The race was a rematch of the county’s Democratic primary in May, when Dugan beat Zappala by about 10 percentage points. But Zappala soon flipped party affiliation and ran in the general election as a Republican after the local GOP, lacking its own DA candidate, organized a write-in campaign to make him its nominee. With nearly all ballots counted by early Wednesday morning, Zappala led Dugan 52 to 48 percent.

As Zappala clung to power this election, Allegheny County’s reform movement scored a significant win in the race for county executive: progressive Democrat Sara Innamorato, who has criticized mass incarceration and who favors overhauling the troubled local youth detention system, beat Republican Joe Rockey. The margin was tight: Innamorato was up about 2 percentage points—fewer than 10,000 votes—as of early Wednesday.

In a county that is very racially segregated and where Black and poorer residents face much higher rates of incarceration, Innamorato pledged a new vision. “We’re bringing together people who have been left out and pushed out and shut out of Allegheny County Government for too long,” she told supporters Tuesday night. “We will create compassionate solutions to addiction, violence, and poverty.”

Tanisha Long, an Allegheny County-based organizer with the Pennsylvania nonprofit Abolitionist Law Center, said Innamorato’s win is thrilling for those working in the Pittsburgh region to reduce incarceration and over-policing. Among other things, the new county executive will inherit power to nominate a new warden for the county’s deadly jail and will wield considerable influence over the board overseeing that jail; she will also be in charge of the city’s scandal-plagued youth detention system. “Those are real things, and there is real hope,” Long told Bolts. 

But Zappala’s victory places substantial limits on many moves toward more progressive criminal justice policy in Allegheny County through 2027, when he’d be eligible to seek an eighth term. 

He’s long been a staunch opponent of reform: He claims to hold police accountable but has seldom prosecuted any officers and, in one famous 2010 case, declined to file charges against a group of white officers who brutalized an unarmed Black teenager. In one year alone, The Appeal found, he prosecuted nearly 2,000 low-level drug possession cases. He mocks the idea of “conviction integrity” units in D.A. offices, which are meant to examine past cases in which innocent or overcharged people were imprisoned. A 2018 investigation found that the vast majority of children charged as adults by his office were Black. And two years ago, Zappala instructed his staff to offer no plea deals to the clients of a local Black attorney known for pursuing racial justice. 

Activists worked hard in recent years to win over voters in the suburbs of Pittsburgh, which lean whiter and more conservative than those in the city. An April Bolts analysis found that areas of Allegheny County that most acutely feel the weight of incarceration have clamored for reform in the DA’s office, but that Zappala has held onto power thanks to suburban voters, who generally have much less direct experience with the local criminal justice system.

That dynamic held on Tuesday night: Dugan dominated in the city of Pittsburgh, which has a population of about 300,000 people, but Zappala hardly lost a precinct in the suburbs, which represent about 900,000 people.

“It’s really disheartening and disappointing that a person who has shown that they have no regard for people of color in Allegheny County, for kids in Allegheny County, has been given another few years,” Long said. “As a Black voter, it feels like the county does not care about us.”

In his campaign, Zappala played up suburban antagonism toward the city. One of his recent television ads painted a grim picture of what Pittsburgh would look like with Dugan as prosecutor, using dark surveillance footage from other cities—gunmen on roadways and at a gas station in Philadelphia, an assault and a carjacking in San Francisco, a drug deal through a car window, a break-in at a jewelry store.

“I will never permit your safety to become an experiment,” Zappala said in the ad. In the days leading up to the election, Zappala reportedly threatened to sue to gain control of the city’s police force, which he has argued does not adequately respond to violent crime.

The public radio station WESA reported Zappala told supporters Tuesday night that this election was “a referendum on us as a community.” 

Rockey used rhetoric similar to Zappala’s in his campaign for county executive. “This is our home, not a laboratory for progressive experiments,” he said in a television ad, during which he also touted endorsements from local police leaders.

Activists had hoped the outcome of this year’s DA and county executive races would help them build on recent wins. The Pittsburgh region is far from the deep-blue bastion found to the east in Philadelphia, and Republicans held key positions in Allegheny County in the 1990s and 2000s, and Pennsylvania’s last GOP governor, Tom Corbett, carried the county as recently as 2010. But progressive-backed candidates have amassed substantial power this decade, winning races for Pittsburgh mayor, U.S. Congress and the county council. 

County Councilmember Bethany Hallam, who is among those Allegheny County progressives swept into office in recent years, told Bolts ahead of Tuesday’s election that Dugan and Innamorato represented the last major pillars in the local political makeover. “If progressives can win these two, we can show what we can do when we are finally in a position to implement our policies,” she said.

Instead, Hallam, Innamorato, and others looking to reduce incarceration and build a justice system in the Pittsburgh area that relies less heavily on punishment will have to contend, yet again, with a top prosecutor resistant to the very idea of reform.

“It’s going to make it very, very difficult to affect radical change, for a while,” Long said.

The post Anti-Reform DA Survives in Pittsburgh Region After Switching to GOP appeared first on Bolts.

After coasting to reelection for decades with barely any opposition, District Attorney Stephen Zappala lost the May Democratic primary against Matt Dugan, the county’s chief public defender. But Zappala is now running as a Republican in a rematch against Dugan.

Meanwhile, the county government agreed to a controversial contract this fall to reopen a youth detention center, even though the center’s fate had been a major issue in the open race for county executive. Local critics fault Rich Fitzgerald, the term-limited outgoing executive and a moderate Democrat, for tying his successor’s hands through the contract, which will span the next county executive’s entire term. Sara Innamorato, a progressive state representative, won the Democratic nomination to replace him in May, beating two centrist opponents who unequivocally favored reopening the center. 

Innamorato now faces Republican Joe Rockey, who, like Zappala in the DA race, is looking to stall criminal justice reforms. While Democrats typically dominate local politics and Joe Biden won Allegheny County by 20 percentage points in 2020, the GOP is hoping law-and-order messaging can deliver its candidates long awaited wins this fall. Recent polls released by the campaigns found tight margins in both races.

But champions of criminal justice reform have already made major strides in the region. Bethany Hallam, a progressive Democrat on the Allegheny County Council, points to other left-leaning candidates who have won recent elections in the area, including Ed Gainey, who became Pittsburgh’s first Black mayor in 2022, and Summer Lee, who won a congressional seat that covers the broader region in 2022 while calling for cuts to jail and prison spending. 

Gainey and Lee are now supporting Dugan and Innamorato, as are other prominent Democrats like U.S. Senator John Fetterman. Dugan and Innamorato have frequently appeared together at events this year. “We are very aware of the moment that we’re in right now,” Hallam told Bolts. 

She added, “If progressives can win these two, we can show what we can do when we are finally in a position to implement our policies.”

This county of more than one million is very segregated along racial lines, and Black residents are vastly more likely than white residents to be arrested and sentenced to prison. Many areas see virtually no incarceration while some neighborhoods, typically within Pittsburgh, have astronomically high imprisonment rates. 

In the run-up to the May primary, progressives worked on winning over the county’s suburban areas, which have less experience of incarceration and which have buoyed Zappala in the past. The last time he ran for re-election, in 2019, the DA received under 10 percent in some of the precincts that most acutely feel the weight of the local criminal system but nearly swept precincts along the outer ring of the county.

This year, Dugan and Innamorato triumphed within the city of Pittsburgh, but they also performed strongly enough in the rest of the county to secure the Democratic nominations. 

Rob Perkins, president of the progressive Allegheny Lawyers Initiative for Justice, told Bolts on the night of this year’s primary election that the Dugan and Innamorato wins tell him “that more people from a broader swath of communities are starting to grasp that the criminal justice system is unfair, full of waste, and too often inhumane.” 

Hallam hopes that wins in November by Dugan and Innamorato will align the county government with Pittsburgh’s more progressive municipal leadership. The county council on which Hallam sits has of late displayed real appetite for more progressive policy-making, only to run into Fitzgerald’s veto pen; he sought to block council votes to raise the minimum wage and to ban fracking in most county parks. The city’s leadership is decidedly more progressive; Gainey has supported minimum wage hikes and fracking bans, for instance. 

Hallam believes that this tension has resulted in missed opportunities to fund programs meant to target root causes of crime. “We have a $1 billion Department of Human Services budget in the county, and we have a city that could really use some of those services to be provided, but it’s been such a head-butting, antagonistic relationship between the county and city,” she said. “It’s going to be transformative to finally have a collaboration.”

Zappala, who flipped parties after the primary, is betting on a reverse dynamic, fueling suburban antagonism toward the urban core to overcome the county’s partisan lean and secure a seventh term in November. 

A recent television ad by Zappala paints an apocalyptic picture of what Pittsburgh would look like under Dugan’s leadership, using dark surveillance footage from other cities—gunmen at a gas station in Philadelphia and a carjacking in San Francisco.

Rockey, the Republican candidate in the county executive race, is using a similar strategy. “This is our home, not a laboratory for progressive experiments,” Rockey says in a recent TV spot in which he touted that he is endorsed by local police and jail-staff unions.

But local advocates of criminal justice reform say Zappala and Rockey are shifting the blame. They attribute Allegheny County’s struggles with public safety to the “tough-on-crime” approach the county has pursued for decades, in large part under Zappala’s leadership. 

Richard Garland, a formerly incarcerated man who runs a program in Pittsburgh for people newly released from prison, says the county needs to invest more in the wellbeing of young people, particularly in the city’s predominantly Black neighborhoods. And he assailed the local jail for failing to prepare people for what happens after they’re released. 

“I’m so frustrated,” he told Bolts. “When I go into the penitentiary it’s full of babies. Babies who don’t have any programs to go to, who are bored. And we expect these things to change? Do we expect society to change overnight?”

Zappala has in the past rejected arguments like Garland’s that strengthening public spending beyond law enforcement is relevant to improving public safety, while Dugan has said that tackling a wider range of economic issues could help disrupt gun violence. 

Over his six terms in office, Zappala has aggressively prosecuted low-level drug possession cases, and his critics point to the wide racial disparities in the cases prosecuted by his office. Zappala has said these disparities reflect who commits crimes in the community, not any policy choices he’s made. Dugan has promised to take the county in a different direction, including by seeking to reduce incarceration over low-level offenses and decrease the county’s use of cash bail and lengthy probation terms. 

