done. 

A public agency gave you a certificate that said you were eligible. What was your reaction when prosecutors still charged you for registering?

When I was first charged, I was confused. I just knew that they had to have the wrong person. I had no idea because the charge was illegal voter registration, I didn’t even know what they were alleging. 

Do you think other people who want to vote give up rather than try to navigate this complicated system you describe?

Oh, I don’t just think, I know. Before I went through this, I was registering people to vote, and I would run into people who were convicted felons. And I’m not talking about newly convicted felons, they had charges from the 80s. They wanted to vote, but they were like, “I’m a felon, I can’t vote.” Everyone saying, “I’m a felon, I can’t vote,” “I’m a felon, I can’t vote.” I said, “You just need to get your rights restored.” And everybody said, “How do you do that? Oh that’s too much trouble man, I don’t feel like that.” It’s discouraging.

Do you worry that the way you’ve been treated will dissuade others in the future, that it will have an intimidation effect?

I think that the goal was to scare people, but it could boomerang. It could scare people, but I hope that it doesn’t. I don’t know what people are going to do. What I do know is that there are a lot of people who are inspired by the fact that this happened to me, like, “I’m gonna start voting more. Because that happened to you, I got to vote.” And we got another group that is like, “Man, this makes no sense at all. They need to change the law.” 

Do you believe that that race played a factor in how harshly the prosecutor’s office or the court treated you?

Oh, absolutely, at least from the prosecutor’s standpoint. I think that absolutely my race, my socioeconomic status, and my political beliefs, is what motivated them. I don’t think, if I would have been of another race, that this even would have amounted to a prosecution.

What political beliefs?

That I believe Black lives matter, and Black voters matter. I’m so vocal in saying that everywhere I go. I wear earrings that say it, I made a song about the DA and the racism that we experience as Black people in Memphis, so she knew that I wasn’t crazy about her. It didn’t have anything to do with her being a Republican; it has everything to do with the way she selectively prosecutes people. 

When I was in jail, this last time, there were women who’d been sitting in jail, waiting to go to trial, for years.  They were all Black. They were all poor. And they just been sitting there waiting to go to trial. That’s what I see: I see injustice in the jail, on the streets. [Editor’s note: Pretrial practices in Shelby county have been under scrutiny for keeping people locked because they are too poor to afford release; a recent report by a court-appointed inspector found people being held “for months or years.”]

The DA’s office has defended the six-year prison sentence you received at the trial saying they proposed a lesser sentence as part of a plea deal. Why didn’t you take the plea deal, and were you worried about being punished for going to trial?

Because that’s how I got into this situation, by taking a plea for something that I didn’t do. I tried to get out of jail, so I pled guilty like most people that can’t afford to make half a million dollar bond. I pled guilty to something that I didn’t do, and I told myself that I would never do that again. I would just have to sit and wait until somebody said I wasn’t guilty. So that was the main reason why. 

The second reason, why should a person waive their right, their constitutional right to trial by jury? If the Constitution says we have that right, why do Black people have to give up their right?

What would you tell people in Shelby County who have lost the right to vote, or who may just be reading the coverage of your case? What would you want them to take from your ordeal?

I want them to know that they have a constitutional right to vote, and everybody should try to exercise it. If you’re a felon, you should try to get your rights back. If you owe court costs, see if you can get a judge to waive it. If you can’t get your right back, support the people who are going to Nashville pushing for laws to be changed, show up with them: There’s strength in numbers. If five people go asking them to change something, they’re not going to do it. But if 5,000 people show up and say we want this change, it’s gonna happen. It’s called democracy.

The interview has been edited for length and clarity.

The post “The Goal Was to Scare People, but It Could Boomerang.” appeared first on Bolts.