All North Carolina counties are electing their sheriff this year, and most DA offices are also up for grabs across the state. 

Durham County DA Satana Deberry, a progressive seeking a second term, easily won and will be unopposed in November’s general election. Besides pursuing reforms at home, including limiting the use of cash bail and clearing thousands of outstanding court fines and fees, Deberry has represented progressive prosecutors on the national stage. 

“Stop pretending reform is the real threat to public safety,” she testified in front of Congress in March. 

Deberry was responding to GOP critics of reform prosecutors, but that was also the message of her campaign against two primary opponents who criticized her for being lax and pointed to violent crime in the county to make the case for change. (Violent crime declined in Durham in 2021, though homicides rose.) One of Deberry’s two opponents endorsed the other in late April in an effort to consolidate the vote, but Deberry received nearly 80 percent of the primary vote on Tuesday.

But elsewhere in the state, challengers who made similar cases for criminal justice reform lost handily against incumbent DAs in two other Democratic primaries. 

In Mecklenburg County (Charlotte), DA Spencer Merriweather easily defeated defense attorney Tim Emry, who was active in a group that sought to lower incarceration during the pandemic. Emry ran on sentencing reform, vowing to never use “habitual offender” statutes, which drive up prison terms. “I don’t care who you are or what you’ve done, no one should do 10 years for stealing your television,” he told Bolts in April.

Merriweather won with roughly 70 percent of the vote, and he too is unopposed in November.

In Wake County (Raleigh), DA Lorrin Freeman prevailed by a tighter margin against challenger Damon Chetson; the campaign was marked by her decision to attack him for his work as a defense attorney. (Freeman will face Republican Jeff Dobson in the fall.)

In the campaign’s final stretch, Chetson focused his efforts on a pledge to never prosecute abortion. If the U.S. Supreme Court overturns Roe vs. Wade, as a leaked draft opinion in early May signaled it would, it would be up to DAs to decide whether to bring charges in states that have banned abortion. Freeman declined to specify how she would act if put in this position when asked by the publication Indy Week, unlike many other prosecutors nationwide—and unlike Deberry in neighboring Durham. In a May 3 statement, Deberry pledged not to prosecute abortion, saying, “Criminalizing personal health care decisions around abortion creates untenable choices for women—particularly those experiencing sexual assault and domestic violence—and undermines trust and fairness in our criminal legal system.”

North Carolina does not have a “trigger” law that would immediately criminalize abotion if Roe were to fall like other states do, though many restrictions are in place; the GOP-run legislature would likely pass anti-abortion bills that would be blocked by the Democratic governor’s veto pen, but an open governor’s race looms in 2024 that could upend the status quo.

The incoming DA of Orange County—the third county that makes up North Carolina’s Triangle alongside Durham and Wake—is on Deberry’s side of the issue.

“We cannot stand for this assault on women and private reproductive healthcare decisions,” Jeff Nieman, an assistant DA who easily won the Democratic primary to replace the retiring incumbent, tweeted earlier this month. “Which is why, if elected, I have committed to join more than 60 prosecutors nationwide in this pledge not to prosecute women who obtain abortions nor the health care professionals who perform or assist in these procedures.”

The state’s closest DA primary was in Buncombe County (Asheville), in the western part of the state. As of publication, and with all precincts reporting, Democratic DA Todd Williams was clinging to a lead of just 200 votes against public defender Courtney Booth, who ran on staunchly decarceral platform and criticized the incumbent for betraying his promise of reform. A third candidate, a former prosecutor who took the different tack of faulting Williams for dismissing too many cases, was close behind.

The status quo prevailed beyond DA elections in North Carolina.

Conservatives failed in an unusual primary challenge against Donna Stroud, the Republican chief judge of the North Carolina Court of Appeals, the state’s second highest court. They blamed her for not being partisan enough when it came to hiring a new court clerk, and for not ensuring that the job went to a Republican. Even a supreme court justice joined in the right-wing effort to oust her. Still, conservatives have a golden opportunity to entrench their power this fall as they aim to flip the state supreme court to the GOP.

Democratic sheriffs first elected in 2018, during an historic wave for Black candidates in the state, also prevailed today in some of the state’s most populous counties, with one notable exception.

