April Wilkens was 28 years old in 1998, when police arrested and charged her with first-degree murder for fatally shooting a man who had repeatedly stalked, harassed, assaulted and raped her. 

Wilkens had called police multiple times on her ex-boyfriend, Terry Carlton, and had obtained two protective orders against him. But he came from an influential Tulsa family, and police seemed to rarely get in his way. She says she shot him one night in self-defense, after he had already raped, handcuffed, and threatened to sodomize and kill her, at one point holding a gun to her head. When Wilkens went to trial, her lawyer failed to obtain or introduce several pieces of evidence of the ongoing abuse, according to her clemency application, including an audio tape recording where Carlton admitted to beating and strangling her. She was convicted and sentenced to life in prison.

Wilkens, now 53, has spent nearly half of her life behind bars. 

Troubled by Wilkens’ story, last year Oklahoma state Representative Toni Hasenbeck helped lead a legislative study of sentencing reforms for survivors of domestic violence whose abuse played a role in their conviction. This year Hasenbeck, a Republican, filed House Bill 1639, the Domestic Abuse Survivorship Act, to give criminalized survivors like Wilkens a chance at release. As introduced, the act capped prison terms at 10 years for people convicted of crimes against an abusive partner, and allowed survivors already serving lengthy or life sentences like Wilkens to retroactively seek resentencing and release.

Wilkens said the bill felt like a ray of hope. “It could mean a life sentence won’t mean death by incarceration for me,” she told Bolts. “It could mean I won’t die in a cage. I could start making up for lost time with my family and friends. He had to grow up without his mom. My son was seven when I was locked up. He’s 32 now and has a four-year-old daughter.”  

As the bill wound through the Oklahoma legislature this year, Wilkens helped spread the word about the bill inside the Mabel Bassett Correctional Center, Oklahoma’s largest women’s prison, urging other women there to tell their families and friends to advocate for the legislation. She also generated and distributed a survey, asking women inside about the role of abuse in their convictions; 156 women responded identifying as survivors of trauma and violence.

But in March, Hasenbeck significantly amended the bill ahead of its vote in the Oklahoma House, Mother Jones reported, effectively gutting it. According to the Oklahoman, the state’s influential District Attorneys Council pushed for a watered-down version that would not have helped Wilkens or any other survivors currently in prison, simply giving judges discretion to impose lighter sentences for people convicted of crimes against abusive partners in the future. 

Even that weakened bill did not make it through the session. After the House unanimously passed it in March and the Senate approved an amended version in April, advocates, including family members of survivors, pleaded with lawmakers to put retroactivity back in. But lawmakers did not budge in preparing a final version, and then they did not even schedule a final vote on it by the end of the session last week.  

Wilkens told Bolts she had mixed feelings about the whittled-down bill. “If what I’ve gone through can help keep future domestic violence survivors from languishing in prison, it will be worth it,” Wilkens said. “On the other hand, it felt like a kick in the gut. Those of us who are already in prison want to feel like our lives—and our families’ lives—matter, too.”

Amanda Ross was seven years old when Wilkens was arrested. Her mother, Wilkens’ sister, had always encouraged her to write letters to her imprisoned aunt, but as a child, Ross only had a dim understanding of why she was behind bars. 

Wilkens, who was sentenced to life with the possibility of parole, first became eligible for parole in 2013, after serving 15 years in prison. That year, at her parole hearing, Carlton’s father protested her release and she was denied parole. In 2016, the parole board didn’t even grant her a hearing. That was when Ross, by then in her twenties, became involved. 

“I started a blog to post her commutation application,” she told Bolts. From there, she began gathering other court documents, including Wilkens’ numerous appeals and court transcripts. “I was scanning the documents trying to get her an attorney,” she recalled. 

At first, Ross didn’t fully understand what she was looking at, but reading and scanning gave her a crash course in what had happened to Wilkens. She turned the records into a chronology so others could understand her aunt’s decades-long ordeal through the legal system. 

In 2019, the board granted Wilkens a hearing only to again deny her parole. By 2022, Wilkens had spent 24 years in prison and was once again up for parole. This time, Ross enlisted the help of Project Commutation, which provides free legal representation to people serving excessive sentences, but the board again denied Wilkens a hearing. 

Wilkins’ story is far from unique. The nexus between domestic violence and incarceration is so common that advocates have coined a term for people who have endured it, calling them criminalized survivors. And Oklahoma’s criminal legal system has long been particularly harsh to women. For decades, it had the nation’s highest female incarceration rate; as of 2021, the state trails only Idaho and Montana for this dubious distinction.

Through other activists, Ross connected with Oklahoma Appleseed Center for Law and Justice, and eventually lawyers with the organization launched a 12-episode podcast detailing Wilkens’ case. They named it Panic Button, after an actual panic button that Wilkens wore around her neck in an attempt to stop Carlton’s attacks. 

Oklahoma Appleseed lawyers also worked with Hasenbeck on her legislative study, putting together the research and speakers for a September 2022 presentation to the justice and judiciary committee of the Oklahoma House, where they also outlined Wilkens’ story of abuse, survival and incarceration. Other presenters highlighted the outsized impact of criminal punishment on women of color in the state; according to state and federal data, Black and Indigenous women each accounted for 18 percent of Oklahoma’s women’s prison population in 2021, despite accounting for just 7 and 8 percent of the general population in the state, respectively.  

The following year, Hasenbeck introduced the Oklahoma Domestic Abuse Survivorship Act. Colleen McCarty, one of the Oklahoma Appleseed lawyers pushing for the bill, begged lawmakers to reconsider after they stripped the provision letting it apply to previous convictions, pointing them again to the cases of Wilkens and other survivors. In an open letter she posted in March, McCarty said Oklahomans have proven supportive of retroactive sentencing reforms. In 2016, voters approved two ballot initiatives aimed at reducing prison sentences for people with certain non-violent convictions, which eventually led to one of the largest mass commutations in the nation’s history. (Hasenbeck didn’t respond to requests for comment for this story.)

“Those cases were for low-level drug and property crimes. These survivors’ crimes that could be impacted by HB 1639 are crimes of ‘it was him or me,’” McCarty wrote. “They are crimes of people who resorted to violence when the system gave them no other choice. These survivors deserve the safety and freedom they couldn’t get anywhere else in Oklahoma—not at home, not at church, not at the police station, and not in the courthouse.”

Renetta Boyd had never engaged in any type of political organizing until she learned about the Oklahoma Domestic Abuse Survivorship Act. 

