On July 8, 2021, activists in Central Texas showed up at the office of Hays County District Attorney Wes Mau to deliver a cake with blue icing that spelled out the words “Failed Promise.” 

They were commemorating the anniversary of a commitment Mau and other local law enforcement officials had made a year earlier, in the summer of 2020, to give people charged with certain low-level crimes, such as  marijuana possession and driving with a suspended license, a way to avoid prosecution altogether by completing a court program or community service. Activists with the local group Mano Amiga (“helping hand” in Spanish) had pushed for a so-called cite-and-divert policy for more than a year as part of a larger campaign to roll back the kind of punitive, zero-tolerance policing and prosecution that have defined this county for decades, despite its close proximity to Austin, the state’s liberal capital city. 

At first, Mano Amiga activists like Jordan Buckley, who co-founded the group, cheered officials for finally agreeing to reforms. But then Mau dragged his feet so long that a whole year passed without a cite-and-divert program—hence the “happy birthday” party hat that Buckley ironically wore as he stood outside the Hays County government building last summer accusing the Republican DA of failing to live up to his word. 

“There have been scores of people who have been needlessly arrested for petty offenses and kept these petty offenses on their criminal record because our district attorney’s word is empty,” Buckley said before he and other activists walked the cake up to the DA’s office to offer him a slice (Mau never came out). “In Austin, for example, no one gets a criminal record for possession of marijuana,” Buckley said, “and yet it’s one of the leading arrest charges in Hays County because our district attorney is such a hardliner on cannabis.” 

Organizing by Mano Amiga since last summer has helped turn this November’s elections into a referendum on both marijuana decriminalization and pretrial diversion in Hays County. Activists with Mano Amiga gathered enough signatures to put a measure on the ballot this year that would end citations and arrests for possession of up to four ounces of marijuana in the city of San Marcos, the county seat and home to one of the state’s largest public universities. 

This politically competitive county is also voting for a new DA. Mau is retiring, and the race to replace him could pave the way for the kind of pretrial diversion program that local activists have demanded, and officials have promised, for years. While GOP nominee David Puryear echoes the anti-reform, tough-on-crime rhetoric of state and national Republicans, Democratic nominee Kelly Higgins vows a “sea change” in the county. He has promised to decline prosecution of cannabis possession and at last implement a cite-and-divert program for other low-level charges. 

Higgins would also add to the growing roster of reform-minded officials in Hays County, the fastest growing county in the nation—a reflection of the larger population boom in the I-35 corridor between San Antonio and Austin. Some of those officials attended and spoke at a “Reeferendum Fest” Mano Amiga activists threw earlier this month to drum up attention to the ballot measure in San Marcos—including County Judge Ruben Becerra, a Democrat first elected to lead the county in 2018 on a platform of criminal justice reforms and who is seeking re-election this year. 

When Higgins addressed the “Reeferendum” crowd,” he directly referred to the cite-and-divert policy. “I’m telling you it will happen,” he told activists. “I’m promising you it will happen.” 

San Marcos activists founded Mano Amiga in 2017 soon after Texas adopted a “show me your papers” law, Senate Bill 4, allowing local cops to investigate the immigration status of anyone they detain. At first the group focused on assisting immigrants caught in detention and at risk of deportation due to arrest for minor charges, but eventually their scope grew. 

“SB4 intensified what is commonly referred to as the ‘jail to deportation pipeline’ and made immigrant rights groups like ours, which primarily focused on deportation defense campaigns, realize we needed to push for systemic change that benefits citizens and non-citizens alike, keeping all our neighbors safe from the legal system and deportation,” Mano Amiga communications director Sam Benavides told me.

One of the group’s first broader policy demands was an ordinance requiring local police to issue citations for minor charges rather than the typical custom of hauling people off to jail over petty things like pot possession; while Texas law has allowed cities and counties to implement so-called cite-and-release policies since at least 2007, small-time marijuana possession remained the leading charge for arrest in Hays County for years. Activists called the policy a racial justice issue: Black people, who comprise about 5 percent of San Marcos’ population, accounted for nearly one third of low-level marijuana arrests in the city, and were almost always arrested over citation-eligible offenses. 

About a year after local activists started pushing for it, San Marcos became the first city in Texas to adopt an ordinance directing police to issue citations over making arrests for most low-level crimes with certain exceptions, like when someone is suspected of assault or family violence; larger cities nearby like San Antonio only managed to pass “resolutions” that simply suggested cops favor citations. The ordinance narrowly passed the city council over intense opposition from both the San Marcos Police Officers’ Association and the Combined Law Enforcement Associations of Texas, a statewide police union.

The local and state police unions haven’t taken a public position on this year’s referendum to decriminalize marijuana possession in San Marcos. But they have endorsed Puryear, the GOP nominee to replace Mau, the outgoing DA who has taken a notably hard stance on marijuana possession, even as state law made it increasingly difficult and costly to prosecute. 