Buncombe County Sheriff Quentin Miller crushed a challenger who ran as part of the “constitutional sheriff” movement, a far-right theory that claims sheriffs have supreme authority. Mecklenburg County Sheriff Garry McFadden prevailed after a rocky tenure marked by his decision to terminate the county’s contracts with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and by criticism over jail conditions. Durham County Sheriff Clarence Birkhead, who ended his own department’s policy of cooperating with ICE, defeated one of his 2018 rivals.

The major exception in this night of incumbent victories is the sheriff’s race in Wake County. Democratic incumbent Gerald Baker, who drew criticism from reform advocates for slow-walking changes after the Black Lives Matter protests of 2020, is headed to a primary runoff against challenger Willie Rowe. 

A powerful Republican is waiting on the sidelines: Donnie Harrison, the former Wake County sheriff who lost to Baker in 2018, easily prevailed in tonight’s GOP primary. 

Over his long tenure, Harrison cooperated closely with ICE and partnered with the federal agency’s 287(g) program, which authorizes local law enforcement to act like federal immigration agents within the local jail; Baker quit the program as soon as he came into office, and Rowe has said unequivocally that he would not reinstate the program. (The only Democrat who ran on reinstating the program came in last in the crowded field.) Harrison, by contrast, says he still supports the program and he faults his succesor for releases of undocumented immigrants. 

Whomever wins the Democratic runoff, Tuesday’s results ensure that 287(g) will once again be a major fault line in the general election—and that, come November, Wake County will have one of the nation’s most important electoral showdowns on local immigration policy.

The post Status Quo Prevails in North Carolina’s Criminal Justice Elections appeared first on Bolts.

Speeding or other traffic tickets can quickly spiral out of control for people in North Carolina, not just because of the ticket cost or court fees that follow, but also the added punishment that can impair their livelihood: When people cannot pay off traffic debts, North Carolina automatically suspends their driver’s licenses.

These suspensions can rapidly escalate. People may lose their ability to travel to their jobs, which compounds their inability to pay the underlying fines and fees. Because their livelihoods depend on it, people often continue to drive, risking arrest and prosecution for driving with a suspended license, and potentially jail and new fines and fees. A 2019 analysis from Legal Aid Justice Center, a legal advocacy nonprofit, found that about 1.2 million North Carolinians—about 15 percent of the state’s driving-age population, and disproportionately Black drivers—had suspended licenses for failing to pay court costs or for failing to appear in court, which is the other major driver of license suspensions. A recent survey from Duke University found that 28.5 percent of people in this situation faced eviction as a result. 

While running for district attorney in 2018 in Durham, where nearly one in five residents have had their licenses revoked or suspended at some point, Satana Deberry denounced the fines and fees that make low-level cases into “debt traps that people cannot escape.” After her election, she made it a priority to confront these exploding court costs. Over her first term, she has partnered with the Durham Expunction and Restoration program, or DEAR, to use her broad authority to clear thousands of suspended licenses. This has helped thousands of Durham residents regain their right to drive and earn a livelihood.

Deberry is running for re-election in Tuesday’s Democratic primary, up against a challenger who says her office has been too lax in some cases. The primary has centered on violent crime, yet Deberry will also be judged on how she has dealt with entrenched poverty driven by the court system.

But Deberry’s approach to suspended licenses can also not contend with the rapid rate at which people are stripped of their licenses in the state. The state has adopted multiple laws over the past 15 years that have made it more likely North Carolinians will be hit with fines and fees they cannot pay. The DA’s office, some advocates stress, is not the optimal place to run after the issue. With other avenues for reform seemingly blocked, though, alternatives are hard to come by.

North Carolina joined many other states during the Great Recession in amping up its use of fines and court fees as revenue generators. Democratic and Republican politicians agreed during that period to increase regressive court costs and fees for driver’s license restoration; these moves hiked the costs of the court system by tens of millions of dollars. The fees were often justified as necessary to upkeep courts, but as of 2018, the vast majority of court fees went to the state’s general fund and other state agencies.

If nationwide trends are an indicator, this approach is hardly profitable: a 2019 Brennan Center report found that fines and fees are an inefficient source of government revenue. Despite this, North Carolina’s legislatures doubled down with laws meant to ensure reliance on fines and fees. 

On paper, judges can waive these costs whenever defendants can’t afford them thanks to a 1983 U.S. Supreme Court decision. But a North Carolina law passed in 2011 requires that the court system publish the names of judges who waive fines and fees along with the total dollar amount. That list is still regularly published as of March 7. 