Renetta’s daughter, Keabreauna Boyd, is serving a 20-year prison sentence for the 2020 death of her boyfriend, which followed years of her being abused by him. Keabreauna was eight months pregnant and had tried moving to get away from him, but that didn’t stop the abuse. She says he charged at her with a knife during a fight before she wrestled it away and killed him with it in self-defense. After her arrest for murder, Keaubreauna gave birth handcuffed to a bed without family present, despite 2018 legislation prohibiting restraints and allowing family during labor and delivery. That was the last time she saw or touched her baby.

Renetta distinctly remembers attending her daughter’s 2021 sentencing hearing because it was the last time she saw her; because Renetta is currently on parole, she must receive special approval to visit her daughter and she hasn’t yet been allowed visits. The mother and daughter have kept in touch for the past two years through weekly phone calls and biweekly letters.

Renetta and nine of her family members attended a rally at the Oklahoma capitol last month, where she was joined by other relatives of incarcerated survivors of domestic abuse, asking lawmakers to restore the retroactive parts of the Domestic Abuse Survivorship Act. 

Renetta says she feels lucky she didn’t lose her daughter or the baby during the assault. But she says her grandchildren need their mother home; Keabreauna has four other children in addition to the baby born in jail. “I feel like this law should pass so that my daughter could get back home with my grandchildren because they’ve never been away from her a day [before her arrest],” Renetta told Bolts. “She needs a chance to raise her children.”

“If you’re fighting for your life, you shouldn’t be punished,” Keabreauna told Bolts in a call from prison. “Everybody has the right to fight for their lives.” 

Oklahoma’s bill wasn’t the first to address the intersection of abuse and incarceration. New York passed the Domestic Violence Survivors Justice Act in 2019, and since then 40 incarcerated people have been resentenced . In Louisiana, a similar bill filed this year faced intense opposition from the district attorneys’ association, Bolts reported in April; it too was amended earlier this month to exclude resentencing for survivors currently behind bars. 

After Oklahoma lawmakers removed retroactivity from this year’s reform bill, advocates ratcheted up efforts to rally around survivors and tell their stories to lawmakers in hopes of passing reforms that could help them. In March, Oklahoma Appleseed held an art and advocacy day at the state capitol building, where artists created pieces based on survivors’ stories while advocates engaged passersby about the issue. The following day, advocates brought the pieces to Mabel Bassett Correctional Center, holding them up outside so that incarcerated women could see them. Both Wilkens and Boyd saw the pieces from their window; Boyd excitedly told her mother later that she had seen the art and noticed her portrait within one of the pieces.

Ross says she visited the state capitol four times over the past two months to meet with lawmakers. While she had previously participated in marches and rallies for other causes, this was the first time she had joined a coalition working towards a specific outcome, and the first time she had advocated for a change that was so personal. 

“It’s affirming,” she told Bolts. “All this time, I was struggling to get someone to listen.” Now, after so many years, advocates, other domestic violence survivors and even lawmakers are doing so.

“It really made me feel less alone,” she added.

Ross continues to advocate for reforms that apply retroactively, pushing for a pathway out of prison for her aunt and others incarcerated because of the abuse they endured. “We’ve carried the bill on the backs of these women who are incarcerated, on their stories,” she said. “I don’t think legislators realize that the bill has gotten this far because we’ve pushed their stories.” 

From prison, Wilkens continues to share her story, publishing op-eds in local newspapers to urge lawmakers to pass sentencing reforms that apply retroactively to cases like hers. 

McCarty with Oklahoma Appleseed told Bolts she was “extremely disappointed in the failure to advance HB 1639” but also said the final version of the bill “didn’t accomplish any of the goals that the coalition set out to accomplish when we embarked on this survivor justice journey.”

At the same time, she said that advocacy and educational efforts around the bill engaged many Oklahomans who had never before been part of the political process before—and that they intend to continue building the campaign before the next legislative session begins.

“I hope that criminalized survivors know that we’re not giving up,” McCarty said. “This is a much bigger issue than we even realized when we started this.”

The post Sentencing Reforms for Domestic Abuse Survivors Derail in Oklahoma appeared first on Bolts.

Ramon Mejía was in the swamp for less than a day before he was arrested, but that brief experience made clear the enormity of what he had gone there to protect. Mejía, an Iraq War veteran and anti-war activist from Dallas, had traveled to the Atchafalaya Basin, the largest wetland in the country, to try to prevent Energy Transfer Partners’ construction of a conduit that would connect the company’s infamous Dakota Access Pipeline to Louisiana refineries. He and two other water protectors camped in the swamp the night of August 17, 2018, watching as the sun began to illuminate a beautiful but harrowing scene the next morning. “After the sunrise, you’ll see the birds and vegetation more clearly, the plants and the flowers—and also the destruction,” he recalled. “The construction of the pipeline, how it tore through the land.” Then, the police showed up. 

Mejía, his two colleagues, and a journalist who was embedded with the group were arrested under Louisiana’s newly minted ‘critical infrastructure’ law, which makes nonviolent protest near oil, gas, electrical, and other forms of infrastructure a felony and ratchets up the punishment associated with these actions. Such laws have proliferated across the country in the last five years and are now on the books in 19 states due to the efforts of the conservative legislators’ organization known as the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) and the meticulous lobbying of powerful oil and gas companies. 

Thus far, states have rarely used critical infrastructure laws against protestors. Until late last year, there was only one other known instance, against Greenpeace protestors in Houston. Nobody has ever been convicted under them. 

But the arrest of more than 40 activists in Georgia between December 2022 and early March may signal a turning point, researchers who track these laws say. The activists were protesting the installation of a training center in the Atlanta forest known as ‘Cop City’ and the destruction of one of Atlanta’s vital green spaces.

The activists, many of whom are still detained, were charged under Georgia’s domestic terrorism and critical infrastructure law. Their arrest warrants, issued by county and local police and the Georgia Bureau of Investigations, don’t accuse the vast majority of them of any specific crimes beyond trespassing, but rather for “participating” with others who have allegedly engaged in far more serious offenses such as arson and discharging firearms. “The arrest warrants are broad and generic and certainly don’t have any individualized facts or information tied to them,” said Lauren Regan, the director of the Oregon-based Civil Liberties Defense Center, which has been coordinating legal support on the ground and will be representing a number of the protesters individually. “They’re basically saying, ‘Because you were wearing black or because you had mud on your shoes or because you had a jail support number written on your arm, you’re guilty for any crimes that anyone else potentially committed.’” 

The charges against the Georgia protesters illustrate how anti-protest legislation is wielded to quash both the movement for police accountability and the fight for environmental justice. The goal is not necessarily to win in court but to levy charges of such extreme consequence against protestors that it effectively quells dissent. 