Puryear, a former prosecutor and appeals court judge who didn’t respond to multiple interview requests for this story, has run in part on demonizing neighboring Travis County—which elected a reform-minded prosecutor who vowed to not prosecute drug possession in 2020. Travis is also home to the city of Austin, which voted to decriminalize small-time marijuana possession earlier this year. 

“Crime victims should know that we will doggedly pursue justice for them and criminals should know this isn’t Travis County,” Puryear wrote in one social media post soon after filing to run for DA. His campaign website states, “Dangerous ‘soft on crime’ policies have led to an exponential rise in robberies, sexual assaults, and murder in Austin and the surrounding counties.” (Data shows that violent offenses have increased statewide in Texas, as well as in counties around the nation irrespective of the politics of their lead prosecutors.) 

Puryear has also publicly criticized Higgins, his opponent, for promising to not prosecute abortion under the state’s new criminal ban, a stance that other Democratic prosecutors and DA candidates in Texas and across the country have taken following the U.S. Supreme Court’s Dobbs ruling this summer overturning abortion rights. “To pick and choose which laws you will obey and enforce as DA, based on your personal feelings, sets an example of lawlessness and opens the door to chaos,” Puryear wrote in another social media post. 

Puryear’s rhetoric against declination also clashes with another campaign promise from Higgins: The Democratic nominee has said he would decline to prosecute all cases of simple possession of cannabis, including THC oils and edibles that can still be charged as felonies in the state, and often still are in Hays County, despite any individual town’s efforts to decriminalize. Higgins, a longtime defense attorney in Central Texas, argues that the hardline stance on marijuana is a sign of deeper dysfunction at the DA’s office. 

“The general impression that you’ll find if you talk to everyone in the courthouse is that the DA’s office is sluggish and vicious—they will charge anything if they can possibly construe as a crime,” Higgins told me. 

“The goals there are not to pursue justice, which is the oath, but to train up your prosecutors to get them more trials, and to be more unreasonable in plea offers to drive cases to trial,” he said. “That includes cases that in no other county would get tried to a jury, like vape pen cases.”

But as much as Higgins’s approach to cannabis is clear (don’t prosecute it), his plans for a cite-and-divert policy in Hays County are more vague. Activists at Mano Amiga have advocated for pretrial diversion not just for misdemeanors but also possession of small amounts of other drugs that still carry felony charges. They want a policy that provides alternatives to plea deals, criminal convictions, and prison time for low-level crimes like substance use, and programs that steer people toward services and treatment instead of punishment. 

“If there is any district attorney out there who actually wants to bring about real community change, and they don’t want it to be a dog and pony show, then they would create a cite-and-divert program to address felony drug offenses,” Mano Amiga policy director Eric Martinez told me. 

When I asked what would be covered by his vision of a pre-charge diversion program, Higgins told me, “The general rubric of party drugs, Friday night, what’s in your blue jeans,” before quickly pivoting to concerns about fentanyl and drug trafficking. “The rise of fentanyl is inhibiting my ability to be very, you know, liberal about a cite-and-divert program,” he said. “I’m not worried about things like THC and things where fentanyl doesn’t appear.” 

Higgins admitted that his thinking on the issue had evolved while campaigning, crediting local activists with helping expand his idea of reform. “Talking with groups like Mano Amiga, and I mean specifically talking with Sam Benavides at Mano Amiga, I got a little educated about what cite-and-divert means, and it is pretty attractive to me,” Higgins said. 

He sounded more resolute when speaking at the group’s “Reeferendum Fest” the following day, including the same word—promise—that activists had put on a cake to mock the last DA for failing to deliver. 

Local activists have long pushed reform on another issue: They criticize the often yearslong pretrial detention of people in the county jail, and demand fair representation for people accused of crimes who can’t afford to hire their own defense attorney. 

The long ordeal of Cyrus Gray underscores the stakes. In 2018, Gray was one of two people arrested and charged with capital murder in the 2015 death of another Texas State University student. Because he couldn’t afford his own lawyer and Hays County didn’t have a public defender’s office to help indigent people accused of crimes, a judge appointed a private attorney to represent Gray, who has maintained his innocence since his arrest. 

Gray has been detained pretrial inside the Hays County jail ever since. He has had two court-appointed lawyers during his more than four years in pretrial detention—the first of which, according to Gray, hardly represented him. 

“He came to see me three times within two years, and every time came to see me he tried to convince me to take a plea deal for 45 years (in prison),” Gray told me in a phone call from the Hays County jail earlier this month. “I would express to him, ‘I didn’t do anything, why would I willingly take 45 years of my life in prison knowing I didn’t do anything?’ And then immediately he’d find an excuse to leave—so these conversations would be like 10 minutes long.” 

Gray’s prosecution, which has generated local controversy, ended in a mistrial last month when jurors remained deadlocked after three days of deliberations. One juror who favored acquittal has publicly criticized police and prosecutors for bringing a flawed case (as of this writing, Mau’s office has said it plans to retry Gray at the end of this month). 