“One of the biggest complaints that we get from the judges is: my name is going to end up on that list,” says Laura Holland, an attorney with the North Carolina Justice Center who has represented clients with traffic debt. She says judges told her that, if they waive fees, “it’s going to look like I’m waiving debt, and my county needs funds.”

Daniel Bowes, director of policy and advocacy of ACLU of North Carolina, said the 2011 law “had a clear chilling effect” on judges. “Judges have broad discretion,” Bowes said. “It’s just that they’ve been pushed politically not to waive the fees.” 

Bowes also points to a 2017 law that requires judges who wish to waive a defendant’s fees to first send a letter to every city agency losing out on revenue so they can weigh in. The North Carolina Administrative Office of the Courts decided to issue a monthly notice to all impacted agencies, towns or other entities, offering their lawyers to sit in on criminal court cases if they want. The notice also asked agencies to check a box if they object to court costs being waived, and the court regularly publishes a table of these responses.

Roger Echols, Durham’s DA between 2014 and 2019, piloted DEAR’s driver’s license clinic to provide pro bono legal assistance for people looking to clear the underlying fines and fees that led to their driver’s license suspensions. DEAR attorneys help people ask the court to clear unpaid debt, with the DA’s blessing. But this approach put the responsibility on residents to know their rights and initiate the waiver process, meaning people with suspended licenses were driving to the clinic or arranging for someone else to do so, often during work hours. 

After defeating Echols and entering office in 2019, Deberry worked with DEAR to expand a program offering mass remittances that began during her predecessor’s final weeks in office. 

Deberry relied on a North Carolina statute that allows prosecutors to petition the state directly, rather than wait for license holders to request it, shifting the burden onto the state. Deberry’s mass remittances covered license suspensions for non-payment of court fees or failure to appear that were at least two years old, absolving court debt from as far back as 1987. With DEAR’s help, Deberry’s office made hundreds of requests for remittance every week.

“I wanted to provide as broad relief as possible without people having to hire lawyers, without people having to get caught up in the paperwork,” Deberry told Bolts. “That is the whole reason that the fines and fees got to the point that they were, because people weren’t able to follow all of these steps.”

Thanks to these petitions, more than 11,000 people in Durham regained their right to a driver’s license and $2.7 million worth of debt was remitted, according to Deberry’s office. Deberry’s office stopped the mass remittance program in late 2020 when they had worked their way through pre-2018 suspensions, but four years worth of new suspensions have since piled up. Will Crozier, a Duke University professor who has studied driver’s license suspensions in North Carolina, credits the work that DEAR has accomplished, but suspects, “it’s not curing old licenses nearly as fast as they’re getting imposed.”

Data obtained by Bolts show thousands of suspensions for failure to pay court debt and failing to appear in court have been issued in Durham since 2018. 

Deberry’s office also says gathering records for a new round of mass relief is time and resource-intensive, and that they now refer people with suspensions to DEAR for help. Deberry has also said she’s open to more mass debt relief actions in the future, something advocates argue will be necessary after a pandemic.

Deberry has also adopted new policies to try to prevent license suspensions in the first place. The office drops some fines, when it determines that a ticketed person can not afford it. Sarah Willets, who handles communication for the Durham DA’s office, says prosecutors consider a person’s ability to pay and “if they can be held accountable without incurring those costs.” In these cases, Willets says, the DA’s traffic team dismisses some cases or agrees to a dismissal in exchange for taking a safe driving course or writing an essay.

Holland says Deberry’s overall approach has changed the culture of Durham County when it comes to fines and fees, affecting decisions from judges as well. “They’re actually more often than not inquiring about someone’s ability to pay,” she says of county judges. “It just kind of shifted the day to day operations of the courthouse.”

“We’ve been actively working to make the courts consider a person’s ability to pay before imposing fines and fees, particularly on indigent defendants in court,” Deberry confirms. 

Deberry’s office also said it dismisses charges when police arrest someone for driving on a suspended license, but only under the condition that they get their license restored. The office did not respond to a follow-up when asked if they considered dismissing all charges where the license suspension resulted from non-payment; some reform-minded prosecutors have adopted such a declination policy.

Moreover, in relying on prosecutorial discretion, Deberry’s proactive approach is vulnerable to the political winds, which could soon change. 

Deberry is now focused on Tuesday’s primary against attorney Jonathan Wilson II. Another opponent, Daniel Meier, suspended his campaign and endorsed Wilson on April 28, writing that Deberry was “unwilling to accept any responsibility” for violent crime and that he would rather work to elect Wilson than divide the vote of those critical of Deberry’s tenure.