He also pledged that he would set up a position in his office to review the cases prosecuted by Zappala for possible overcharging and innocence claims. The Allegheny County DA’s office currently does not have a conviction integrity unit. 

In their debate earlier this month, Zappala mocked a similar initiative set up by DA Larry Krasner in Philadelphia. Krasner’s unit has uncovered dozens of wrongful convictions since 2018. “How’s the conviction integrity unit working out for Philadelphia?” asked Zappala during the debate. “The conviction integrity unit in Philadelphia has exonerated over 30 people,” Dugan responded. 

After losing in the primary, Zappala’s ideas have found a cozy home in GOP politics. No Republican filed to run for DA, and party leaders organized a write-in effort to hand him the GOP nomination—a maneuver that comes with a relatively low threshold; Zappala accepted it after losing the Democratic primary. The DA has since aligned himself with GOP campaign firms—including one that worked with former U.S. Senator Rick Santorum. The chairman of the Allegheny County GOP told the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, of Zappala, “I think we have similar views on law and order.”

When they debated, Dugan accused Zappala of airing “right-wing GOP attack ads,” saying the incumbent’s tactics are a sign of desperation. Zappala attacked Dugan for receiving outside funding from George Soros, the billionaire who has supported reform candidates around the country. Zappala has the endorsement of Andrew Yang’s Forward Party, which has also endorsed Rockey in the county executive race.

Similarly to Dugan, Innamorato has pledged to tap into county coffers to better fund services that may reduce crime, such as behavioral health care and free recreational programs for kids. Ahead of her competitive primary this spring, she said this goal would be her north star when it comes to settling the heated local debates over youth detention. The local youth jail, the Shuman Juvenile Detention Center, shuttered in scandal two years ago, and local politicians and organizers have fought over whether—and how—to reopen it.  

Innamorato did not take a definitive position in the runup to the primary on whether she would reopen Shuman, but her victory over candidates who were unambiguously in its favor created question marks over the future of the lock-up.

But this fall, Fitzgerald and local courts entered into a five-year contract with a private operator to reopen and run the Shuman Center. 

Innamorato and Rockey, the candidates running to replace him, have both criticized the contract. They have each disagreed with privatizing the detention center; and they’ve both said that the length of the contract will limit the options of the next executive. But they’ve both also said that they favor at least temporarily reopening Shuman; at minimum, they say, it’s a way to get kids out of the county’s adult jail, where they’ve often been warehoused since Shuman’s closing.

Innamorato and Rockey did not provide comment for this article. Fitzgerald declined to comment through a spokesperson on the contract. He also declined to endorse a successor.

The county council is now suing Fitzgerald over his decision, asserting that he overstepped his authority by making such an impactful move without the consent of the council. 

Reporting by local public radio station WESA confirms that Fitzgerald’s move will tie the hands of the next executive. The contract allows the county few options for termination, and it provides for little oversight beyond that conducted by the county controller, who is currently reviewing the contract and who has power to audit the facility.

Allegheny County’s controller, Corey O’Connor, assumed that position in 2022 when then-Governor Tom Wolf appointed him to fill a vacancy, and is now running for a full term this fall against Republican Bob Howard. O’Connor has used his first years in office to highlight the failings of the local criminal legal system, including by releasing an audit that underscored how thoroughly the county jail upends the lives of entire families. The audit blamed Allegheny County for doing very little in the way of outreach to the children of the adults it incarcerates, further destabilizing households. O’Connor’s office found nearly 12,000 children largely abandoned by the county in this way between January of 2021 and September of 2022.  

O’Connor, who has endorsed Dugan and Innamorato, told Bolts that he thinks the elections this year will further illustrate the county’s growing comfort with criminal justice reforms.

“Places that were predominantly Republican in the suburbs are starting to turn blue, and they’re turning blue not just in countywide races but council races, school board races,” he said. “It’s all about people organizing and getting people out to vote.”

The post In Pittsburgh Region, Criminal Justice Reformers Face Off Against Old Guard appeared first on Bolts.

Still, all six commissioners secured the Republican nominations on Tuesday in their bids to serve another four years in these offices.

Should they prevail again in November’s general election—and these are all red-leaning counties—they’ll retain control of local election administration during the 2024 presidential cycle. 

Duncan Hopkins, a local organizer with the group Lancaster Stands Up who confronted Lancaster County GOP commissioners Ray D’Agostino and Josh Parsons at a public meeting last fall about their ties to election deniers, is alarmed by this landscape.

“We are looking at elected officials—at the highest levels, I’m thinking of former President Trump, all the way down to county election board officials—and we are seeing that they will work very hard to find a way to take votes away from people, even from people who voted for them, just to prove that it’s something that they can do legally,” Hopkins told Bolts on Wednesday. “It’s distressing.”

In most of Pennsylvania, county commissioners double as local boards of elections, with duties ranging from supervising voter registration to tabulating ballots. Their role in certifying election results has emerged as a critical lynchpin in Trump allies’ efforts to take over election administration. “Sometimes the vote counter is more important than the candidate,” Trump told Pennsylvania Republicans last year. But these county officials have broad effects on voting rights beyond the count since they shape people’s access to different ways of voting.

D’Agostino and Parsons last year voted to remove Lancaster County’s only drop box for mail-in ballots, for instance, and Hopkins is concerned by local commissioners’ crusade against mail voting, which is central to Trump’s own lies about fraud. “There are a fair number of people who in the Republican Party have tried to make voting more difficult by taking away ballot drop boxes, making it more difficult to vote by mail,” he said.

D’Agostino and Parsons faced no opponent in Lancaster’s Republican primary on Tuesday. In Berks County, incumbents Christian Leinbach and Michael Rivera prevailed against three challengers, while Fayette County incumbents Scott Dunn and Dave Lohr won against two. 

Similar results played out throughout the state. Local GOP officials have attempted to block election certification in a handful of other counties since 2020. And in an extensive investigation of public statements made by county commissioner candidates, Votebeat and Spotlight PA identified additional Republicans who have amplified false conspiracies about voter fraud. 

In total, 20 incumbent commissioners were on the ballot this week after supporting the Big Lie in either word—repeating denialist rhetoric in public statements—or else in deed, by refusing to certify a recent election. Eighteen of them won their Republican primaries, most of them in contested races. 

In Allegheny County, home to Pittsburgh, Councilmember Samuel DeMarco was unopposed for the GOP nomination on Tuesday, three years after voting to not certify the local presidential results and even signing up as a fake Trump elector. 

DeMarco, in fact, is a very rare elected official anywhere in the country who agreed to add his name to alternate elector lists willing to declare their state’s electoral votes for Trump despite the Republican’s loss in their state. DeMarco was interviewed by the FBI last year as part of an investigation into these schemes; he defended himself, saying that the list was only meant to be used in case the courts overturned the results. “When we did not win in court, the matter ended,” he told TribLive last year.

The Trump campaign’s lawsuits themselves were on flimsy grounds, and numerous judges in 2020 expressed alarm that they were being asked to disenfranchise millions of voters. DeMarco, who is also the chair of the local Republican Party in Allegheny County, Pennsylvania’s second most populous county, did not return a request for comment. 

Joe Gale, a commissioner in Montgomery County, is one of the two exceptions. Gale voted against certifying election results in 2020, though as the sole Republican on his county board he was not able to block them. “There is no way to verify the authenticity of one half of the votes cast this year,” he said at the time, mirroring lies spread by Trump allies about the results. He doubled down, later opposing certifying the 2022 elections as well. Gale was ousted on Tuesday, finishing third in the Republican primary when only the first two vote-getters move forward to the general election.

But even that vote was not a complete repudiation of election denialism; the Republican who got the most votes in Montgomery, Thomas DiBello, has himself repeatedly amplified false allegations of widespread voter fraud, as uncovered by Spotlight PA and Votebeat.

Another election-denying commissioner who lost on Tuesday is Stuart Ulsh of Fulton County, a small and rural jurisdiction. Fulton was Pennsylvania’s only known county whose commissioners agreed to let a private group, connected with Trump lawyer Sydney Powell, conduct a so-called audit of voting equipment. State officials then decertified the county’s voting equipment, saying they could no longer be sure it was secure since a third-party had toyed with the machines. 

Ulsh, who later testified in the legislature in defense of this scheme, was eliminated on Tuesday. But his colleague Randy Bunch, who approved that audit alongside Ulsh, came in first in the Republican primary and will move to the general election alongside another Republican. 

Other counties that feature incumbent commissioners who amplified false fraud conspiracies include Beaver, Butler, Juniata, Lackawanna, Schuylkill, Washington, and Wyoming. 

In the night’s biggest loss for an election denier, state judge Patricia McCullough fell short in her bid to join the state supreme court, losing in the GOP primary by seven percentage points.

McCullough gave Trump one of his brightest legal wins in late 2020 when she blocked the certification of state results, only to be quickly disavowed by the supreme court. “I was the only judge in the entire country to enter an order to halt the certification of the 2020 presidential election results,” she later said, boasting of her boost to “Stop the Steal” efforts.

Carolyn Carluccio, the Republican who defeated McCullough on Tuesday, has herself amplified false allegations of widespread voter fraud, telling a Republican audience that a bipartisan law that expanded mail-in voting in the state had undermined the integrity of elections. Carluccio did not answer a Bolts request for comment, and she also dodged a question on what she meant by the Philadelphia Inquirer.

Throughout the state, Tuesday’s elections were marked by relatively low turnout, as is typical for off-year elections. Roughly 820,000 Republicans voted in the judicial primary on Tuesday, which is just 60 percent of the electorate that participated in the GOP primaries 12 months ago. 

Carluccio will face Democratic nominee Daniel McCaffrey in November. The winner will sit on Pennsylvania’s supreme court and hear potential election cases during the 2024 cycle. Democrats will retain a majority on the court no matter the outcome, though a loss would narrow their edge to 4-3. This general election is expected to be highly competitive. 

But in the counties where GOP commissioners tried to block certification in recent years, most of the incumbents who won their primaries yesterday are likely to have a clear edge in November. Trump carried Berks, Fayette, and Lancaster counties by large margins in 2020. 