“Witnesses were badgered and harassed on the stand in ways that felt far beyond even a confrontational cross-examination,” the juror, Melinda Rothouse, recently wrote in an essay published in the Texas Observer. “The accused man’s friends had been coerced, threatened, intimidated and treated as suspects themselves by investigators to the point that implicating the defendant seemed to offer their only way out from under the thumb of the system.” 

Others like Gray are also spending years in the Hays County jail without a trial, the Austin Chronicle reported last month. Gray says they also go months or even years without seeing their appointed defenders. The Chronicle also described dangerous and degrading conditions, including unchecked violence and poor medical care—problems that plague local jails across the state. 

In recent years, activists with Mano Amiga have rallied around Gray’s case to argue for the need for a local public defender’s office to improve representation and overall conditions in the legal system. After years of activists organizing around the issue, Hays County commissioners voted unanimously this past spring to allocate $5 million in federal stimulus funds to build a new public defender’s office, which has yet to launch. 

Along with monitoring the implementation of the nascent public defender’s office and rallying for marijuana decriminalization, activists with Mano Amiga are already planning for how future elections could reform local law enforcement. 

Last month, Mano Amiga activists began the process of gathering the signatures needed to put an item on the local ballot next year to overturn the contract that the San Marcos city council recently approved with the city’s police union. Activists, along with the life partner of a woman killed in a car crash with an off-duty deputy, had pushed for disciplinary and transparency reforms to the contract, none of which were included. The campaign to repeal the police union contract follows a similar effort by San Antonio activists to put an ordinance before voters to curtail police union power, a measure which narrowly lost last year. 

As Hays County has grown, it has also shifted blue. Biden carried the county in 2020 after six consecutive wins for GOP presidential candidates, though elections there remain competitive. 

To Benavides, the organizing behind this year’s ballot measures is larger than the individual issues at hand because of how activism has started to reorient power in Hays County. “For me it’s so much bigger than any policy itself, it’s about showing people the power that they have as a collective,” she told me.

Gathering signatures and organizing for reforms has also underscored the need for change. “Every time we knock on doors we hear from people saying how they’ve been abused or mistreated by law enforcement,” Benavides told me. She says Mano Amiga has started branching out to help organize and push for reforms in surrounding counties. 

“I feel like there isn’t enough emphasis on the organizing going on in rural communities,” she added. “There’s so much going on in San Antonio, so much going on in Austin, and our goal is to bridge that gap and help build a corridor of resistance.”

The post How Years of Organizing Put Drug Reform and Diversion on the Ballot in Central Texas appeared first on Bolts.

Champions of decriminalization got Maine closer than any other state to emulating Oregon. The state House adopted a bill last year to decriminalize low-level possession, but the legislation died in the Senate, hindered in part by the resistance of Maine’s district attorneys. With reform delayed, attention has shifted to those DA offices, which are in charge of prosecuting drug offenses—and are all on the ballot this year. 

Running in Cumberland County, home to the city of Portland, Jackie Sartoris has claimed the mantle of reform as she promises to keep more people from being locked up over substance use.

She is the only Democrat challenging an incumbent DA anywhere in Maine, and she faces DA Jonathan Sahrbeck in the June 14 primary. 

“We are too often sending people with addiction-related conduct to prison rather than treatment,” Sartoris told Bolts. 

But she also says she would not eliminate criminal consequences for substance use in Cumberland County. She has expressed some support for legislation that would reduce the role of the criminal legal system, but says she wants to use criminal prosecution as a tool to push more people into treatment, the stick to the carrot of having charges dropped. 

“My approach is to use interactions with the criminal legal system as opportunities to solve an underlying problem and help people in need of assistance to obtain help,” she told Bolts.

The boundaries of prosecutorial reform have shifted recently as some DAs have drawn a starker line against low-level drugs prosecutions. In Maine, many advocates are no longer satisfied with making the criminal legal system less severe. They want prosecutors to entirely butt out of substance use, and have pushed the state to shift resources toward social services and treatment programs that operate outside of the criminal legal system. 

Tina Heather Nadeau, the executive director of the Maine Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers who talked to Bolts in her personal capacity, is skeptical of prosecutors who claim to want to use treatment for the benefit of the defendant. All too often such mandates are used as a “bludgeon,” she said, setting people up to fail.

In this moment of crisis, Nadeau says she is mainly interested in how candidates propose to reduce the havoc of encountering the criminal legal system. Even a brief jail stint after an arrest can have grave consequences for someone’s life, and overdose risks are high upon release. “I want to know how they’re going to help people who come in contact with the criminal justice system—either minimize their contact or get them to a better place,” she said. 

Marshall Mercer, a formerly incarcerated advocate for drug reform, made the case during last year’s legislative debates that the looming threat of criminalization gets in the way of people’s recovery. “Every time I would look for help, there’d always be someone looking down on me,” he said at a public event. “We’re not going to go looking for help if people are arresting us and throwing us in jail.”

A report released by the ACLU of Maine in March concurs and calls on the state to take a more holistic approach.The report assails Maine for doubling down on spending on incarceration: One year in a state prison is more than double what it would cost for housing assistance, counseling, and treatment at MaineCare. “Incarceration does the opposite of what people need, which is support and connection,” lead author Winifred Tate, a Colby College anthropology professor, told her university. People also end up with burdensome criminal convictions.