“One of the ways that people have an impact on what’s happening in their communities or in their country outside of voting are things like protesting,” Rico Sisney, one of the Greenpeace protesters arrested in Houston, told Bolts. But when you add the risk of steep penalties and felony charges that accompany critical infrastructure laws, he said, “there’s a lot of people who might have considered participating because it’s like an issue that really matters to them—but they can’t take that additional risk. And that’s 100 percent the goal.”

Critical infrastructure laws represent a backlash to Indigenous-led protest movements, which have stopped or delayed the equivalent of at least a quarter of yearly emissions in the U.S. and Canada, according to a 2021 report by the Indigenous Environmental Network. 

The first critical infrastructure laws were proposed and passed following the success of protesters at Standing Rock in temporarily halting the Dakota Access Pipeline, said Emma Fisher, the deputy director at Climate Cabinet, an advocacy and lobbying organization focused on climate change legislation. Fisher co-authored a report on critical infrastructure laws last year. “[Bill author] Rep. Scott Biggs of Oklahoma directly cited North Dakota’s Dakota Access Pipeline protests, acknowledging that anti-pipeline demonstrations have succeeded and therefore the pipelines haven’t been built,” Fisher told Bolts. “That direct line is clear.” 

When that bill passed in Oklahoma, ALEC took note, drafting a model bill it dubbed the ‘Critical Infrastructure Protection Act.’ Like the Oklahoma law, the model bill had two key components that would become characteristic of nearly all critical infrastructure laws. First, it turned conduct that would have previously been a misdemeanor into a felony—and jacked up the consequences to match. “One of the problems with these really high penalties is, if you’re charged, even if you know you’re innocent, do you really want to risk going to trial on it?” said Nick Robinson, a senior legal advisor at the International Center for Not-for-Profit Law (ICNL), which maintains a comprehensive anti-protest law tracker. “That trial process will take a long time—but also, let’s say you did lose, you’d face potentially a lot of time in prison. And so some people might feel pressured into just taking a plea.”

“One of the most important takeaways from our research is that these bills are intentionally vague,” Fisher said. “That is causing a chilling effect for protesters and for prospective demonstrators because people are not sure how much danger they might be in.” 

Furthermore, the legislation established the concept of ‘vicarious liability,’ leaving organizations potentially on the hook for the alleged actions of even loose affiliates. “It broadens the net, both in who can be liable but also who law enforcement can investigate and potentially arrest and prosecute—whether or not a court ever finds them liable,” said Robinson. 

Connor Gibson, a Denver-based fossil fuel opposition researcher who has become an expert on critical infrastructure laws, says they have a compound chilling effect. “Not only will they have activists who are aware of the potential felony charges and how that could really screw up their life, even if they don’t get convicted, but they are sending a message to all these organizations like, ‘Hey, if anybody you were ever affiliated with gets charged under one of these laws, we’re going to go after you for $100,000 and we’re going to sue you into the ground.’” 

ALEC may have provided the language, but the country’s biggest oil and gas manufacturers and associations have worked behind the scenes to get state lawmakers across the country on board with critical infrastructure laws. “The tip of the spear is really the AFPM,” Gibson said—the American Fuel and Petrochemical Manufacturers, a powerful trade organization that represents companies such as Koch Industries, Chevron Corporation and ExxonMobil, among others. 

While support for critical infrastructure laws has overwhelmingly fallen along party lines, with Democratic governors vetoing bills in Minnesota and Louisiana, in 2019, Democratic legislators backed them in Illinois and Wisconsin after Koch Industries lobbied to get the trade unions on board. Ultimately, Wisconsin’s Democratic governor signed the bill into law.

Even if these laws have only very rarely been invoked by police, in the wake of the 2020 racial justice uprising, and as the fight for environmental justice continues to intensify, activists and researchers alike fear they could be trotted out and deployed with increasing frequency.  

“The threat is real,” said Gibson. “The most dire consequences have not yet been played out.”

Bill Quigley, a Loyola law professor who represents Mejía and the other protesters charged in Louisiana, warned that “the idea of terrorism… is becoming more and more common against environmental protesters and people who oppose the police.” He added, “I think the idea is to capture the emotion that people felt after 9/11 and to apply it to people sitting in trees, for goodness sake.”

Just before sunrise on September 12, 2019, Rico Sisney and 10 other Greenpeace protestors rappelled down the Fred Hartman Bridge in Baytown, Texas. Suspended hundreds of feet above the Houston Ship Channel, they unfurled a series of brightly-colored banners over the country’s largest fossil fuel thoroughfare, shutting down ship traffic for an entire day. 

Sisney hung there for over 12 hours, reading from Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Talents. “Looking at a waterway that has no ship traffic and just has dolphins splashing around, and seeing a literal sunset on oil infrastructure behind me,” he recalled, “counterintuitively, it was really, really peaceful.” 

That sense of tranquility ended abruptly when officers began extracting the protestors one by one as night fell. They were taken to shore, where Sisney said a group of hostile onlookers had gathered and began heckling them, tossing out racial slurs as they passed. The demonstrators were ultimately bundled into police vans and booked into the Harris County Jail.

Soon, the group was informed that they would be charged under Texas’s critical infrastructure law, which had gone into effect on September 1, less than two weeks before the action. The activists had been warned about the new law. “Intellectually, I understood that that was a strong possibility,” Sisney told Bolts.  “But then once it hit, it was like, okay, now I can actually feel this and what potential impacts that could have for me and my family and my community. “ 

For Sisney, a felony conviction would have compounded the racist assumptions and police scrutiny he already faces just for being Black. “I don’t have any criminal convictions on my record,” he said, but “In the many times I’ve been stopped by police, the first assumption is not only do I have charges but I have active warrants. I think it hits differently for Black people in America.” 

The critical infrastructure charges against Sisney and his fellow protestors didn’t stick. Six months after the action, prosecutors downgraded the charges to a misdemeanor count of obstructing a roadway, with a maximum penalty of 180 days in jail and a $2,000 fine. But there have been consequences nonetheless. Sisney said that some of his fellow defendants lost out on job opportunities. They were told that they couldn’t be arrested again—and if anyone was, it would have ramifications for everyone in the group. “For a lot of folks who probably would want to participate in other forms of direct action,” Sisney said, people had to “have an entirely different risk assessment for the years after the charges.” 

“Which is sort of the goal right of critical infrastructure laws in the first place,” he added, “to make the most active people inactive for as long as possible—and the most active organizations inactive.”