Still, there is recent history to suggest that Pennsylvania Democrats can be competitive in red-leaning territory when facing a far-right candidate; Berks swung blue last year in the governor’s race, which featured election denier Doug Mastriano as the Republican nominee. In each of these counties, the two Democratic and two Republican nominees will run on one ballot, and the top three vote-getters will become commissioners.

DeMarco, the fake Trump elector running for re-election in Allegheny County, is also highly likely to return for another term. Under Allegheny’s complex rules, Democrats and Republicans each nominate only one candidate to complete for two at-large council seats in the general election, so they’re each sure to win unless an independent also enters the race. Local election observers told Bolts that they are not aware of an independent running at this time, though the deadline for one to file is Aug. 1.

“Since it is these local officials who are responsible for administering our elections and certifying the results, it’s critical for Pennsylvanians to not only be aware of this dangerous trend spreading through their cities and counties, but to know who the officials are who could potentially be a threat to democracy,” says Jenna Lowenstein, executive director of Informing Democracy, an organization that released its own report on local officials in Pennsylvania and elsewhere who have amplified the Big Lie.

The results in Pennsylvania’s Republican primaries on Tuesday stood in marked contrast with those in Kentucky, the only other state with statewide elections this week.

Kentucky Secretary of State Michael Adams easily won the Republican primary, defeating two election deniers who’d spread false election conspiracies with 64 percent of the vote. Over his tenure, Adams partnered with Democratic Governor Andy Beshear to support election changes that made it easier for Kentuckians to vote early and to vote by mail.

“I’m really proud that Kentucky Republicans ratified the things that we’ve done to make voting easier at a time that other red states have gone backwards,” Adams told Bolts on Wednesday after his victory. “I’ve got hundreds of thousands of Republicans that use those mechanisms to their satisfaction, and I just didn’t think that they were going to punish me for that.”

Adams will face Buddy Wheatley, a former Democratic lawmaker who promises to champion reforms to increase turnout, in the general election.

In the run-up to the Republican primary, Adams denounced the spread of conspiracies about the 2020 elections and he himself framed this race as a referendum on election denialism. 

“I’ve seen my colleagues in the same job in other states try to feed the tiger,” he told Bolts. “I’ve seen them make decisions that I think were probably not good for their voters to try to survive a primary and all it does is just validate the conspiracy theories. You can’t cave.” He defended his decision to keep Kentucky in ERIC, a national consortium to clean voting rolls that a wave of GOP-led states have quit since the start of the year. 

Adams acknowledges that it may be easier to push back against the Big Lie in a state where Republicans already dominate, compared to a place like Pennsylvania where ”the stakes are higher.” But he cast election denialism as a national crisis, pointing to threats in places that aren’t as competitive in presidential elections such as Tennessee or New Mexico, where some GOP officials tried to block local certifications last year. 

“This is not a six state problem, it is a 50-state problem now,” he said.

The post Pennsylvania GOP Doubles Down on Election Deniers, Including a Fake Trump Elector appeared first on Bolts.

In Allegheny County primary elections, Pittsburgh-area Democrats nominated candidates for two key local posts who vowed transformative change, voting to oust the punitive, longstanding district attorney  and selecting an anti-carceral Democratic socialist as county executive. 

In the Democratic primary for Allegheny County DA, public defender Matt Dugan beat incumbent Stephen Zappala easily, with over 55 percent of the vote as of press time. Dugan had focused his campaign largely on convincing more moderate suburban voters of the need to overhaul an office that has presided over vast inequalities in arrests and prosecutions, which disproportionately target majority-Black neighborhoods in the county.  

“From a criminal justice reform perspective, and more generally a social justice perspective, it tells me that more people from a broader swath of communities are starting to grasp that the criminal justice system is unfair, full of waste, and too often inhumane,” Rob Perkins, president of the progressive Allegheny Lawyers Initiative, told Bolts Tuesday night. “In other words, my suburban neighbors are starting to get it.”

But reform advocates aren’t celebrating just yet: Zappala, who has held the post since 1998, is headed for a rematch with Dugan in the November general election because local Republicans, lacking their own nominee for DA and aware that Zappala could lose in the primary, organized a write-in campaign for him in the GOP primary. GOP write-in ballots have not yet been tallied but an unusually large number were cast, indicating the effort likely succeeded; Zappala confirmed Tuesday he would accept the GOP nod.

“We haven’t really thought about November, but we fully expected him to do this,” Dugan told Bolts on Tuesday night, adding that the DA’s office would change under his leadership. “We’re going to talk about opportunities, not just prosecute. … We’re going to talk about building better systems such that folks don’t have to live with gun violence and criminal justice issues.”

The last time Zappala stood for re-election, in 2019, he was both the Democratic and Republican nominee. That year, reform advocates tried to unseat him in the primary and general elections, but had trouble convincing residents of more suburban, majority-white areas to pay attention to the deadliness of the local jail and the disproportionate punishment and incarceration in Allegheny County’s minority communities. 

As Bolts reported in April, the weight of the local criminal legal system is felt acutely in a handful of neighborhoods and towns that skew much poorer and have higher Black populations than in the rest of this highly segregated county—for example, the county jail population is 66 percent Black, though Black people account for only 12 percent of the overall county population.

“They don’t just take us one by one,” Terrell Johnson, a formerly incarcerated and wrongfully convicted Pittsburgh man told Bolts last month. “They can put an indictment down and get 15-20 Black men outside of their households. That’s what it is. It’s still that way.”

But in Dugan’s victory Tuesday, people working to upend this system see hope because he has promised to divert more people toward treatment and services and away from incarceration; pursue shorter sentences, including for parole and probation; dramatically reduce the local jail population; and interrogate questionable past convictions secured under Zappala.

“We’ve been thinking through these issues for a long time,” Perkins said. “This is a big night for us.”

As Allegheny County pivots now to what could be another competitive DA election in November, less mystery surrounds the critical county executive race after Tuesday’s Democratic primary. Sara Innamorato, a progressive state representative who was endorsed by U.S. Senator Bernie Sanders and won the Democratic nomination with 37 percent of the vote, as of press time, will face Republican Joe Rockey, who ran unopposed in the primary and who polling suggests is a longshot to defeat her. 

Allegheny is a blue-leaning county that voted for Joe Biden by more than 20 percentage points in 2020, making any Democratic nominee a strong favorite; still, Republican candidates retain much more of a path to victory than in other urban counties like Philadelphia.

As Bolts reported this month, the county executive race carries particularly high stakes for Allegheny County’s system of youth incarceration: the local youth lockup, the Shuman Juvenile Detention Center, was shuttered in 2021 amid repeated violations of state standards, and the question of how—or whether—to open a new detention facility will fall largely to the next county executive. 

In contrast to Rockey and her two primary opponents, Innamorato has questioned whether Allegheny County needs a detention center for children. Amid calls from police and her opponents to reopen the shuttered youth jail, Innamorato told Bolts earlier this month, “I want to flip that conversation and say, ‘What do our young people need so they don’t end up in a detention facility?”

Jay Moser, the former principal of the school that operated inside Shuman, said he’s excited by Innamorato’s win.

“The problem is so much broader than just saying, ‘Oh, those kids are bad,’” Moser told Bolts late Tuesday. “There are issues that need to be addressed systematically: poverty, racism, lack of opportunity. With her philosophy on governing, there’s no doubt in my mind that she will usher in changes, that we won’t just focus on punishment first.”

One of Allegheny County’s loudest anti-carceral voices, county council representative Bethany Hallam, also won her countywide election Tuesday, crushing challenger Joanna Doven in a Democratic primary—a third critical victory for the left in the Pittsburgh region.

“It’s a strong rejection of the status quo,” abolitionist organizer Tanisha Long, who has been part of the years-long push to reduce incarceration, told Bolts on election night. “People are sick of feeling like Allegheny County is not for everyone.”

The article has been corrected on May 17 to clarify that write-in ballots in the Republican primary for DA have not yet been tallied.

The post Reformers Soar in Pittsburgh Primaries, Opening New Chapter for Decarceral Efforts appeared first on Bolts.

Allegheny County hasn’t operated a facility dedicated to youth incarceration since then, and instead has shipped kids to detention centers in other counties and sometimes even outside the state, while also implementing more at-home supervision like ankle monitors. 

Heading into Tuesday’s election for county executive, which could determine the future of youth detention in the Pittsburgh region, social workers and reform advocates who’ve worked closely with Allegheny County kids are imploring the leading candidates to reject any new youth jail and to support alternatives that keep kids in their homes and communities. 

“We want as few young people out of their homes as possible,” Sara Goodkind, a professor of social work at the University of Pittsburgh who co-authored a broad report about Shuman last year, told Bolts. “We know through decades of research that youth detention is associated with increases in recidivism, decreased chances of graduating high school and an increased chance of being arrested as an adult.”

The outgoing county executive, Rich Fitzgerald, cannot run for re-election. In February he announced his intent to “re-establish a county-run facility, or to create a public-private partnership” for juvenile detention in Allegheny County, but has not revealed any plan or proposed timeline since then. Fitzgerald’s successor will have a four-year term and will be instrumental in whatever happens next, as they will inherit broad power over contracts, administrative appointments, and capital budgeting for any potential new or repurposed facility.

The candidates looking to replace him have signaled they’d take the county in different directions. Two of the Democrats who lead in polling, John Weinstein and Michael Lamb, say Shuman should be reopened, though with structural improvements to the building, either for the long term or until the county can replace it with a better facility. 

A third frontrunner in the Democratic primary, Sara Innamorato, a progressive lawmaker who led the field in one public survey last week, has taken a more open stance, questioning whether the county really needs a juvenile lockup.

The Democratic primary victor will face Republican Joe Rockey, who declined to be interviewed for this story but who, according to the Pittsburgh radio station WESA, also believes the county must reopen a youth detention facility. He faces steep odds in this strongly Democratic area in the November general election, polling far behind his potential opponents.

Like the ongoing debates over the adult criminal legal system’s disproportionate impact on Black neighborhoods in this highly segregated area, the varying proposals for youth incarceration carry particularly high stakes for Black children and families in Allegheny County. The ACLU of Pennsylvania found that Black students grades 5-12 in Allegheny County were arrested at nearly nine times the rate of white students during the 2018-2019 school year, and that Allegheny County arrested students at more than double the statewide rate and nearly four times the rate in Philadelphia. 