Maine seemed to be on its way to an overhaul last June when the House passed LD 967, a bill that would have made drug possession a civil violation rather than a criminal offense. But the bill was eventually downed by the opposition of the Maine Prosecutors’ Association and the likely veto of Democratic Governor Janet Mills, a former prosecutor.

Sahrbeck, Cumberland County’s current DA, is skeptical of decriminalization because he thinks it would make dangerous drugs flow into the region. He’s waiting to see how Oregon’s reform goes. “Unfortunately, opioids and fentanyl, methamphetamines—they are so powerful, and people are suffering so much, that oftentimes the criminal justice system is that thing that triggers someone getting into recovery,” Sahrbeck told the Maine Beacon last year.

Sahrbeck became DA in 2018 after unexpectedly winning as an independent when both the Democratic and Republican candidates dropped out in the campaign’s final stages. He filed as a Democrat this time. He told Bolts that running as a Democrat makes sense ideologically. 

But for Sartoris, his challenger, Sahrbeck is mainly invested in “superficial change” in rhetoric, and the diversion and restorative justice programs he has pursued are not sufficient. Sartoris, who lives in Cumberland County but works as a prosecutor in nearby Kennebec County, told Bolts that she would pursue alternatives to incarceration at a much greater rate. She also said she would charge more cases at a lower, misdemeanor level rather than the felony level to ensure that they qualify for a diversionary approach. 

Sahrbeck disputes that interpretation of his office’s work. He shared data with Bolts showing a decline in the total number of cases his office filed with the court in 2020 and 2021. “Our diversionary measures in charging like our restorative justice diversion program, compliance diversion, and higher scrutiny on which cases to prosecute show a significant decrease in criminal filings,” Sahrbeck says. 

But this reduction in the raw number of cases filed, which coincided with the onset of the pandemic, matches the decline in the number of overall cases that entered the DA’s office for review in the first place; the start of the pandemic led to a big drop in police arrests nationwide. The rate of how the DA’s office processed cases changed little: In 2018, the last year before Sahrbeck became DA, the number of cases filed with the court was 63.3 percent of the number of cases that entered the DA’s office. Last year, that rate was 63.6 percent.

The DA also pointed to a reduction in the number of people held at the county jail, crediting it to “policy changes surrounding cash bail and motions to revoke bail in which we now look for supervision in the community wherever possible over incarceration.” That number dropped when the pandemic began, Sahrbeck stressed that “the numbers never returned to pre-covid levels.” Over the past year, though, the local jail has been marred by repeat COVID outbreaks and coverage of dismal conditions like solitary confinement, with advocates demanding reductions in detention.

Sahrbeck and Sartoris do agree on a key policy question. Both candidates told Bolts that they opposed the creation of a do-not-prosecute policy, like some progressive officials have adopted elsewhere in the country for low-level drug cases and some other charges, and thereby rule out bringing drug possession charges.

Sahrbeck said each case should be taken on a “case-by-case basis.” “I kind of get wary when it comes to do-not-prosecute lists, even though I know I do have discretion, because the legislature is the one who makes the laws,” he added. 

Similarly, Sartoris said she doesn’t back creating a declination list, including for drug offenses, “where the legislature has enacted laws that apply.” 

Sartoris tweeted earlier this year that she would never prosecute cases related to abortion. When Nadeau, the local defense attorney, asked whether there were other types of charges that she would pledge not to prosecute, Sartoris replied: “Running to be DA, not DF! (Dismissal Fairy).” 

Nadeau retorted that the comment was “glib” and asked, “What about the ethical obligation of a prosecutor not to pursue charges they know they can’t prove? Or if a dismissal is in the interest of justice?” She said Sartoris blocked her after the exchange.

In an interview with Bolts, Sartoris also expressed wariness about changing state law to decriminalize drug possession. 

What she wants instead is to provide more people “access to secure treatment” in lieu of incarceration, but also in lieu of ever ending up with a conviction. 

She told Bolts she would pursue a policy of providing people arrested for drug offenses with the information for treatment for addiction services, and require them to follow up and actually enter treatment. When her office receives confirmation, she said, they would dismiss the charges—enabling the defendant to leave the system without having been convicted.

“This enables the first touch for most people with the criminal legal system to possibly be their last, without a conviction or fine resulting,” Sartoris said. 

Under this approach, people would continue facing the threat of criminal conviction if they fail to follow-up the various steps of the process laid out by the DA’s office. Proponents of decriminalization say forcing people into treatment is often unproductive, costly, and ultimately ineffective. 

Nadeau notes such decisions are not outside of prosecutorial control.

“There is nothing that requires a prosecutor to push a possession charge,” Nadeau said. “There is nothing that pushes the prosecutor to go forward with even a trafficking charge if the stop was based on racist garbage. Nothing. They can always do the right thing.”