Karen Savage, an independent investigative journalist, had been embedded with the L’eau Est La Vie water protectors for months, reporting on their attempt to stop the construction of the Energy Transfer crude oil pipeline in the Louisiana wetlands. She had taken photographs, documented life in the swamp, and published an exposé in The Appeal on the pipeline company’s use of off-duty state law enforcement officers as private security guards. She knew what she was doing was risky, but she and the water protectors had written permission from one of the swamp landowners to be there, while the company had actually gone ahead with pipeline construction in violation of the owners’ wishes. If anyone was trespassing, she figured, it was them. 

On August 18, 2018, around sunrise, Savage joined Mejía, the anti-war veteran who had come there from Dallas, and several other activists in the swamp. Shortly thereafter, they were all arrested. In the holding cell at the county jail, they overheard their charges being read, and realized that police were invoking Louisiana’s new critical infrastructure law. 

Quigley, the lawyer, had noticed an immediate shift after the law went into effect on August 1. “They had probably 50 people that got arrested, and all on misdemeanors,” he recalled. “And then the change in the law, all of a sudden, the exact same conduct, there were people getting arrested for felonies.” 

“It was definitely apparent that these laws were being utilized as a weapon by the state to silence our voices,” said Mejía. 

Later that fall, more water protectors were arrested in the swamp—including herbalist and community organizer Anne White Hat, a member of the Aśke Gluwipi Tiospaye of the Sicangu Lakota, also known as the Rosebud Sioux. White Hat, who is originally from South Dakota, had helped found L’eau Est La Vie; the name—“water is life,” in French—is an intentional call back to the Standing Rock protest to shut down the construction of the Dakota Access Pipeline. “To me, we’re holding down the continuation of that fight up north,” she told Bolts. “We weren’t gonna let them just continue to build this black snake without any resistance.” 

The state had four years to decide whether to move forward with its case, and Savage and the 16 L’eau Est La Vie protesters arrested under the law lived under the threat of critical infrastructure charges for nearly three years. As a single mother, White Hat was fearful of what would happen to her three children should she go to prison. “It’s a very heavy burden to bear,” she said. “I was just hyper-aware of [the fact that] they could formally charge us any day.” She tried to embrace nake nula waun—a Lakota expression describing a state of constant readiness. One night, U.S. marshals came to arrest someone down the block from her in New Orleans, and she woke up to a reverberating pounding noise. “I shot straight up in bed and I was like, ‘Oh, my god, is this happening right now?’” she recalled. 

“It kind of hit me maybe in November of that year, like, ‘Wow, that’s 10 years in a Louisiana prison,’” Savage said. Fearful of risking another arrest and having her bail revoked, she stayed home during the January 6 attack on the Capitol, and barely covered the 2020 racial justice uprising. “It did impact my reporting,” she said. 

During this time, Mejía, Savage, and White Hat, the co-founder of L’eau Est La Vie, filed a constitutional challenge with the assistance of Quigley and a lawyer from the Center for Constitutional Rights, both of whom also served as their criminal defense lawyers. “Certainly they got much more consideration in state, local and federal courts because the Center for Constitutional Rights took up their cause and put literally thousands of hours into this thing,” said Quigley, who estimates that he worked hundreds of hours pro bono on the case himself. Finally, in July of 2021, two years and 11 months after the first arrests, the St. Martin Parish District Attorney announced that he was dismissing the critical infrastructure charges. White Hat said it took another year, until the statute of limitations passed, before she could really relax. 

It was the 2017 critical infrastructure law in Oklahoma that was seized upon by ALEC and became the template for other such legislation across the country. But Georgia’s Senate Bill 1 was proposed that same session. Legislators at the time said that the bill, which expanded the definition of ‘domestic terrorism,’ was intended to address mass casualty events, citing the massacre of nine Black churchgoers in South Carolina two years prior. The proposal withered on the vine—until legislators copied and pasted the bill’s text into a different one that passed. 

“Fast forward until December of 2022, when the first Atlanta forest defenders were charged with the statute for, in essence, trespassing,” said Regan of the Civil Liberties Defense Center. “It was certainly a far cry from what the legislators stated that their intent was in passing the statute.” The statute mandates a prison sentence of at least five years and up to 35 years for people convicted of disabling or destroying “critical infrastructure, a state or government facility, or a public transportation system.”

Regan said applying the law against the Cop City protesters is far-fetched—but again, convictions aren’t necessarily the point. Just being charged brings stark consequences: the activists were initially denied bail and most are currently detained in the DeKalb County Jail, which is notorious for squalid conditions and allegations of mistreatment by staff. According to Regan, a number of activists have complained about being denied medical care and medication while in jail. 

“Even though it’s very unlikely that they’ll ever get a conviction against trespassers for domestic terror, and there are a number of serious faults and failures in the state’s prosecution of land defenders thus far, the most negative consequences are already being forced upon citizens who are normally innocent until proven guilty, ” she told Bolts.

On March 23, the protesters still being held in custody in DeKalb County had their second bond hearing. Nine of the 22 were denied bail again and remain detained as of publication. According to Hannah Riley, an activist in Atlanta, the justifications for denying bail included protesters wearing black, having a jail support number scrawled on their arm, and having mud on their shoes. 

Meanwhile, a new crop of critical infrastructure bills in legislatures across the country could increase punishment for protesters, from Idaho to Minnesota to Illinois to North Carolina. Utah’s governor just signed two new infrastructure bills into law last month. 

Robinson of ICNL noted many of the new bills are somewhat distinct from the previous crop of critical infrastructure laws in that they are allegedly motivated by recent white supremacist attacks on energy substations and are not necessarily based on the language in the ALEC model bill; instead many build off existing law. Nevertheless, he said, “we and others are concerned that even if these bills are being enacted in response to attacks on electric substations, which we do not support in any way—it’s criminal already under the law—that if they’re overly broad or vague, that they could be used in other context against protesters.”

Many state legislatures are also considering broader anti-protest bills at the moment. Cop City is the focal point for that convergence, but there are two bills before the Georgia state legislature that advocates worry could quell protest: a critical infrastructure bill inspired by recent substation attacks, and an anti-riot bill. The punishment for violating either would be up to 20 years in prison. 

For White Hat, looking to the past has helped her steel herself against the uncertainty of this new landscape for protest. When she thought about the importance of the land she was defending, what came to mind was a late mentor of hers from Baton Rouge, a Choctaw woman who would come back to the Atchafalaya each year to go crawfishing. Her father had told her stories about how he had stood up against Dow Chemical’s pollution of the swamp back in the 1950s. “I feel connected to that,” White Hat told Bolts, noting that there has been a long history of Indigenous resistance to environmental degradation. “What is different and what is new is that the oil industry and South Louisiana hasn’t experienced this level of an organized resistance movement,” she said. “Ever.” 