As of Wednesday, 31 kids 17 or younger were incarcerated in the Allegheny County Jail, the adult facility, according to county reports. Twenty-eight of them were Black.

Weinstein, the Allegheny County Treasurer and one of the leading candidates in the Democratic primary for county executive, believes that closing Shuman sent a signal that children can commit crimes without threat of punishment. Youth gun violence has increased dramatically since 2020 in the area, and local police have pointed to examples of children sent home after being arrested and accused of violent acts.

“Kids are not stupid. They know there’s no Shuman Center and they’ll push the envelope,” Weinstein told Bolts. “There’s no fear now.” 

He continued, “The police officers know this. I’ve talked to judges, and they’re unbelievably frustrated by it. Even if they’re putting ankle bracelets on, the kids go out and commit the crimes with the bracelet on.”

Weinstein called for reopening Shuman with more mental health staff and workforce training than previously existed there.

“We’re gonna rebrand it, totally revamp it,” he said.

Lamb, the Pittsburgh City Controller and another leader in Democratic primary polling, says that Shuman likely needs to reopen, albeit maybe only in the near-term until Allegheny County can find a better facility to house children accused of violent crimes, like assault. 

“First and foremost, I do believe we need a center for juvenile detention,” Lamb told Bolts. He said it’s important that any new center not look or feel like a traditional jail—like Shuman, with its sally port entry, intake station, and cells with concrete floors, metal toilets, and skinny windows. 

Lamb criticized the current practice of shipping kids to other detention centers up to a three-hour drive away from Pittsburgh, but also said he wanted Allegheny County to make space to house children accused of crimes in some of the 55 out of 67 Pennsylvania counties that currently don’t have their own youth detention centers. According to a state report, the percentage of children detained more than 100 miles from home increased tenfold between 2012 and 2021, from 2 percent to 19 percent. 

Goodkind said she worries some county officials are too focused on how the next center should be designed.

“My concern is these proposals to build a fancy, new, kinder, gentler youth detention center,” she said. “I think we need a vision of a world where youth incarceration is obsolete. And to get there, we can’t be focusing on our efforts to have a better detention center.” 

Tammy Hughes, a school psychologist and professor at Duquesne University in Pittsburgh, said officials don’t have to strain to imagine a world in which kids who break the law aren’t incarcerated. As in other states, many Pennsylvania counties have recently gotten rid of juvenile detention centers in favor of more home confinement or other in-the-community options. Fifteen juvenile detention centers around the state closed between 2006 and 2021, the state reported.

Hughes pointed out that non-white kids are referred to the juvenile justice system more often even though white youth often commit crimes at similar rates.

“This place really leans into punishing Black and brown kids,” Hughes said. “This starts in preschool. We see three-year-olds in our clinic, expelled for ripping papers off the wall, for noncompliance, talking back, not listening. That’s an application of rules gone awry. That’s ‘zero tolerance.’ But with white kids we give a lot of grace, like, ‘I know I made mistakes when I was 14.’”

Innamorato, a state Representative, is the only leading candidate in the Democratic primary for county executive who isn’t convinced Allegheny County needs to re-open Shuman or replace it with another detention center. She hasn’t committed to opening any particular facility, but says if the county does re-establish one under her watch, it would need to be non-carceral. She told Bolts that even children accused of violent crimes should not be held in traditional jail cells.

“I’m really trying to separate the two conversations,” she said. “We tend to talk about Shuman Center as a building that is there and should be repurposed and so what is it going to be? I want to flip that conversation and say, ‘What do our young people need so they don’t end up in a detention facility?’”

Innamorato told Bolts that the University of Pittsburgh research project Goodkind co-authored, titled “Post-Shuman Visioning,” was foundational to her current views on juvenile crime and detention in the county. In the absence of any firm plan for the future of youth detention in the county, Goodkind said, her team saw an opportunity to center the experiences of children who had been previously jailed inside Shuman. When asked about their time at Shuman, they overwhelmingly said they wished for more counseling and therapy, with specific resources for those who had experienced sexual violence and other forms of trauma. They asked for more structured activities, training in financial literacy and education on their own legal rights, and more opportunities to connect with their families. One child told the researchers that Shuman was a place that “grooms kids for crime, not healing.”

Innamorato told Bolts, “If we aren’t intentional about the way that we’re architecting this system moving forward, we’re going to continue to put kids through a system that hurts them further, and then put them out in the world where they don’t have access to resources. And we expect them to thrive?”

If Innamorato wins and charts a new path that doesn’t involve replacing Shuman with another youth lockup, it would build on other victories for criminal justice reformers in western Pennsylvania. In 2021, voters overwhelmingly approved a ballot initiative to ban solitary confinement in Allegheny County, although the county’s adult jail has continued the practice. That same year, Pittsburgh elected Ed Gainey mayor after he ran on a platform of racial justice; local police accountability advocates say they have confidence in him. Other elections next week could change the course of the criminal legal system in Allegheny County: in addition to key county council races, the county’s longtime and punitive district attorney faces a public defender who has secured key endorsements and appears viable.

People who have worked with kids in Shuman and in similar settings told Bolts that next week’s election could signal another turning point for youth detention in Allegheny County. Jeff Shook, a professor of social work at the University of Pittsburgh, said that he’s urging whoever wins to prioritize community investments that aren’t based in punishment and incarceration.

“If you invest in health care, people do better, and you have less crime,” Shook said. “If you invest in education, young people do better, and there’s less crime. We need to raise wages. We need to think about what the pathway is to good jobs, to jobs that are sustainable and promote wellbeing. I think those are the conversations we should be having, as opposed to asking, ‘What kind of center should we build?’”

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“I’m done aging,” Johnson says, pacing one recent Sunday morning outside the duplex where he was raised, in Pittsburgh’s Hazelwood neighborhood. He says his mom built a safe, loving home here, and by a firehouse not far away, he points to where he and other kids rode bikes. 

Johnson recalls that by the time he was 14, his friends in the neighborhood started “disappearing.” Hazelwood is a diverse area with a large Black population where the incarceration rate skies above most of the rest of the Pittsburgh metro. Johnson rifles through a mental list of kids he knew growing up, and can only think of one who hasn’t at some point been incarcerated or killed, or both. 

Johnson himself was locked away in 1995, at 19 years old, for a murder he did not commit. He stayed in prison for nearly two decades, thanks in part to a local district attorney’s office, helmed since 1998 by Democrat Stephen Zappala, that was slow to take seriously the considerable evidence in his favor. Much of that evidence was publicized in a 2003 Pittsburgh Post-Gazette investigation, but Johnson would still be forced to wait another nine years for exoneration and release from prison.

“Every year, every day of that was real,” Johnson says. “I never got to play the saxophone, the drums, stuff that I really aspired to do,” he says. “I didn’t get to go to the playground with my kids and buy them Big Wheels, bikes, and get my first jobs.”

Just like so many of his peers. 

“They don’t just take us one by one. They take us by the twos and threes and the fours,” Johnson says. “They just snatch us up out of here. They can put an indictment down and get 15-20 Black men outside of their households. That’s what it is. It’s still that way.” 

This kind of experience with incarceration and the criminal legal system is not common in most of the city, let alone in Allegheny County, the population center of western Pennsylvania that is made up of Pittsburgh and its suburbs. Black people account for 12 percent of county residents but roughly two-thirds of the people detained in its jails, a disparity that maps onto the geography of this intensely segregated area.

When the Prison Policy Initiative analyzed Pennsylvania’s prison population last year, it found that vast swaths of the county experienced virtually no incarceration. In most of the county, the imprisonment rate was no more than six residents out of 10,000, often much less, which is far below statewide and national numbers.

But the imprisonment rate was much higher in some areas, up to 25 times that rate. In raw numbers, this means that most of the county’s population lived in census tracts from which no more than three people were imprisoned, while in some dozens of people were missing.

The four Pittsburgh neighborhoods where this is most pronounced, according to PPI’s report—Homewood North, Marshall-Shadeland, Larimer, and Beltzhoover—are all majority-Black. So, too, are a handful of suburbs with comparably extreme imprisonment rates. Emily Widra, who co-authored the PPI report, told Bolts that its alarmingly high numbers don’t even include people in jail, in the juvenile system, on parole or probation, or involuntarily confined for mental health reasons. “I think it’s safe to say that is a vast underestimate of how many people feel the burden of the criminal legal system,” she said. “Which is kind of bonkers.”

Summer Lee, who became the first Black woman representing Pennsylvania in Congress after winning an Allegheny-based House seat last year, was raised in one of those suburban areas, in North Braddock, just outside city limits and north of the Monongahela River. 

“These communities are over-policed, which means they’re over-incarcerated,” Lee told Bolts earlier this month. “These folks aren’t criminals because they’re Black or because they’re poor. They’re criminals because our policies have failed them. I don’t even want to say they’re criminals; they’ve committed things that we call ‘crime.’”

For Lee and others in Allegheny County who are hoping to unwind mass incarceration, a big share of the responsibility rests on the shoulders of Zappala, who has overseen charging and prosecutions in the county as its local DA for more than two decades.

Zappala has repeatedly faced criticism from reform advocates for decisions that have favored white people over Black people and systems of power over the vulnerable. He says he holds police accountable but has seldom prosecuted officers; in one 2010 case, he declined to file charges against a group of white officers who brutalized an unarmed Black teenager. He boasts of a modern approach to substance-use issues, but in one year alone, The Appeal found, he prosecuted nearly 2,000 low-level drug possession cases. Another Appeal investigation revealed that, in 2016 and 2017, the vast majority of children who his office charged as adults were Black. Two years ago, he instructed his staff to offer no plea deals to the clients of a local Black attorney known for seeking out racial justice.

As Zappala runs for a seventh term next month, many of his critics, including Lee, have rallied around his challenger, Matt Dugan, the county’s chief public defender. (The two are set to face off in the Democratic primary on May 16.) 

But the county’s segregated geography is also shaping its electoral dynamics. Zappala’s opponents must contend with different areas’ vastly contrasting familiarities with the carceral system.

In 2019, when Zappala last ran for re-election and faced reform proponents in both the Democratic primary and general election, the parts of Allegheny County that most acutely feel the weight of the criminal legal system overwhelmingly voted against him. But they were outvoted by areas with far less experience of incarceration.