Matt Gunn, co-chair of the Drug Policy working group of Maine DSA, agrees. “I can see from a prosecutor’s perspective how that looks very appealing,” Gunn said. “But whether someone supports mandated treatment options or not, having the mentality that we need to seek out cases and prosecute them and be arresting people and taking them off the streets and away from their jobs and their lives and their families so that they can stop using drugs is not a healthy approach.”

Gunn regrets that the state is not fully committing to approaching drug policy as a public health issue because politicians are most concerned with the perception that they’re looking after “public order.” 

“Whether they are upholding public order is up for debate,” he said, “but they have to make their constituents feel as though they are maintaining a safe environment.”

The post Maine Prosecutor Election Unfolds Under the Shadow of State’s War on Drugs appeared first on Bolts.

The support of friends, family, and social service providers catalyzed Sterling Johnson’s recovery from substance use disorder. “When they looked at me and they saw hope in me instead of treating me like shit,” he said. “I would say that dignity, respect, having people believe in you. Those are the things that make you want to change.”

Johnson is a lawyer and housing advocate in Philadelphia, where District Attorney Larry Krasner has made strides toward decriminalizing simple drug possession by dismissing an increasingly large portion of these cases. Johnson sees this as key to decriminalizing substance use.

“Let’s humanize every single person,” he said. “You don’t put them in a box and they get better from the box.” 

Philadelphia could step back into the mainstream of the war on drugs should Krasner lose the May 18 Democratic primary—a de facto general election in this deeply blue city. His opponent is Carlos Vega, a career prosecutor who Krasner fired upon taking office. Vega has more of a law-and-order stance; he favors sending drug possession cases to drug court, rather than dropping charges outright. Drug courts can bring alternatives to incarceration, but their eligibility is restricted, and people remain under the threat of prosecution or incarceration if they relapse during treatment.

“Correctional facilities are detrimental to a person’s health … Being incarcerated has a huge impact on a person’s life, even more than the use disorder,” said Danielle Ompad, professor of epidemiology at New York University’s School of Global Public Health. She said that prosecuting drug offenses isn’t working and that “we could be putting that money into poverty alleviation, building an economic safety net.” 

Upon taking office, Krasner stopped prosecuting marijuana possession. Then, in late 2019, he established a policy of dropping every drug possession charge if the person shows proof of participating in treatment. The office defines treatment broadly, and does not require the recovery program to be court-monitored. Attending a Narcotics Anonymous meeting would suffice for someone caught with cocaine, for example, and such meetings are free and widely offered in the city. The office also does not wait to see if the person successfully completes the program before dismissing the case, a marked contrast with drug courts.

“We weren’t going to keep a hammer over their head to be sure that they completed X number of days,” Krasner told The Appeal: Political Report. “We know that often people are not ready for treatment, or treatment fails them the first time. But at least go so that you know where to get [it].”  

The share of drug possession charges that were outright dismissed by the DA’s office climbed as soon as Krasner took charge in January 2018. It then rose again after he made it a policy in late 2019 to drop charges for people who seek treatment regardless of whether they enter drug court or complete a program. 

Comparing January through March 2020 (before local courts shut down due to COVID-19) to the equivalent time period in 2017 (the last year before Krasner entered office), the share of drug possession charges that were dismissed increased from 19 percent in 2017 to 54 percent in 2020. This jump corresponds to hundreds of dismissed cases.

The share of dismissed charges surged further when the pandemic began, but pandemic data is tricky because courts were non-functioning and many prosecutors dismissed low-level cases more broadly. Between January and March of 2021, as Krasner called for police to make fewer arrests for low-level crimes, the office dismissed 87 percent of drug possession charges. 

Krasner has made other changes to enhance harm reduction, like declining to prosecute anyone for possessing buprenorphine, a drug that is prescribed to quell cravings for someone weaning off opioid use but is also sold on the black market. Also he sanctioned fentanyl test strips, which are used to detect the lethal chemical and were previously considered drug paraphernalia. And alongside other city officials, he has advocated for the construction of a safe injection site to reduce overdose deaths.

Vega says he will continue to not prosecute cases involving marijuana possession. When it comes to other forms of substance use, though, he wants to take the Philadelphia DA’s office in the opposite direction. He has spoken against bringing a safe injection site to the city, and he is campaigning to return to the long-established drug diversion programs administered by a drug court, where a person’s chance to circumvent incarceration depends on whether they can abide the program’s conditions and achieve sobriety. 

“If you’re caught with a drug that I believe is going to destroy your life, lead you to a dark place and also affect the community, I’m going to put you into a program,” Vega told the Political Report. “And once you complete that program, get the help you need, the counseling you need, I drop the charges, and I seal that record.”

However, this type of court-monitored diversion program is increasingly selective, only admitting people with no prior convictions, and it comes with onerous requirements such as reporting for urine tests that can impede a person’s ability to make a living. Critics say that these programs often lead to incarceration when people trip up and fail to meet those conditions—often with steeper sentences than if they had just been sentenced in the first place.

“For people who have substance use disorders, relapsing can be part of their recovery,” said Ompad.