The post “A Weapon by the State to Silence Our Voices” appeared first on Bolts.

State Question 820 lost overwhelmingly, 62 to 38 percent. It trails in all Oklahoma counties, and the state’s rural areas rejected it by especially large margins.

In the five years since voters approved a measure to legalize medical marijuana, Oklahoma has seen an explosion in cannabis farms and dispensaries. Some business owners are making a fortune. 

But possession and sale outside of those strictures remains a criminal offense. An estimated 60,000 Oklahomans are weighed down by a past marijuana conviction and the number keeps climbing, with 5,000 people arrested over marijuana possession in 2020 alone, according to state data. 

“At a time when the state has legal marijuana millionaires, it seems both unjust and imprudent for there to be so many people who can’t get a job and can’t put food on the table for low-level marijuana convictions,” Damion Shade, executive director of OK Justice Reform, told Bolts. 

Had it passed, SQ 820 would have enabled these people to seek an expungement of their criminal records. Providing retroactive relief has become a staple of legalization efforts around the nation, since the effects of a conviction extend far beyond the sentence, affecting people’s ability to secure employment, housing, or college grants. And Black Oklahomans disproportionately suffer these repercussions; an ACLU study found that between 2010 and 2018, Black people were four times more likely to be arrested over marijuana than white people.

Organizers intended to qualify SQ 820 for the state’s November 2022 ballot. But challenges delayed approval and kicked it off to 2023. Then, Republican governor Kevin Stitt scheduled the referendum for March 7—a special election where SQ 820 would stand on its own—even though Oklahomans were already set to go to the polls on both Feb. 14 and April 4 for local and school board races. 

This left the state with a confusing schedule of three separate election days—each with their periods of mail-in ballots and early voting—within eight weeks.

“People can’t rearrange child care and jobs every month to go vote,” says Andy Moore, CEO of Let’s Fix This, an organization that promotes civic engagement in Oklahoma. “Doing it like this was clearly a way to suppress turnout.” 

While Oklahoma routinely sees some of the worst voter turnout in the nation (it was the lowest of any state in the 2020 presidential election), participation on Tuesday paled even in comparison to that low bar. Roughly 560,000 people voted in Tuesday’s election, 25 percent of registered voters and less than 20 percent of the total voting-eligible population in the state. 

When Oklahomans voted on medical marijuana in June of 2018, alongside the state’s primaries, nearly 900,000 people voted; turnout on Tuesday was 37 percent lower. 

“If we really want to get an assessment of what the voters want, we need to help them to the polls,” Moore told Bolts. “We can do things to make elections more accessible to more people so that we can have higher turnout.”

The governor who scheduled the election opposes legalizing marijuana and called on voters to defeat SQ 820, as did other prominent Republicans who said it would endanger the state. “I believe this is the best thing to keep our kids safe and for our state as a whole,” Stitt said on Twitter on Tuesday after the result was known.

Some Oklahoma Republicans are pushing changes to the ballot initiative process that could guarantee an odd placement on the calendar, lending credence to complaints that state officials are intentionally seeking to dampen turnout in those elections. 

One measure, introduced by Senator Warren Hamilton, would mandate that initiatives only go to voters in odd-numbered years, rather than on even-numbered years where turnout is far higher. The proposal goes against the burgeoning movement nationwide to move more elections to even-years in order to sync them with higher-turnout national election cycles and champion higher engagement.

Hamilton’s proposal is now technically dead because it did not survive a legislative deadline last week, though Moore warns that measures can always be revived by legislative leaders or poured into other legislative vehicles late into the session. But another measure, Senate Bill 518, is still alive. Introduced by Senator Julie Daniels, it would make it trickier to qualify a ballot initiative, doubling the time window for someone to challenge petitions and making it easier to invalidate signatures. The legislation would mandate that voters use their full legal name when signing a petition, raising the prospect that any misspellings, nicknames, or other deviations from a government ID could nullify their signatures.

Moore warns that this change would add to what he calls an “already totally bogus” verification process. Oklahoma officials drew complaints last year when they decided to outsource signature verification to a private vendor, claiming the authority to do so by invoking a new law, even if many legislators say they did not mean it to authorize outsourcing, The Journal Record reported last year. 

SB 518, which passed a Senate committee in February, is scheduled to be heard on the Senate floor on Wednesday morning. 

Daniels and Hamilton did not respond to requests for comment about their respective bills. 

Republicans nationwide have retaliated against popular initiatives they oppose by championing an avalanche of measures that make it far harder for organizers to gather signatures to get them on the ballot. In Oklahoma, voters approved a number of ballot measures in recent years that circumvented conservative lawmakers, including medical marijuana in 2018 and Medicaid expansion in 2020. 

SQ 820 won’t add to that list, however. Besides making marijuana more accessible in the state, the measure would have raised revenue off of a 15 percent excise tax on the sale of marijuana that would have funded public schools and addiction treatment programs.

The expungement provision would have given tens of thousands of people the option to clear their records, though it would not have made that process automatic. Last year, for convictions that were already eligible for expungement in Oklahoma (marijuana is not among those), the state adopted a “Clean Slate” law that will lift the need for people to file a burdensome petition for relief. 

Shade, of OK Justice Reform, helped champion that “Clean Slate” law, which he says did not modify the criteria as to which offenses are eligible to be expunged—it only made the existing process automatic. With SQ 820’s failure, he says, he hopes to persuade state politicians to pass a bill to at least allow marijuana convictions to be expunged, which at least some Republicans seem to be open to. “It’s my goal to reach out to stakeholders and begin figuring out what type of legislative success we have going after this,” he said.

The post Oklahomans Reject Recreational Weed in Low-Turnout Election appeared first on Bolts.

Oklahoma City police are regularly in the spotlight over police shootings, having shot at least 20 people in the last two years, killing at least 41 people since 2015. But these shootings rarely yield accountability, and very few police officers have faced criminal charges. 

Oklahoma County District Attorney David Prater broke that pattern in 2021 when he charged five officers with first-degree manslaughter for killing 15-year-old Stavian Rodriguez outside a convenience store. Rodriguez had allegedly tried to rob the store before police intervened and surrounded the building. When Rodriguez exited, he raised his hands in the air, then dropped his handgun. He then reached for his back pocket, which held a cell phone. He was shot more than a dozen times by five officers and died at a local hospital later that night.

But Prater’s impending retirement, which will bring a new top prosecutor to the state’s largest county for the first time since 2007, is set to reshuffle both the DA’s office and its relationship with local law enforcement in this county of nearly 800,000. 