His challengers in each of the two races—a pair of public defenders, Turahn Jenkins in the Democratic primary and independent Lisa Middleman in the general—carried the city of Pittsburgh itself. They did particularly well in neighborhoods with higher incarceration, a Bolts analysis of the precinct results finds.

These areas also have especially personal investment in discussion of safety and crime, as they suffer the bulk of gun violence in the county. Homicides are very rare in most of Allegheny, but the recent tally is in the dozens in a slew of communities including Homewood, Beltzhoover, and North Braddock.

But Jenkins and Middleman both lost badly in the outlying county and fell short overall. 

Zappala, meanwhile, got well under 40 percent of the vote in some areas, even in the Democratic primary when he won nearly 60 percent countywide; in some precincts, he hovered around 10 percent. But he did far better in areas with near-nil imprisonment rates and hardly lost any precinct along the outer ring of the county.

People in Pennsylvania cannot vote while they are in prison over a felony, skewing political influence even further in favor of areas from which few are imprisoned. 

Dugan is aware of these geographic headwinds as he runs to unseat Zappala. The challenger seeks to harness the appetite for reform that already exists in Pittsburgh and select other pockets while also bringing in more suburban voters.

“Voters in the county are going to outproduce voters in the city by about 2.5 to one. That’s what we project,” he told Bolts about the May primary. “Our path to victory exists in the margins of the suburbs.”

One weekend earlier this month, Dugan spoke at a candidate forum inside a unitarian church in the well-to-do suburb of Mt. Lebanon, in a precinct that Zappala won by more than 20 percentage points four years ago. The next day, Dugan appeared at another forum organized by a Democratic club in the city of Pittsburgh, at a large municipal park surrounded by precincts Zappala lost badly in 2019. Zappala skipped both events.

“We have heat spots in the county where we know we have issues with gun violence, we have neighborhoods plagued by that,” Dugan said at the Mt. Lebanon event. “These neighborhoods share certain characteristics: income levels well below the state level, underperforming schools, lack of access to resources, food deserts.”

“We can do something potentially to disrupt this cycle,” he continued. 

But attendee Joanie Forin, a retired suburbanite, warns that the conversation remains abstract for many in the community.

“In the suburbs, people don’t really have interaction with the criminal justice system. They just see the incumbent, and they know the name,” she told Bolts at the event. “They don’t know what happens in the jail.”

Local organizers say they’ve been working relentlessly to change that reality, including by publicizing abuses in the jail. 

In 2021, voters overwhelmingly approved a popular initiative to limit the practice of solitary confinement in Allegheny County. (Jail administrators have since been accused of repeatedly violating that initiative’s mandate.) That same year, Ed Gainey became Pittsburgh’s first Black mayor, after running on a platform of racial justice. Lee won a congressional seat in 2022, after four years in the state House, while calling for jail and prison spending to be slashed, and for cash bail to be eliminated. And in February,  Pittsburgh’s new city controller released an audit underscoring how the county jail thoroughly upends the lives of entire families.

Gainey has endorsed Dugan this year. So has the county Democratic Committee, an indicator of the reform movement’s increased viability among more establishment-friendly voters. 

Bethany Hallam, a formerly incarcerated activist who won an at-large seat on the Allegheny County’s council in 2019 and who also supports Dugan, told Bolts that the terrain has changed significantly since her first election. 

“We’ve done hundreds of these forums and Democratic committee meetings and at all these places,” she said, “you hear it over and over again: every single place, people ask about the jail, about the legal system. And that never happened. Even when we had all of these exact same races running in 2019, nobody was talking about it.”

Zappala, meanwhile, still carries himself with an air of invincibility. 

Some of it is that he has rarely had to fight to keep his job. Between 1999, when he first faced voters as an appointed DA, and 2019, he faced zero challengers—that’s four re-election races when he was unopposed. (This is common: 35 of 49 Pennsylvania district attorney elections this year feature only one candidate.) When he ran in 2019, facing his first challenge in 20 years, he scoffed at his critics, telling the Post-Gazette, “I’m done with socialists and ACLU forums.” 

This year, local Democratic politicos say he’s nowhere to be found on the countywide circuit of meet-and-greets and candidate forums. His campaign site features no policy stances as of publication.

Zappala declined to be interviewed for this story and a spokesperson did not respond to a follow-up with written questions. He also did not show up at either of the candidate forums that Bolts attended.

Lee, who has called for Zappala’s removal for years, finds it troubling that the areas most punished by his office don’t get to communicate with him more. “Those very same communities that are underinvested, basically carrying the brunt of the injustice, are also the communities that are least likely to even have candidates talking to them in the first place,” she says. “Zappala isn’t coming to these communities to get votes, he’s not interacting with them on the front end.”

Reform proponents are quick to remind that these are the same places most challenged by poverty and underfunded public education. But for Zappala, this confluence of factors is a reason to eschew criminal justice reforms rather than embrace them. 

By the time someone comes in contact with his office, he has said in past interviews, so many problems—lack of access to affordable health care and housing, for example—are so baked-in that it’s unfair to call his record classist or racist. And it’s unreasonable to expect a DA’s office to take those considerations into account. 

“I’m not in charge of transportation, safe and decent housing, or education,” he said in 2019. “I’m on the back end of government.”

Zappala has stressed that his office simply takes each individual case as it comes. “It’s a reality: an officer brings a case in and they say, ‘Here are the facts,’” he said at a forum four years ago when pressed about racial disparities in the county jail. “We ask, ‘What is the evidence that supports what you’re saying is fact?’ And then we charge based on that evidence.”  

Frank Walker, who leads the Pittsburgh Black Lawyers Alliance, said in an interview with Bolts that he finds it “absurd” that a person in such a powerful position speaks as though he has little agency over outcomes in the local legal system. “If you can’t contribute,” Walker said, “why are you even there? Then what’s your job? If it’s making people safe and making sure justice is undone, it would appear this is an injustice.” (Walker emphasized that he was speaking for himself, not the Alliance.)

Even as he has occasionally touted some programs to alleviate incarceration, Zappala has largely maintained a “tough-on-crime” persona, even as Democratic prosecutors in many parts of the country have of late tended toward less punitive action, particularly in lower-level cases. 

Local defense attorney Paul Jubas, who has handled a string of high-profile cases in Pennsylvania, drew a stark contrast between Democrats like Zappala and Philadelphia’s reform-minded district attorney, Larry Krasner. Jubas, who has deep knowledge of both offices, said, “It’s quite a different experience working on a post-conviction case in Philadelphia and working on a post-conviction case—or any case—here. They cooperate in Philadelphia. They’re interested in doing justice. … This district attorney, he’s not exactly engaged. And he hasn’t been for a while.” 

Terrell Johnson was one of those post-conviction cases that landed on Zappala’s docket after he became DA in 1998.

Zappala didn’t prosecute Johnson, but his office did help keep him incarcerated. According to court records, his staff spent five years, starting in 2007, reinvestigating the case, then produced just a six-page report. All those years, the critical evidence that would eventually exonerate Johnson was available to them. 

Johnson’s lawyer during the retrial was Turahn Jenkins, who later became Zappala’s challenger in the 2019 Democratic primary. Jenkins declined to comment for this story, but Walker, who shared an office with Jenkins and watched the Johnson case closely, faults Zappala’s office for its focus on maintaining Johnson’s conviction. “They could have actually investigated the case properly, with a mindset of seeking justice,” he said. “They could have sent it to the conviction integrity unit, they could have made a referral to the attorney general’s office. But that office will always put self-preservation over everything.”

In 2019, by then free for seven years, Johnson saw Zappala at a campaign event, and thought he’d introduce himself. His hands were shaking: before him stood a man who at one point held enormous sway over whether Johnson would die in prison. He approached Zappala, who, he said, didn’t seem to recognize him.

“I said, ‘You really don’t know who I am, do you?’” Johnson says. “He said, ‘No.’”

Johnson saw himself as a “shining star” coming out of incarceration, a rare success story among the wrongly convicted. “This stuff doesn’t happen,” he told Bolts. “I die in jail. That’s my outcome.” Surely, Johnson felt, Zappala would recognize one of only nine people ever exonerated from Allegheny County during his long tenure.

“I just stood there and looked at him,” Johnson said. “He moved on to his next conversation.”

Dugan promises to create a new role in the office dedicated specifically to investigation of past convictions, so that innocent people, like Johnson, as well as the many more people he believes have been overcharged, can be freed. 

Still, when it comes to outlining policies that would change the county, Dugan has generally proceeded with some caution. He declines to speak in “absolutes,” saying he would never rule out prosecution of any offense–though he says he doesn’t see himself ever prosecuting certain behaviors, particularly sex work and drug possession. He believes cash bail is unfair and unethical, but he said he’d still seek it in some cases. 

Asked at a recent event whether he’d ever seek the death penalty, he declined to altogether rule it out, as other DA candidates have done, saying it should be reserved for only the most extreme situations. 

But Dugan is enjoying strong support from Zappala’s critics, who see in him an opportunity to turn the page. To differentiate himself from the incumbent, Dugan says he would move people out of the system and into diversion programs even if they don’t plead guilty. He promises never to pile a case on someone just because he can. And he says he will seek shorter supervision periods, an important issue in a state that has among the nation’s highest rates of people who are kept under probation and parole. He believes this will help bring down the population of the jail, which is filled with people dinged for allegedly breaking the conditions of their supervision. 

“It’s about thinking differently about the role of the district attorney in the criminal justice system,” Dugan told Bolts. “This isn’t serving the individuals well and it isn’t serving the county well.”

The confrontation between Zappala and Dugan could extend well beyond May 16. While Zappala filed to run as a Democrat, there are efforts among local Republicans to qualify him to be the Republican nominee via write-ins. (A similar effort succeeded in 2019, and Zappala accepted the GOP’s nod, eventually running in the general election as the nominee for both major parties.) Should he lose the Democratic primary to Dugan in May, Zappala would only need about 500 GOP write-in votes to become the Republican nominee and run against him again in November, according to TribLive.

For local organizer Tanisha Long of the Pennsylvania-based Abolitionist Law Center, the election is the culmination of years of education and activism to build a case for systemic overhaul. Long charts some wins so far—the passage of the anti-solitary confinement ballot measure, for one, and the fact that once-sleepy meetings of the county Jail Oversight Board are now better-attended and closely-watched events.