Some local activists and public health advocates are also pressing Krasner to go further and dismiss drug possession arrests without conditions. “Most people who use drugs don’t need treatment,” said Ompad. “If someone is picked up for marijuana or cocaine possession and they use maybe once a month or once a week, they don’t really have a substance use problem.”

Brooke Feldman, a board member with the Philadelphia-based harm reduction nonprofit Angels in Motion, says she supports what Krasner is doing, but thinks that he should drop the treatment requirement, however small it may be. “Mandating something isn’t the way to go,” she said.

She explained that one negative experience with a treatment facility can become a barrier to recovery—so a person should only enter when they’re ready, and through a program that is right for them. “If someone goes to a meeting because they had to, it just gives them a picture of something that they don’t want to do in the future. That can set them back,” she said.  “Or if someone goes and gets an assessment for treatment and has a negative experience, they sat and waited for eight hours, in withdrawal, got treated like shit, in the end was told, ‘Sorry we don’t have any beds available for you.’ That kind of stuff sets people back.” 

Krasner has also faced criticism from the Philadelphia Bail Fund, which slammed him in a July 2020 report for asking judges to set impossibly high bail for people charged with, among other things, drug possession with intent to distribute. This is a charge that Krasner doesn’t plan to stop prosecuting, but he had implied it would no longer trigger pretrial detention when he made promises to only seek bail for violent offenses.

Other prosecutors nationwide have moved toward policies of not prosecuting drug possession, including DAs in Boston, Seattle, and Baltimore, where State Attorney Marilyn Mosby’s office halted prosecuting drug possession during the pandemic as a measure to reduce jail population size. In response to a subsequent drop in crime rates, Mosby’s office recently announced that these changes are permanent.

Taking it a step further, in a January 29th letter to his constituents, newly elected Travis County, Texas, District Attorney Jose Garza said that he would not prosecute people for possessing small amounts of drugs, but also for selling those amounts, unless the case includes violent conduct. 

In Oregon, Multnomah County (Portland) District Attorney Mike Schmidt was a strong advocate for the new state law that decriminalizes drug possession, making it the first state in the country to do so. The 2020 reform was inspired in part by Portugal, which decriminalized personal amounts of drugs in 2001.

Krasner says he would eventually like to have a similar model. In Portugal, if a police officer finds a person in possession of drugs, rather than send that person to jail, they typically direct them to a local commission that includes a lawyer, social worker, and a doctor. This team will educate the person about available treatment, including medical and social services. 

The primary rationale for Portugal’s law change was to destigmatize drug use, encourage treatment for those who needed it, and cut down on needless incarcerations. Since it was implemented, drug use has decreased, and the number of overdose deaths has declined. Meanwhile, the number of people entering drug rehabilitation programs has increased. 
Portugal’s government implemented this system in the midst of a heroin epidemic that Philadelphia is mirroring today. The city is one of the hardest hit by the opioid overdose epidemic. A staggering 1,150 people were reported to die from overdose in Philadelphia in 2019, with 80 percent of them attributed to opioids.

This article has been corrected to reflect that Krasner’s predecessor did not have a policy of declining to prosecute marijuana charges; Krasner established this policy upon taking office. This article has also been updated to include that Vega says he would retain this policy and not prosecute marijuana cases.

The post Philadelphia D.A. Race Could Ramp Up the War on Drugs appeared first on Bolts.

This article is published as part of a partnership between New York Focus and The Appeal: Political Report to cover Manhattan‘s 2021 elections.

The war on drugs in New York City is fueled by a little-known but powerful office: the special narcotics prosecutor (SNP), whose powers derive in part from the good will of the Manhattan district attorney’s office.

Manhattan’s election for DA next year could severely curtail the SNP. Some of the candidates in the crowded field vying to replace DA Cy Vance, who has not yet indicated if he will seek re-election, say they would push for abolishing or weakening the office.

The Office of the Special Narcotics Prosecutor was created in 1971 as part of Governor Nelson Rockefeller’s effort to fight the new war on drugs, which also included the infamous 1973 Rockefeller drug laws. Since 2005, the earliest year for which complete records are publicly available, the office has prosecuted over 20,000 individuals and secured thousands of prison or jail sentences.

Unlike the five borough DAs, who deal with a wide variety of cases from white-collar fraud to construction safety, the SNP prosecutes only drug felonies. The SNP is unique to New York City; no other municipality in the country has a prosecutor’s office devoted solely to drug crime.

“All they do are these drug cases day in and day about, and they overcharge. They demand really overly harsh sentences and make horrible offers in cases,” said Tiffany Cabán, a former public defender and Queens DA candidate who is currently running for City Council.

Advocates and defense attorneys are making the case that taking on the SNP is an essential part of fighting mass incarceration in New York.

“Special Narcotics is just stuck in time,'” Libby Fischer, an attorney with Neighborhood Defender Services, said of the SNP’s office, even as some prosecutors’ offices nationwide are “starting to change slowly, to come under overdue scrutiny.”