Republican nominee Kevin Calvey, in announcing his run for DA last year, said he would “support the police, not persecute them,” and vowed that same day to drop the charges Prater had filed over Rodriguez’s death against the Oklahoma City officers. He told The Frontier and Bolts he had not looked at the case beyond seeing news reports that the Oklahoma City Police Department investigated the shooting and found it was justified.

“I would have shot him myself,” he said during a primary forum last year. 

During another debate this month, Democratic nominee Vicki Behenna accused Calvey of pandering to law enforcement when he vowed to drop the manslaughter charges against the five officers. Calvey responded by accusing Behenna of pandering “to those anti-police people.”

The candidates

Kevin Calvey is no stranger to controversy. Known as one of the most conservative lawmakers in the state House during his twelve years as a lawmaker, he threatened to set himself on fire in 2015 over a bill that proposed a pay raise to state Supreme Court justices. Calvey said the court wasn’t doing enough to prevent women in Oklahoma from receiving an abortion.

“If I weren’t a Christian and didn’t have a prohibition against suicide, I’d walk across the street and douse myself in gasoline and set myself on fire,” he said, pumping his fist angrily during a debate on the House floor.

After joining the Oklahoma County commision, Calvey voted in 2020 in favor of sending more than $30 million in federal coronavirus relief funds to the county jail instead of spending it on local relief funds, a vote that sparked anger as it was rushed before a commissioner who opposed the measure could even sit down. 

Earlier this year, the Oklahoma State Bureau of Investigation announced it was investigating some of Calvey’s campaign expenditures. Prater told News9 that employees from the State Auditor’s Office alleged that Calvey had misused public money in his campaign. Calvey denied the allegation in a press conference he staged directly outside Prater’s office, and at a debate earlier this month proclaimed he had been cleared. The OSBI later said the investigation is ongoing.

This history aside, Calvey has numbers in his favor. Oklahoma County is the state’s most purple metro area, and increasingly competitive—it voted for Donald Trump by one percentage point in the 2020 presidential race—but it still leans Republican. And in a state where every county has sided with the GOP’s presidential candidate on election day since 2004, and the state Legislature is heavily Republican, having an R next to your name goes a long way.

But Prater himself is a Democrat, and Behenna is intent on testing her party’s local strength.

Sitting in an office overlooking Oklahoma City from the 30th floor of her downtown office building, she looks and sounds like a focused, experienced attorney.

Behenna is a former a federal prosecutor, who served on the team that prosecuted Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh. She has also worked as a criminal defense attorney; she says she worked with the Innocence Project after she noticed “mistakes we made on the DA side at times.”

It’s that experience, she says, that makes her the perfect candidate to succeed David Prater as Oklahoma County’s DA. And she told The Frontier and Bolts that she entered the race in part because of the contrast with her opponent.

“When I saw (Calvey) was running, I was concerned,” she said. “It’s just not a job for a career politician or a lobbyist, it’s a job for someone with experience, who understands how the system works. I’ve been in this my whole career, I know what it’s about and what the DA does.”

Calvey rejects that this is the right lens to judge a DA. 

“Experience is important, but let’s look at the right kind of experience,” Calvey told The Frontier and Bolts. “What does this job entail? How many cases is the district attorney himself or herself actually prosecuting? In an urban DA office, it’s virtually none.”

Calvey compared the role to “an administrative position” and said his role as county commissioner provided him with the experience he needs to manage the DA’s office.

“What the DA does in a large urban office is work with stakeholders, law enforcement and lawmakers,” he said. “And I know all of them.”

Calvey already convinced Republican primary voters of this argument. In the August primary, he defeated Gayland Geiger, a 22-year veteran of the DA’s office who worked under Prater, by more than 20 percentage points.

Relationship with law enforcement

Calvey has centered his campaign on criticizing Prater’s record. He described the current office’s relationship with law enforcement, particularly the Oklahoma City Police Department, as “poisonous.” He told The Frontier and Bolts that he believed the “No. 1 problem” between the DA’s office and police is the “wrongful prosecution of police officers.”

“So that needs to be repaired,” he said. “The reality is the current DA does not work well with others. There’s a definite need for change and reform there.” 

Denouncing the prosecutions over Rodriguez’s shooting have been a campaign refrain for Calvey. He referred to encounters between police and civilians as “combat situations,” implying that Prater does not understand the hardship police officers face.

But Calvey points to another case that he believes exemplifies Prater’s “bullying nature”, and this is a very different case where the DA leaned into “law and order” politics. 

Julius Jones, a prisoner on death row, became a national cause celebre in 2020 as he maintained his innocence and neared his execution date. Celebrities and professional athletes were rallying to his cause, asking Governor Kevin Stitt to release him from prison.

Jones appeared before the Pardon and Parole Board twice to ask for leniency. During that process, Prater empaneled a grand jury to investigate some Pardon and Parole Board members, raising alarms among his critics that he was inappropriately pressuring the board to deny Jones clemency. He also sued the Pardon and Parole Board, accusing the members of bias and self-dealing and sought to keep two members from hearing the Jones case. The grand jury did not indict any of the board members, though both board members who were most often targeted by prosecutors have since resigned. 

The parole board ended up recommending that Jones’ sentence be lessened, and Stitt ultimately commuted Jones’s death sentence last year to life without the possibility of parole just hours before he was set to be executed.

“(Prater’s actions) seemed like something you’d see in a banana republic,” Calvey told The Frontier and Bolts. “To pull a stunt like that at that time seemed very politically motivated. I think had the pardon and parole board not recommended clemency for Jones, what Prater did would have tainted the death penalty process.”

Behenna said that she agrees with Calvey that the DA office under Prater has a strained relationship with other agencies, including the police. 

“What I hear from most stakeholders is that there’s a breakdown in communication with the DA’s office,” she told The Frontier and Bolts. “On the surface, that’s where I have to start. I’m hearing from chiefs of police, telling me they haven’t heard from the DA’s office in years. If they can’t chat with an ADA or understand what an ADA needs done, it’s going to be hard to prosecute that case.”

But Behenna rejects Calvey’s promise to drop criminal charges against the police officers who killed Rodriguez.

She said she spoke with Oklahoma City’s Fraternal Order of Police and was asked if she, too, would commit to dropping those charges.

“I told them I can not promise you that, I just can’t,” she said. “I told them … if they stay within their training and meet force with appropriate force, they are fine. But it is completely inappropriate to prejudge facts of a case just because of a person’s occupation.” 

Rodriguez’s mother, Cameo Holland, has sued the City of Oklahoma City, Oklahoma City Police Chief Wade Gourley, and five police officers over her son’s killing. The lawsuit, which asks for more than $75,000 in damages, is ongoing.