Still, Long worries the message may not have sufficiently taken hold in all parts of the county.

“A lot of groundwork was done to get the public to understand what was going on. I think that four years ago, people who weren’t activists had no idea, and they didn’t know who had power over such things,” she said. “Now we are saying as activists, ‘We’ve brought all this to your attention. What are you going to do about it?’”

The post Pittsburgh’s Most Heavily Imprisoned Areas Want Change. Will the Suburbs Listen? appeared first on Bolts.

Tom Marino, a former member of Congress, is running this spring for a job he held more than two decades ago: district attorney of Lycoming County, in Central Pennsylvania. On his website, he vows to “prosecute offenders to the fullest extent of the law,” and in the brief list of issues he says he’d tackle with a “tough-on-crime approach,” he includes the fact that “drugs are making their way into our neighborhoods.”

Lycoming County has been hit hard by the opioid crisis, overwhelming local officials with a surge in overdoses. But Marino’s campaign posture today sticks out given the accusations he faced just five years ago that he worsened this trend.

In late 2017, Marino’s nomination to be then-President Donald Trump’s drug czar derailed after The Washington Post and 60 Minutes reported that he pushed legislation that made opioids more readily available. The investigation revealed that Marino collaborated with the pharmaceutical industry to draft language that gutted the Drug Enforcement Administration’s authority to go after large drug companies suspected of fueling the crisis, all while receiving big donations. Besides sinking Marino’s appointment, the news sparked a national reckoning over his law and, back home in Lycoming, condemnation as well as fresh reporting on overdoses.

But any debate over Marino’s record and how it fits with his new campaign’s rhetoric ended before it even began: No one filed to run against him. 

Pennsylvania’s deadline to run for DA as a major-party candidate passed on March 7 with no other contender entering the race, leaving Marino highly likely to win the job and complete his comeback with little additional scrutiny. Marino, who also survived a residency challenge last week, did not reply to Bolts’s requests for comment over his legacy and platform on drugs.

The same scene repeated itself throughout the state this month. Upon compiling the list of candidates in the 49 Pennsylvania counties with DA elections this year, I found that only 14—less than a third of the total—drew multiple candidates, with a few of those races seeming to offer voters a stark choice. 

Thirty-five counties, meanwhile, drew only one candidate by the deadline.

Missed windows for democracy

That’s 35 candidates—typically incumbents, but in six cases nonincumbents like Marino—who are poised to waltz into office without facing much scrutiny into their policies. In Dauphin County, where PennLive recently reported on mounting jail deaths and local officials offering little information or accountability, DA Frank Chardo faces no opposition, just like the last time he ran in 2019. The same is true for DA Brian Sinnett in neighboring Adams County, where the DA’s office faced allegations that it is not taking rape complaints seriously. In Lehigh, which saw sustained activism after prosecutors decided to not charge police officers in a publicized use-of-force case, the DA is retiring and his chief deputy is the only candidate who filed to replace him.

The strangest saga is unfolding in Northumberland, where DA Tony Matulewicz filed his petition too late by a matter of minutes and was denied a ballot spot. He is suing to be reinstated but, for now, challenger Mike O’Donnell remains the sole qualified candidate. O’Donnell, who is a Republican like Matulewicz, works as a defense attorney and said upon entering the race that “he wanted to fix a broken system,” but did not reply to questions about what that means.

Independents may still file to run later, but it’s very rare for candidates outside of the two major parties to win. In 2019, when each of these 49 counties held their last DA race, all 49 winners had filed as a Democrat or Republican. Newcomers could also mount uphill write-in campaigns.

It’s common across the country for DAs to run unopposed. For one, it’s hard for attorneys to challenge a sitting prosecutor without fearing professional repercussions should they lose, especially in smaller communities. Still, the number of Pennsylvania counties hosting contested elections plummeted this year compared to 2019. At the time, 24 of the 49 counties drew multiple major-party candidates, compared to 14 counties this year. 

The pattern is also not confined to the state’s smallest jurisdictions. There are 12 DA elections in counties with at least 250,000 residents, and only four drew multiple contenders; in Montgomery County, for instance, a county of more than 800,000 residents, incumbent DA Kevin Steele will be running for re-election unopposed for the second straight cycle.

“Many people just don’t know all of the power that district attorneys actually possess,” says Danitra Sherman, the deputy advocacy and policy director at the ACLU of Pennsylvania. “As voters, we often get excited about presidential elections, but not so much about local races, or state races at times, when those that hold positions at these levels have more say on and decision making power over the day-to-day life.” The state ACLU launched a voter education drive on the role of DAs in 2017, and in 2019 they sent out questionnaires to candidates, asking for their views on matters ranging from sentencing to bail, but many did not reply. Sherman says they recently sent out questionnaires to some candidates again this year.

In counties with contested DA races, this year is voters’ first opportunity to weigh in directly on criminal justice since the Black Lives Matter protests of 2020 and the latest round of GOP attacks over crime, which has put issues surrounding policing and public safety squarely in Pennsylvania’s political spotlight. Yet even when there’s a contested race, candidates often downplay the huge amounts of policy discretion that comes with the role. 

My own review of Pennsylvania’s 14 contested DA races found that many of the people who filed this year are running as status-quo candidates (such chief deputy prosecutors bidding to replace their retiring boss), competing largely over who has the most professional experience as a prosecutor, and eschewing sharing their thoughts on issues—all standard fare in DA races. 

In addition, some candidates have little to no campaign presence at this stage and did not answer requests for comment. That includes the sole challenger in Delaware County, one of the most populous counties with a contested race.

Primaries in Pennsylvania are on May 16, and general elections are in November. State voters also weigh in on many local and state elections this year, including a seat on the state supreme court, county sheriffs, and Philadelphia’s mayor.

Still, a few DA elections are presenting voters with some contrasting paths on criminal justice policy.

What to still watch for

The year’s marquee race is the DA election in Allegheny County, home to Pittsburgh, where longtime incumbent Stephen Zappala faces the county’s chief public defender, Matt Dugan. 

Over his nearly 25 years in the DA’s office, Zappala has embraced a reputation for harsh prosecutions—other than in cases of police shootings—and sternly opposed advocates who have pushed for decarceration, accusing them of disregarding victims. “I don’t agree with their philosophy on a lot of things,” he said during his most recent campaign, explaining why he was “done with socialists and ACLU forums” and skipping some candidate events. Investigations have revealed significant racial disparities in prosecutions under Zappala’s watch but he has routinely dismissed addressing systemic inequalities as beyond the purview of his job. “I’m not running for public defender,” he quipped four years ago.

Now a public defender is running against him, adding to a wave of outsiders, including civil rights attorneys, who have run for DA nationwide in recent years. Dugan is pressing a basic disagreement over whether the DA’s office should even be tackling the root causes of crime and tracking class and racial disparities. “I do see a place for the district attorney to think more about crime prevention and to address the issues that are really driving people into the criminal justice system in the first place,” he told the Pittsburgh City Paper.

Hundreds of miles away, in Monroe County, the retirement of a local DA—Republican David Christine—has sparked an intriguing three-way race. In the Republican corner is Alex Marek, an assistant DA in a neighboring county who is pledging to bring a “tough on crime” approach. 

Democratic candidate Donald Leeth takes exception to that moniker. “Unfortunately being tough on crime is always locking up more people for a longer period of time, and I think the evidence has shown that that doesn’t work, that doesn’t make us a safer community, that doesn’t address the underlying issues within our society and our criminal justice system,” he told me. 

Leeth used to work as an assistant DA but says he became more aware of disparities in prosecution as a defense attorney. He faulted racial disparities in the county’s court system and an overreliance on police officers as “first responders for everything.” But he also remained largely cautious when it came to specifying reform he’d implement, for instance saying he’d want to recommend cash bail in fewer cases, but also that it has its role in the court system.

Leeth also said he “would not be open” to seeking death sentences if he was elected DA, and called on the death penalty to be repealed.

Also in the running is Democrat Mike Mancuso, who currently works as the county’s chief deputy prosecutor, and who did not reply to a request for comment on the death penalty and other issues. (The winner of the Democratic primary between Leeth and Mancuso will face Marek in November.)

Monroe is one of the ten counties in Pennsylvania that has sentenced someone to death over the last decade, according to data gathered by the Death Penalty Information Center. Pennsylvania’s Democratic governors have imposed a moratorium on executions but the death penalty remains available and state prosecutors regularly seek it.

Washington County is also on that list. Republican DA Jason Walsh came into office in late 2021 after his predecessor’s death and he has since pursued death sentences aggressively; the county had eight capital cases as of August, and more since. Walsh now faces Democrat Christina Demarco-Breeden, an assistant DA in a neighboring county. When I asked Demarco-Breeden if there are aspects of the DA’s office that she wishes to change, she zeroed in on Walsh’s use of the death penalty. She is concerned that it just keeps growing and that the county’s defense resources are at a breaking point. But she also said that, if she became DA, she herself would remain open to applying the death penalty “to the most brutal homicides.”

Some Democratic lawmakers are championing legislation this session to abolish the death penalty. “My job is to make sure that’s not even an option,” said State Representative Chris Rabb when I asked how he hopes DAs handle capital cases in the meantime. The money “could be much better spent on any number of things, most notably violence prevention so that we don’t have as many people committing the murders that get people on death row to begin with.” 

Rabb, who represents Philadelphia, was a vocal defender of  Philadelphia DA Larry Krasner, a figurehead for so-called progressive prosecutors, against state Republican efforts to remove the DA from office last year; Krasner, who easily won re-election in 2021, is not up again until 2025. 

Rabb says the GOP attacks on Krasner and other tough-on-crime messaging backfired—Democrats won a high-profile U.S. Senate race and flipped the state House—because most Pennsylvanians believe in reforming the criminal legal system. “They believe in second chances, and having parole and probation reform so that people are not surveilled for decades,” Rabb told me.

“Spending so much time denigrating Larry Krasner did nothing else than energize Philadelphia in saying, ‘You folks who don’t live in Philly claim to care about us, but what are you doing for us other than demeaning someone who we voted for twice?’” Rabb added. Krasner, unlike most of his peers, has faced opponents in every primary and general election.