Of the eight declared Manhattan DA candidates, all of whom are running in the Democratic primary in June, four told New York Focus and The Appeal: Political Report that they would support legislative reform to abolish the SNP office. Four also said they would vote to remove Bridget Brennan, the tough-on-crime prosecutor who has led the SNP since 1998, fought proposals to reform drug laws, and cultivated a reputation among defense attorneys for pursuing low-level offenses. Brennan could be removed with the approval of three of the five borough DAs.

Perhaps most consequentially, two of the eight candidates—civil rights attorney Tahanie Aboushi and public defender Eliza Orlins—said they would withdraw the 57 assistant district attorneys that the Manhattan DA’s office loans to the SNP. This could be done unilaterally and would cut the SNP’s staff by more than half. 

“If the DA pulled their support, the SNP—one of the most horrific vestiges of the Rockefeller drug era—would soon cease to exist,” said Jared Trujillo, president of New York City’s public defenders union.

Vance, the current DA, did not respond to multiple requests for comment on his policies regarding the SNP. 

“That’s how you get mass incarceration”

The SNP says it focuses far more on top-level narcotics felonies than lower-grade offenses.

“Of the nearly 2,400 indictments brought by our office between 2017 and 2019, 25% of defendants were charged with top A level felonies. In 2017, the most recent year for which New York State data is readily available, we handled 39% of the state’s most serious narcotics cases,” SNP spokesperson Kati Cornell said in a written statement.

A former prosecutor at the SNP, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because of continued professional involvement with the office, told New York Focus and the Political Report that such statistics can be misleading.

“It’s really about people’s definition of petty crimes. If you think that someone should go to state prison for a couple years for selling two bags of crack because they want to buy new sneakers, then you would agree with [the SNP] that they’re only doing the most serious crimes,” the former prosecutor said. “Those people will end up in prison, and that’s how you get mass incarceration.”

Cornell said that the SNP rarely prosecutes defendants solely for lesser drug possession. “From 2017 to 2019, just 2% of indicted defendants faced lesser narcotics possession charges that do not involve intent to sell, exclud[ing] defendants simultaneously facing non-narcotics charges such as weapon possession, assault and money laundering,” she said.

Fischer said that low figure reflected the SNP’s propensity to charge defendants harshly.

“Somebody could have 10 bags of crack because they’re a heavy user, and SNP will charge them with intent to sell,” Fischer said. “That’s a very common case for us to have to go to trial with. SNP believes if you have more than 20 bucks worth, that means you’re a seller, not a user.” 

Orlins, one of the DA candidates and an 11-year public defender, said that many of her clients charged by the SNP were arrested for low-level drug sales in sting operations.

“Time and time again, I would see clients get targeted by undercover officers who would pretend to be addicts themselves,” Orlins said. “They would show up with fake crusted vomit on their sweatshirts, looking disheveled and haggard, and go up to someone who’s a drug user and say, ‘Hey man, hey man, please help me out, I’m so dope sick.’”  

“Then the team swoops in, grabs my client off the street, and arrests my client for sales of narcotics to an undercover police officer,” Orlins continued. “All of a sudden this person is facing years in state prison because of this. It is cruel, it is inhumane, it is unjust, it doesn’t make our city safer.”

The former SNP prosecutor said the SNP is out of touch with attitudes in New York. “If you take what the current view of narcotics prosecutions is in this city, people don’t think that someone selling drugs on a corner should go away for four and a half to nine years. But those are the cases that [the SNP] is still doing.”

The SNP cites a commitment to treatment programs as an alternative to incarceration as proof that it is not overly punitive. The unit has had an alternative sentencing bureau since 1992.

“When individuals with substance use disorder are arrested on lower level narcotics sales charges, we are strong proponents for treatment alternatives,” Cornell said.

But records show that few defendants end up getting access to treatment programs. In 2019, just 6 percent of defendants’ cases were diverted to treatment, according to an SNP report. In 2018, the figure was 3 percent.

Asked about these figures, Cornell said that “many defendants currently charged with lower level felonies opt for a probationary sentence rather than entering treatment programs in New York City.”

That’s likely because as burdensome and strict as probation in New York is, treatment programs can be even riskier for defendants.

The SNP typically requires a guilty plea to divert people into treatment programs, Fischer said. And defendants can end up with a less severe plea if they opt for probation instead. “It could be that you’d get a misdemeanor and probation rather than a felony and treatment,” she said.

People who are diverted into treatment programs still face the looming threat of aggressive punishment if they fall short of expectations, which may involve tasks such as finding stable housing and employment.

“If your client relapses, if they mess up in any way, the SNP prosecutors immediately ask for sentencing and incarceration,” Fischer said.

Abolish the SNP?

Janos Marton, an attorney who worked as a criminal justice organizer with the ACLU, was the first DA candidate to publicly advocate abolishing the SNP. He made the issue a pillar of his campaign, releasing a policy paper on it in January, but suspended his campaign earlier this week.