Alternative courts

Looming over the race are the dismal conditions in the Oklahoma County Jail, which has been well above its intended capacity throughout Prater’s tenure as DA. At least 14 people have died this year, and dozens more over the past decade. 

The DA’s office does not run the jail, but prosecutors play a major role in its size based on what they charge and what bail they recommend. 

Calvey does not intend to push for a major reduction in the jail population, something that has already happened to a degree thanks to voter-led criminal justice reforms that reclassified some felony and misdemeanor crimes. “Most of the people who are in jail probably do belong there, even the people being held pre-trial,” he said. “But still, putting some people in jail for basically being too poor to pay fines and fees is a problem.”

Calvey said he would seek to “do something” about people being held in beleaguered jail for not paying fines and fees. For some people, he said, the jail has become a debtor’s prison.

“That is neither fiscally conservative or humane or christian,” he said. “We’re only collecting about 30 percent of those fees under the current system.”

He said using tax intercepts to collect those fees, which are used in part to help fund the DA’s office, might be one potential fix.

Calvey and Behenna both told The Frontier and Bolts they want to expand the use of alternative courts. In Oklahoma County, there are a number of alternative courts that seek to avoid incarceration through treatment, including courts specifically for drug or DUI charges, and courts aimed at finding assistance for military veterans and residents with mental health issues. There are also a number of diversion courts available in the county.

The county’s alternative court program says it has graduated more than 900 people since 2016.

Behenna explained she wants to “speed up” the process of placing defendants into the appropriate place.

“I think it takes far too long to get approvals for people to go to drug court, or veteran’s court,” she said. “I think with the legislative commitment that’s gone on the last few years with these programs and the funding of these programs, it’s important to refocus your ADAs’ views of theses issues, and for them to understand that a determination needs to be made earlier in the process about whether someone is a good fit for one of these courts or not.”

Behenna told The Frontier and Bolts she believes the county jail is “inhumane” and said “there’s no question it’s a disaster.” She said her role as DA would not specifically be to lessen the jail’s population, but noted she believed an increased focus on alternative courts would lessen the burden on the jail by being “smart on crime.”

“It’s not just being tough on crime, it’s being smart on crime,” she told The Frontier and Bolts. “I believe in separating dangerous people from the community, but also in helping people who need help, like a veteran who has returned and faces mental health trauma.”

Calvey told The Frontier and Bolts he doesn’t mind having a “tough on crime” reputation, but that a “different method” of getting a person to the point of not being a threat to the public “would be better.”

“If the person is a psycho, then let’s put them in prison, they’re unlikely to get better,” he said. “But while this other person has a raging untreated alcohol or drug problem, but they’re otherwise not a threat, then let’s put them in a treatment program. If it works, then that would be a much better solution to the public as well as that individual less cost to the system.”

Whoever wins in November will take over one of the most important roles in the Oklahoma criminal justice ecosystem, Oklahoma County Public Defender Bob Ravitz told The Frontier and Bolts. 

The election is a county election, but the reality is decisions made by prosecutors in large metro areas can impact the entire state, he said. 

“I said this years ago at a Governor’s task force meeting, I said if you get the wrong DA in Oklahoma or Tulsa County, you can add 2,000 beds to the state’s prison population without flinching,” Ravitz said. “By the same token, get the right DA and you can reduce prison space or at the very least keep it steady.”

The post Oklahoma DA Candidate Runs on Dropping Charges Against Officers Who Killed 15-Year-Old appeared first on Bolts.

All three reforms will have a large impact, but all were also narrowed in the final stretch, often due to the opposition by prosecutors and their statewide associations.

Illinois legalized marijuana

Illinois is set to legalize the possession and sale of marijuana. The bill passed the legislature last week, and the state’s governor has said he will sign it. If he does, Illinois would become the first state to create a regulated marijuana industry via a legislative route (as opposed to via a ballot initiative), a testament to the issue’s shifting politics.

The bill faced a test beyond legalization: to confront the racially disproportionate harm that the prohibition of marijuana has caused. “We can’t move forward into the new world where marijuana will be legal and not take extra steps to repair that harm,” Roseanne Scotti, state director of the Drug Policy Alliance’s New Jersey office, told me in February. In legalizing pot, other states have often failed to clear past convictions, and the industry is primarily benefiting white investors. How does the Illinois legislation fare?

First, it sets up a streamlined pardon process to expunge existing convictions, which will relieve thousands from the lifelong implications of past prosecutions. Individuals will not need to initiate a request as long their offense involved less than 30 grams of marijuana. Relief will entail an individualized review process, however. The original legislation proposed a more automatic process, and it did not specify that 30-gram threshold, but it was amended after the state’s attorneys association demanded a greater role for prosecutors in determining eligibility.

Second, the bill allocates some of the revenue generated by legalization to programs meant to reverse the “systematic disinvestment of the same communities where folks with criminal records are concentrated,” as Sharone Mitchell Jr., deputy director of the Illinois Justice Project, put it. The legislature “did extremely well when it comes to the equitable distribution of cannabis tax proceeds,” Mitchell told me. “The 25 percent share of the tax revenue reserved for violence prevention, re-entry services and social determinants of health” are a “game changer when it comes to violence reduction.” Mitchell credited the work of the Illinois Black Caucus.

Third, it boosts the licensing applications submitted by residents of “disproportionately affected neighborhood” and of people with past convictions. Fourth, it provides financial assistance for people who want to enter the marijuana industry and who have been directly impacted by its prohibition; nevertheless, opening a dispensary will still entail a very high startup cost. Mitchell said that “Illinois has clearly done better than other states” when it comes to “minority inclusion in the industry,” but that “it is not the perfect bill when it comes to inclusion” because “industry giants that may not feature racial diversity still have the potential to dominate the industry.

Kim Foxx, the chief prosecutor of Cook County (Chicago), testified in favor of legalization and of those equity provisions. Earlier this year, Foxx earlier launched a process to facilitate the expungement of past marijuana convictions in Cook County.

Earlier this year, New Mexico and North Dakota reduced the prospect of facing incarceration for possessing pot. Promising reforms derailed in other states, including New Jersey and Texas.

Colorado reclassifies drug possession charges, and shrinks penalties

Colorado is lowering drug possession to the misdemeanor level. This new law, effective in 2020, reclassifies possession of nearly all Schedule I and Schedule II substances, including heroin and fentanyl.

This significantly reduces penalties associated with possessing these drugs. It shortens sentences and shifts people from prison to county jails. Drug possession currently carries a prison sentence and a subsequent parole period, but this change provides a sentence of up to 180 days in jail and a probation period.