Democrats’ takeover of the state House in the midterms changed the political dynamics around criminal justice reform by ushering progressive leaders into power. But Liz Randol, legislative director of the state ACLU, says one thing that hasn’t changed in Harrisburg is the role of the Pennsylvania DA Association, the influential group that lobbies on behalf of state DAs and has helped shape state laws to be more punitive. Randol is watching whether 2023 chips away at state prosecutors’ typical role as chief antagonists to reform legislation.

“The prosecutorial mindset runs through the entire criminal legal system, from legislating to charging, to sentencing,” said Randol. “Because the system is largely driven by the prosecutorial side of the equation, it’s going to take a lot to change it. But I certainly think you can poke holes in that veneer.”

The post In Pennsylvania’s 2023 DA Races, There’s Already a Winner: Unopposed Prosecutors appeared first on Bolts.

Andrews got into an argument with two guards and requested to file a grievance, but instead they locked her in a cell alone, causing her to have a panic attack.

“I was a kid in jail. I’m scared,” she said, recalling the painful experience. 

Andrews says her requests for help were met with suspicion, and she was told that she would go in “the hole”—solitary confinement—as punishment if the medical ward found nothing wrong.

“I was about to go to the hole because I wanted to see medical care. Because I said I couldn’t breathe, because I was having a panic attack. And I just couldn’t believe that,” Andrews told The Appeal: Political Report. 

When she was incarcerated at the jail again in 2019, Andrews was placed in solitary confinement. She says if it had happened to her the first time she might not have survived. The Allegheny County jail has a suicide rate more than 1.5 times the national average.

“Going to jail later and finding what all that really meant, if that would’ve happened to me when I was 18 and I first went to jail, I would have not made it. Like it’s that serious.” 

Now Allegheny County voters could ban solitary confinement in the jail. A ballot initiative sponsored by Alliance for Police Accountability and co-signed by over 25 other organizations, would prohibit holding people in a cell for more than 20 hours per day, with limited exceptions for health and security reasons. After receiving nearly 67,000 signatures, the initiative will appear on the ballot in the local election today. 

Brandi Fisher, president and CEO of the Alliance for Police Accountability, says the ballot initiative is the community’s way of addressing concerns about conditions in the jail. “The sole goal is to make sure that people are safe. Just because someone is accused of a crime doesn’t mean that we ignore their health issues and their health concerns. And Allegheny County Jail has a huge issue when it comes to being able to address people’s health concerns, and people are literally dying and losing their lives because of it.”

The jail has come under scrutiny for a range of problems, from reports of cells with frigid temperatures and cool air blowing from the vents during the winter, to COVID-19 outbreaks exacerbated by the notoriously poor medical care, to brutality and abuse. Pittsburgh’s Black residents are far more likely to face these conditions because of the jail’s racial disparities. Out of the roughly 1,700 people incarcerated at the jail each day, roughly two-thirds are Black, despite Black people making up only 13 percent of the population in the county.

Last year, the Abolitionist Law Center filed multiple lawsuits against jail officials over the facility’s lack of mental health care and the mistreatment of people who need it; 70 percent of the people incarcerated in the jail have been diagnosed with a psychiatric condition.

A press release concerning a lawsuit the group filed in September states that “People with psychiatric disabilities are tased, sprayed with [pepper spray], beaten, and placed in restraint chairs for several hours for minor infractions and for simply requesting mental health care. They are commonly placed in solitary confinement for weeks and months on end, often without having a hearing, in conditions universally acknowledged by correctional experts, courts and the United Nations as torture.” 

In response, Allegheny County said that “Force is not used to punish inmates; it is used only when necessary for the safety and security of the staff and inmates.”

The lawsuit alleges that in solitary confinement, people are restricted to a 10-by-7-foot cell, that they can be deprived of soap, toothpaste or a toothbrush, and that they are often restricted from programs and services.  They only receive one hour outside of their cell, sometimes handcuffed to a table. Allegheny County denied that people in solitary are deprived of hygiene products.

According to the Abolitionist Law Center, the Allegheny County Jail’s track record of brutality, especially against women, far exceeds other jails in the state.  In 2019, there were 720 reported use-of-force incidents—a per capita rate twice as high as the state average— and people were confined to restraint chairs 339 times. In 2018, the staff even used pepper spray against a pregnant woman.

People who were placed in restraint chairs told Public Source, a local publication, that they were left without food or bathroom breaks, pepper sprayed, and covered with a spit hood that affected their breathing. Some said they were even left naked and exposed.

Allegheny County Jail warden Orlando Harper did not respond to a request for comment from the Political Report.

Andrews says she has experienced the restraint chair, solitary confinement, and other forms of brutality numerous times during periods of incarceration over the past three years. She believes that the jail’s practices are long overdue for change. 

“Just because you have the power to watch over these people and basically be their authority figure doesn’t mean you can take advantage of that power,” Andrews said. “And that’s basically what happens at that jail.” 

The county jail board, which oversees the facility, has stalled on addressing these problems. And legislation to limit solitary confinement hasn’t made it far in Pennsylvania’s Republican-controlled legislature. Fisher says the ballot initiative lets voters take the matter into their own hands. 

“It was a way to make change happen without permission, without the loopholes, without having to go through the institutions and structures that currently exist that we already know are rooted in racism and white supremacy,” she said. “We’re not ever gonna get the changes that we wanna see if we’re dependent on those folks to make it happen.”

Advocates for the ballot initiative acknowledge that incarcerated people could still be isolated for up to 20 hours a day if the measure passes. But Miracle Jones, the director of policy and advocacy at 1Hood Media, says that it is a place to start. “Legislation will not always be as all-encompassing as the most progressive of us want, but sometimes just the compromising solution is getting definitions that will not only allow for a referendum to be passed, but implemented.” 

Activists are rallying around other issues in this election, too. The ballot includes a Pittsburgh Home Rule Charter amendment to implement a version of Breonna’s Law, which banned no-knock warrants in Louisville, Kentucky. The amendment would require law enforcement officers to be in uniform or other identifiable clothing, record video using a body camera, and announce themselves when executing a warrant. They would also be required to physically knock and wait at least 15 seconds before entering a residence.

A high-stakes county sheriff’s primary election features former Pittsburgh police chief Dom Costa. After leaving law enforcement, Costa was elected to the state legislature, where he pushed for tough-on-crime legislation and once called people on death row “animals.” His opponent, Kevin Kraus, also has a background in law enforcement but is seen as more progressive.

In judicial elections, activists are backing candidates seeking to fill a quarter of the seats on the county’s Court of Common Pleas, where they could make a dent in mass incarceration. And organizers have brought issues like policing and gentrification to the forefront of the mayoral primary, where incumbent Bill Peduto faces a strong challenge from state Representative Ed Gainey. 

All of these races could alter the lives of hundreds of thousands of people and shift the political landscape toward racial and economic justice.

“Right now, we have an unprecedented moment to really rewrite and redefine what reform is and what liberation is for Black people in this city,” Jones said.

Fisher says the initiative to ban solitary confinement has catalyzed people who are affected by these issues to get involved. “It really showed people how we can govern ourselves, how we are the ones that make the decisions about our lives and our loved ones’ lives,” she said.

Andrews worked with the Alliance for Police Accountability to put the referendum on the ballot. She says sharing her story and advocating for change in the jail is part of her healing journey.

“I honestly don’t think I will be free from it until something’s done, until I make a difference. I don’t honestly think I will be able to breathe the same until everybody else can breathe the same. Because as of right now, somebody’s in that chair right now. Somebody’s in that restraint chair as we’re speaking. That’s how I look at life every day.”

The post Pittsburgh Voters May Ban Solitary Confinement in Jail Today appeared first on Bolts.

Mik Pappas’s path to becoming a judge has not been typical. He has never prosecuted a case and instead spent several years as a community organizer campaigning against private prison corporations, helping people in county jails vote, and advocating for criminal justice reform.

In 2017, Pappas was elected as magisterial district judge in Allegheny County, Pennsylvania—which includes Pittsburgh—in an effort to reform the system from the inside. Pappas won with the support of the Pittsburgh chapter of Democratic Socialists of America.

“I knew the power of the law and making social change and in influencing society in a positive way,” he told The Appeal: Political Report. 

Pappas has nearly eliminated the use of cash bail in his judicial district, reduced evictions, and found alternatives to issuing warrants and arresting people who owe money to the court. Now he’s seeking higher office as a common pleas judge, a position where he could influence judicial policies throughout the county. 

Pappas is running as part of a slate backed by local activists who hope this election will reshape the court of common pleas, which has nine out of 34 seats open. Their first hurdle is a primary on May 18. The outcome could have an effect on issues from mass incarceration to evictions.

In Pennsylvania, common pleas judges are trial court judges. They hear and decide motions, oversee bench and jury trials, and render verdicts. They also handle civil cases, hear eviction appeals, and decide on final protection from abuse orders.

Common pleas judges have sway over magisterial district courts, whose judges are typically the first to hear a criminal case. Magisterial district judges sign off on warrants, set bail, and determine if there is enough evidence for cases to move on to the common pleas trial court. They also handle traffic citations, small claims civil suits, and landlord tenant cases.

This is where Pappas has already made inroads. He described his work at the magisterial district level as a proof of concept that showed judges can use their power to reduce the use of jails and harsh penalties.

A 2019 report from the ACLU of Pennsylvania found Pappas did not set cash bail in any  cases between February and June 2018—his first few months in office. He set cash bail in only six cases during the same time in 2019. In total, Pappas set cash bail in less than 3 percent of cases that came before him during those 10 months.

For comparison, some judges in the county imposed cash bail in more than 70 percent of cases during the same time. The report also found glaring racial disparities in the use of cash bail; Black people accused of crimes were initially assigned bail more than 1.5 times more often than their white counterparts.

Outside of some criminal homicide cases which require bail to be denied, Pennsylvania law provides magisterial district judges with wide discretion over what kind of bail to impose, what conditions to set, and, if cash bail is used, how much the person charged is expected to pay before they can be released.

Pappas said he was able to essentially eliminate cash bail by working with people who are facing charges to craft conditions of release. He might issue an order to stay away from an accuser, or make a recommendation of releasing the person to mental health or social services. He says these measures allow people to remain out of jail while awaiting trial, help guarantee their appearance in court, and ensure they don’t cause harm.

“What this all has been is figuring out how the systems work, where the gaps are in the bail system and how to fill them,” he said.