“If you ask most New Yorkers how they feel about the war on drugs, it’s at this point something that we are all ready to move on from,” Marton told New York Focus and The Political Report. “But here we have this office that’s unique to New York that is continuing to perpetuate it in the most regressive ways. Their perspective on the war on drugs is very Republican circa 2010.”

Four candidates still in the field—Aboushi, Orlins, Assemblymember Dan Quart, and former New York Deputy Attorney General Alvin Bragg—told New York Focus and the Political Report that they also support eliminating the SNP.

Bragg added that as DA, he would not actively push to abolish the SNP but instead would focus on ways to “manage the office and improve it” to promote a “public health perspective” on drug issues.

Three candidates—Lucy Lang, Diana Florence, and Liz Crotty, all of whom are former prosecutors—indicated they did not support abolishing the office outright when asked by New York Focus and the Political Report. A fourth, Tali Farhadian Weinstein, said that she is “open to revisiting the question of whether having a separate and interborough office remains the best way to address narcotics cases.”

Lang signaled interest in reforms, saying that “the options aren’t just to shut it down or for things to remain the same” and that she supports “rightsizing it to focus only on high-level trafficking,” while expanding therapy and counseling services and enabling “immediate diversion” of more drug cases to public health programs. 

Crotty, who has staked the positions most skeptical of reforms on a range of issues, defended current practices, saying the SNP “provides a vital function in working on complex narcotics cases, investigating large-scale drug enterprises, and combating drug trafficking.” 

Asked a number of questions about the SNP, Florence replied in an email statement: “The Special Narcotics Prosecutor should prosecute drug cartels, gun running, drug trafficking rings, and doctors who serve as pill mills, and divert defendants struggling with addiction to treatment.”

Replace Bridget Brennan?

Four of the candidates—Bragg, Orlins, Aboushi, and Quart—told New York Focus and the Political Report that they would vote to replace Brennan as head of the SNP, pointing to her history of supporting a tough-on-crime approach and opposing progressive reforms.

During a 2008 hearing on the reforms to the Rockefeller drug laws that passed the following year, Brennan argued against greater leniency in sentencing. “The threat of incarceration is critical to the success of our programs—and it is a critical element in the success of our efforts to keep dealers from taking over buildings, blocks and neighborhoods,” she testified, according to Newsday’s reporting.

Crime rates in New York City, already falling when the reforms were signed, have continued to fall nearly unabated since.

Brennan has also spoken out against other progressive criminal justice reform efforts in New York including safe injection sites, marijuana legalization, and 2019’s bail reform.  

“Her thinking just hasn’t evolved since she took office in 1998,” said Trujillo, the New York City public defenders union president. 

Bragg argued that Brennan views substance use as an issue of crime rather than public health. “If [the SNP] still exists, prioritizing getting someone in who shares my vision is something I can fully commit to,” Bragg said.

Crotty, by contrast, said that she “knows of no reason to replace Bridget Brennan.”

Lang indicated she had no set position on Brennan. Florence and Weinstein did not address this question when asked over email.

Replacing Brennan would require the support of two of the four other borough DAs, whose offices declined to comment or did not respond to inquiries for this story.

Withdraw attorneys?

The most direct way the Manhattan DA race could affect the SNP office would be its resources: The winner could unilaterally cut its staff by more than half.

As of 2019, 57 of the 72 assistant DAs working in the SNP office—the women and men who prosecute the SNP’s cases—are on the payroll of the Manhattan DA, who could recall them at any time. 

Orlins and Aboushi say they would do so if elected.

“The special narcotics prosecutor is a redundant office that targets communities of color, imposes harsher sentences, and has virtually no accountability. I will not cooperate with it or lend ADAs to that office,” Aboushi told New York Focus and the Political Report.

Orlins said she is in favor of recalling assistant DAs “as quickly as possible,” while noting that “it would be difficult to snap my fingers and make it happen. There has to be some transition period.”

Two other candidates expressed interest in the possibility without committing to it. “I would want to know about ongoing cases before saying I’d zero it out on day one, but to be clear, my priorities lie elsewhere,” Bragg said.

Quart said that he would “consider it” but noted that if the Manhattan DA unilaterally withdrew personnel, other DAs could make up the shortfall. 

Marton doubts that the other borough DAs would make that choice. “I’ve never heard of an agency saying, ‘It looks like you’re short handed over there, why don’t you take a bunch of our guys,’” he said.

Once again, Lang indicated she did not have a set position on the possibility of withdrawing personnel and Florence and Weinstein did not address the question when asked over email.

Crotty said that she “would oppose at this point recalling ADAs from the SNP office.”

If the next Manhattan DA chose to deplete the SNP’s staff, it would curtail drug prosecutions in New York, advocates say.

“It would be a crucial step toward Manhattan and NYC treating substance use as a public health issue,” Trujillo said, “instead of a vehicle to put Black and brown people in cages.”

Correction: An earlier version of a graphic image in this story inverted the positions of Lucy Lang and Tali Farhadian Weinstein regarding the elimination of the SNP.

The post The Election That Could Thwart New York City’s War On Drugs appeared first on Bolts.