The Senate limited the original bill’s scope, however, when it added a weight limit of 4 grams over which possession remains a felony. The law also contains other exceptions. It never applies to cathinones, flunitrazepam, ketamine, gamma hydroxybutyrate (GHB). Possession of other substances will also be a felony beyond a third offense. In addition, the law will not apply retroactively.

Five states have reclassified drug possession into a misdemeanor, all since 2014, according to a 2018 report published by the Urban Institute: They are California, Connecticut, Oklahoma, Utah, as well as Alaska (which may soon roll back its reform). The report finds that none of these states specify a weight limit; some do raise charges to a felony after repeated convictions.

Brian Elderbroom, a scholar at the Urban Institute who co-wrote the 2018 report with Julia Durnan, called Colorado’s bill a “critical first step.” He added, though, that it does not meet the standard of the five reforms assessed in his report. It “builds on reclassification efforts in other states by also limiting incarceration in local jails and investing in treatment programs,” he told me, but “lawmakers left plenty on the table when they amended the bill to retain the felony classification in certain cases.” He added that “incarceration should never be the response to addiction or substance abuse,” which “should be a public health issue.”

Oklahoma had already ‘defelonized’ drug possession. Now that became retroactive.

Drug possession is already a misdemeanor in Oklahoma. Voters reclassified it in a 2016 ballot initiative, State Question 780, that passed by a large margin; it also reclassified theft of under $1,000. But SQ 780 was not retroactive; people already convicted got no relief.

This just changed. House Bill 1269, signed into law in May, makes SQ 780 retroactive. It instructs the state to identify and resentence people now in prison for felony drug possession. (People convicted of other offenses in addition to drug possession, and people convicted of theft, will need to file a commutation petition to be considered.) Up to 800 people who are serving simple possession charges will be eligible for release, The Oklahoman reports.

The law also makes already-released individuals eligible for expungement. Up to 60,000 people could qualify for this form of relief, according to Kris Steele, the executive director of Oklahomans for Criminal Justice Reform, a coalition that supported the change. Steele is also the state’s former Republican speaker. “When an individual can remove that scarlet letter, it opens up a myriad employment opportunities and new housing opportunities, it allows that individual to move forward in a very positive manner,” Steele told me.

But Steele also expressed concerns about the way lawmakers set up the expungement system. For one, the reform requires individuals who are eligible to file an application rather than shift that burden on the state. Steele said that although the reform provides a simplified application, people may still perceive the process as too burdensome. “Many individuals who are involved in the justice system may be skeptical of applying because it is additional involvement with a system that has been punitive,” he said.

Other “caveats” include the stipulation that people with past felony convictions must complete all treatment criteria and pay full restitution before obtaining an expungement. People arrested today face no such preconditions to be charged with only a misdemeanor, and Steele argued that “true retroactivity” should mean that people convicted before SQ 780 became effective are “treated exactly the same.” He said of the requirement to pay restitution before obtaining an expungement that “what we don’t want is to create a disparity between individuals who have resources and individuals who may be living in poverty.”

Oklahoma is only the second state, along California, to reclassify drug possession retroactively.

Yet HB 1269 is the only major criminal justice reform that Oklahoma, which has the country’s highest incarceration rate, will adopt this year. Legislation to reduce the use of cash bail, waive some fines and fees, and lessen sentencing for some nonviolent offenses had some early success, but the legislature adjourned without adopting them. Steele said that this is “primarily because of the opposition of district attorneys.” Prosecutors “are very effective within the state legislature in thwarting reforms that would reduce incarceration, and they work with other law enforcement entities such as the sheriff associations to defend and protect the status quo,” he added.

The Oklahoma District Attorneys Council, the association that lobbies on behalf of prosecutors, had also raised concerns about HB 1269 and retroactivity. NPR reports that the bail bond lobby also contributed to derail these reforms.

The post Legalized Pot, Reduced Sentences: Three States Reform Their Drug Laws appeared first on Bolts.

In separate interviews on Monday, Proehl-Day and Williams detailed some of the difficulties they experienced running for prosecutor on such a platform.

“We struggled to get anybody to care about the DA race,” said Williams, who is a Democratic state representative. “Ninety percent of my campaign was actually an education about what a DA is, what a DA does… [It was] not uncommon to hear, ‘I’ve never been arrested, why do I care, how does this impact me?’” He added that he was hampered by a parallel indifference among the people in a position to help financially. “There isn’t a built-in pipeline fundraising for DA races,” he said, contrasting his experience in this election with his past legislative races.

According to Proehl-Day, people were “completely unaware” of a DA’s role, which enabled Kunzweiler to obscure the discretionary power he enjoys. “The incumbent wanted to frame [reform] as the legislature’s job,” she said. “[He] was dead set that there is no discretion in his job, that he needs to follow the law.”

Proehl-Day and Kunzweiler indeed clashed over prosecutorial discretion. After Proehl-Day said that she would decline to prosecute marijuana possession, Kunzweiler denounced her stance. “That’s not what a DA does, DA’s job is to enforce the laws,” he said. But in a new interview in the New Yorker, Kunzweiler describes his role as going well beyond the rigid application of laws, extending it to “teach[ing] people the morals they either never learned or they somehow forgot.” To illustrate how he makes calls about how to punish defendants, he compares prosecution to disciplining children. “There are times when your kids need a lecture, times when they need a grounding, and times when they need a spanking,” he said.

Proehl-Day listed ways in which Kunzweiler does much more than merely apply the law. “Overcharging, undercharging, those are all discretion,” she told me. She pointed to his efforts to “thwart” a recent reform that voters adopted to reduce drug sentencing by upping the charges he files. But Proehl-Day also described feeling partially boxed in by his rhetoric. “When he frames it that way, I come across looking like an activist,” she said.

The claim that prosecutors’ political preferences are irrelevant to their function also obfuscates the lobbying role that the Oklahoma District Attorneys Council has played by speaking out against legislative reforms. Williams noted that the group has “time and time again” watered down or impeded legislative deals; he said that he ran to be a “counter-lobby” to the council. Prosecutors coming together to organize against legislative reforms is a pattern that recurs across the country.

Both candidates insisted that reform remains urgent, and that the current debates about building new prisons in Oklahoma could be an entry point for change given the cost of building new facilities. “Oklahoma is at a breaking point,” Proehl-Day said, describing as unsustainable the state’s new status of having the country’s highest incarceration rate. “What Oklahoma is doing is fiscally irresponsible and morally repugnant.”

The post On the Challenges of Running As a Reform Prosecutor in Oklahoma appeared first on Bolts.