Pappas has also taken an unusual approach to landlord-tenant disputes, which has resulted in a nearly 40 percentage-point reduction in the number of cases won by landlords in his judicial district.

He said he accomplished this in part by more strictly holding landlords to their burden of proof and requiring evidence that they have taken all the proper steps before asking that a tenant be forcefully removed from the property.

This helped cut down on the number of cases that resulted in eviction but also led to fewer cases being appealed by the tenants, Pappas said.

Pappas also began referring some cases to mediation in an effort to resolve a conflict between a landlord and a tenant in a way that didn’t require throwing someone out of their home.

With the COVID-19 pandemic bringing a halt to many eviction proceedings, Pappas said the county has turned to more mediation services to help resolve landlord-tenant conflicts.

Organizations like Just Mediation PGH have helped the court handle cases arising during the pandemic, and Pappas says he hopes mediation or other types of alternative conflict resolution will remain and expand after the pandemic is over.

“People are coming here because they have a conflict, not necessarily because they want the most harsh remedy available,” he said. “These are conflicts where an eviction would be like using a hammer to swat a fly.”

Pappas also instituted a fine and fee justice workshop that connected people who owed money to the court with financial planners and helped them set up payment plans and get in good standing with the court without risk of being arrested.

If Pappas wins a seat on the court of common pleas, he won’t oversee these cases anymore, but he says he wanted to seek the higher office because it will allow him to help shape policy for the entire county rather than just in his individual judicial district.

Pappas did not seek the county Democratic Committee nomination and instead joined two other candidates to create what they’ve called a Justice Reform Coalition. The coalition is made up of Pappas, public defender Lisa Middleman and former assistant district attorney Nicola Henry-Taylor.

He said their goal is to start building power at the common pleas level by electing judges who are interested in instituting reforms to make the system fairer.

The three have also become part of the Slate of Eight, a group of candidates endorsed by several progressive organizations.

If Pappas is successful, Governor Tom Wolf will nominate someone to fill his seat for the remainder of his term, which ends in January 2024. Wolf’s nominee is subject to confirmation by the Republican-led state Senate.

“As [a magisterial district judge], I wanted to push back against mass incarceration,” Pappas said. “But as a common pleas judge, what I’d be calling for is to end mass incarceration in Allegheny County.”

The article has been updated to reflect that Pappas does not describe himself as a socialist.

The post A Pittsburgh Judge Wants to Use the Bench To Fight Evictions and Mass Incarceration appeared first on Bolts.

Their campaigns for seats on the County’s Court of Common Pleas—the primary trial court for criminal, civil, and family cases—could bring overwhelming change not only to that court but also to lower courts whose procedural rules are set by Common Pleas judges.

“This is an opportunity to be transformative in terms of how our courts look, how our courts feel for the public, and the types of policy reforms that can be implemented,” said Tiffany Sizemore, a professor at Duquesne University School of Law and former public defender who is part of the Slate of Eight. 

The Slate of Eight moniker comes from grassroots racial justice organizations that teamed up to decide who to endorse out of a pool of more than 30 candidates. The groups are planning to mount major volunteer mobilizations on behalf of their chosen candidates in the run-up to the May 18 Democratic primary. 

Nicola Henry-Taylor, Lisa Middleman, Mik Pappas, Zeke Rediker, Giuseppe Rosselli, Chelsa Wagner, and Wrenna Watson round out the slate; most are criminal defense lawyers or former public defenders. Organizers supporting the slate say they chose these candidates because of their commitment to reforms like reducing the use of cash bail, curtailing long sentences, diverting drug cases, and limiting the involvement of minors with the criminal legal system.

“The slate candidates all understand how mass incarceration is one of the leading issues in this country, that the issue of mass incarceration is a national embarrassment,” Wasi Mohamed, a founding organizer with UNITE, one of the organizations that endorsed the slate, told The Appeal: Political Report. 

“Historically judges have used the discretionary power of the Court of Common Pleas to breed this system of mass incarceration. Now we have people who are actually advocates against it wanting to take these seats,” Mohamed said. 

One of the factors motivating activists to mobilize around the Common Pleas races this year was the number of seats open—nine out of 34. Only three seats were open in the last two elections combined, and with judges serving 10-year terms, such an opening isn’t likely to arise again soon.

And reshaping the bench could have a trickle-down effect. Under Pennsylvania law, Common Pleas judges have the power to set countywide rules for the administration of the county’s court system.

Taking over nearly a quarter of the bench would enable the slate to “bring a cohesive force to making the changes that we need to make on a policy level,” said Middleman, a public defender. 

The sitting judges on the Court of Common Pleas may not be as reform-minded as the Slate of Eight, but Pappas said he’s confident they’d be able to work together to produce changes. “We all have a vested interest in improving the justice system in Allegheny County,” Pappas said. “I don’t doubt that there would be skepticism and perhaps even resistance, but I also know that they know there’s a lot of work to be done.”

Middleman said she hopes to scale back Allegheny County’s onerous system of court fees, which can keep people stuck in the legal system for years. That issue has also been a focus of Wagner, who is the current county controller. The slate could also significantly drive down the number of people in jail by changing cash bail policies, something that Sizemore and Pappas say they would advocate for.

Pappas has already tackled this issue as an Allegheny County magisterial judge, a position in which he oversees the initial stages of a criminal proceeding. An ACLU of Pennsylvania report analyzed 239 cases he oversaw in 2018 and 2019, finding that he set cash bail in just six of those cases. Pappas told the Political Report he would bring a similar approach to bail decisions on the Court of Common Pleas.

“People have a fundamental right to pretrial release just like they have a right to the assistance of counsel in their case, or to be presumed innocent,” he said.

Pappas said he would advocate for rules that allow pretrial services to replace burdensome cash bail with nominal payments or none at all. Instead of release being based upon an accused person’s ability to pay, that person could be referred to mental health and addiction treatment providers and other services to ensure they show up on their court date.

Drug prosecution could also be scaled back under the Slate of Eight. Middleman says one of her priorities is increasing options for people to receive treatment or services rather than incarceration. Especially for first-time defendants, she said, “Instead of involving them in the system, you could create a diversion program where the person would not have to plead guilty to get treatment and help that they needed.” 

Sizemore sees a similar need to change how the court deals with youth cases. Her work in the last decade has focused on juvenile justice; if she’s elected, she wants to end the prosecution of minors as adults in her courtroom. Pennsylvania law gives judges broad discretion on this issue for most felony cases.

“I don’t think that children should be tried as adults, ever,” Sizemore said. “What we know is that both the science and the United States Supreme Court have told us repeatedly that children are different. They tend to be less morally culpable; they tend to have greater prospects for reform.”

In her practice, Sizemore has fought the school-to-prison pipeline by working to keep children from being placed on probation due to infractions at school, a decision made by family court Common Pleas judges. “One way that courts frequently criminalize adolescents is by reflexively making this finding that, ‘Well, if you’re here and you took a dime bag of weed to school, you must need to be on probation,’” Sizemore said. 

Sizemore said she would dismiss the charges of minors who end up in court for infractions like this. “Most children actually don’t need probation or supervision,” she said.

Across the country, advocates for criminal justice reform have increasingly homed in on judicial elections as fertile ground for change. Last year, activists in New Orleans and Las Vegas backed judge candidates whose experience and priorities mirror the Slate of Eight. But in Allegheny County, the grassroots-style campaigns of the slate candidates are a departure from the norm.

“The traditional path has been to schmooze the Democratic committee members, and get the labor council endorsement, and the FOP [Fraternal Order of Police], because that’s what judges are supposed to do,” Middleman said. “We have not chosen that traditional path, because those are not the organizations that have been vocal or helpful in making the progressive change that is necessary.” 

Instead, the candidates are relying on the organizations that endorsed the slate to mobilize volunteers.

Straight Ahead, one of the endorsers, grew out of the Abolitionist Law Center’s court watch program. Participants observed judges adopting racist and discriminatory attitudes toward defendants, said Robert Saleem Holbrook, the executive director of Straight Ahead. “We recognized that ‘OK, we have to do something about these terrible judges,’” he added.

Straight Ahead’s organizing is focusing heavily on outreach to those directly affected by incarceration, including people who are currently locked up. Although people in Pennsylvania prisons are not eligible to vote, Holbrook said Straight Ahead will be encouraging them to ask their family members to vote for the slate. 

“We are going to be flooding the prison with [information about] this slate, and telling them to send it home to their communities, because our communities are going to be impacted by who sits on these benches,” Holbrook said. “We’re going to mobilize the communities that we’ve been representing for years, but just in a defensive position,” against police and correctional abuse, he added.

These efforts have met with a positive response so far, Holbrook said. “I’ve seen a lot of enthusiasm, because they’re feeling empowered, like ‘Yeah, we are now going to matter. We are now on the offensive, entering spaces where we previously weren’t even aware that we could make an impact.’”

Last year, 1Hood Power, another organization that selected the slate’s candidates, was heavily involved in organizing during both the summer’s Black Lives Matter protests and the fall general election. Members of the group are now campaigning on behalf of the Slate of Eight with the skills they gained from organizing marches and mobilizing voters for top-of-the-ballot Democrats. “We did some stuff around helping with [the Senate elections in] Georgia, and now we’re like, ‘OK, we can actually affect right here where we live in a big way,” said founder Jasiri X.

1Hood Power is planning a big digital push for the slate as the election approaches, including a series of videos explaining the offices that will be on the ballot, including Common Pleas judge.

Voters will also have a chance to elect magisterial district judges and weigh in on a ballot initiative that would ban solitary confinement in the county jail, and another that would abolish no-knock warrants.

Mohamed said UNITE’s mobilization for the Slate of Eight has been boosted by its previous wins, which include getting multiple state representatives and local officials elected. “Every race, we build capacity, we build membership, we build interest and excitement around these races. And every victory made our members and those in the community realize that we could actually change and impact local politics,” Mohamed said. 

As homicide counsel at the Public Defender’s office, Middleman can already feel the change. “I’m used to my cause not being one that’s generally accepted or supported,” she said. “So the last several years have been amazing and inspiring. People and groups are interested, and they are supportive, and they’re willing to work really, really hard to make change.”

The post How Pittsburgh Activists Are Seizing a Rare Chance To Reshape Courts appeared first on Bolts.