Wilson did not respond to requests for comment from Bolts on his views on fines and fees. He has said elsewhere he would “reduce violent crime and restore the swift administration of justice” by relying more on pre-trial detention for people charged with violent crimes. 

Data released earlier this year by the city of Durham (which makes up the vast majority of the county) showed that violent crime declined there in 2021, but homicides jumped significantly. Other jurisdictions in North Carolina and around the country have seen similar trends, and Deberry points out that the rise in homicides has happened in places with tough-on-crime prosecutors as well as reform-minded ones. 

Advocates fighting to end predatory fines and fees are asking for bolder solutions that can only happen at the state level. 

A program like Deberry’s only goes so far if state agencies do not cooperate or waive fees. Lifting a suspension does not mean people can legally drive; each person still needs to reapply for their license and pay a mandatory reinstatement fee with the DMV, which can’t be forgiven. There is no data available on how many people had their licenses fully restored, which requires a wait that can stretch on for months.

“We’re kind of putting the burden on the district attorneys and the clerks to take care of this, and it results in something that’s really piecemeal,” says B. Leigh Wicclair, a staff attorney at the North Carolina Pro Bono Research Center. “There’s some things that should just be sort of uniform policies across the state,” she says. 

Wicclair also says a disparity in resources between counties makes it unrealistic to set up a program like DEAR everywhere.

Yet there is little momentum around the most obvious path for change: statewide legislation that would end the practice of suspending driver’s licenses. Many states have adopted such laws in recent years, including neighboring Virginia. But similar bills to end automatic suspensions for non-payment, to allow restoration fees to be waived and make it easier to pay off court costs have not passed in North Carolina.

DEAR’s work would also be less necessary if judges waived more court costs to begin with, an uphill climb due to the laws adopted over the past decade and the legislature’s current composition. Shirley Randleman, a former state senator who played a leading role in orchestrating the laws that targeted what judges can do, left politics for several years but is now mounting a comeback. 

Deberry says the biggest help to addressing the issue would be legislative reform. “I think the answer to that is change in the General Assembly, where fines and fees are not exorbitant,” Deberry says. For now, though, she says much of the responsibility still lies with prosecutors. 

Holland says future change will depend on how the issue is framed. “This is not about scoffing the law and people not paying because they didn’t want to pay,” she says. “This is about not punishing poor people.”

The post North Carolina Drivers Still Face “Debt Traps” Despite Some Local Reforms appeared first on Bolts.

A new paper by Brandon Garrett and William Crozier of the Duke University School of Law finds that more than 1.2 million North Carolinians have lost their licenses for “non-driving related reasons” such as not paying fees and fines. Their paper also documents racial disparities in these revocations. “Poverty functions differently for whites than it does for blacks,” they write. This finding is in line with studies that show that fines and fees—and their myriad outsize consequences—are disproportionately imposed on African Americans.

Losing one’s license can trigger further economic hardships and mounting legal if not carceral problems, most notably for people who keep on driving after losing their license since they would otherwise be unable to go to work or simply move about.

This is true everywhere, and all the more so in areas with poor public transit. In North Carolina, the latter is aggravated by significant legislative cuts to transit funding, and by the behavior of wealthy actors like Duke University, which just sank a light rail project that was long in the works.

To regain their license, North Carolinians must pay fees in addition to the original debt, which may itself stem from poverty-related violations such as a lapsed registration. But payments are harder to make when mobility is impaired and alternatives lacking. “Many, many, many jobs in America are inaccessible to people who don’t drive,” Angie Schmitt, who writes on transportation policy for Streetsblog USA, told me via email. License revocations “can trap otherwise willing workers in a cycle of dependency and repeated incarceration.”

One North Carolinian who asked to be relieved from fees he could not afford wrote in his lawsuit that the loss of his license meant that he would “have to forgo the truck driving training school, and job placement,” or else “illegally drive and risk violating his supervised release and going back to prison.” A judge dismissed the case in March. Another case still stands, however. Johnson v. Jessup, a class-action lawsuit, went to trial in March and is now in the hands of U.S. District Judge Thomas Schroeder.

Durham is taking action this year through its Second Chance Driving Project, an initiative supported by the Durham Expunction and Restoration Program (DEAR), local officials, and organizations such as the North Carolina Justice Center.

Sarah Willets’s feature in Indy Week details the program’s “unprecedented scale.” Durham County District Attorney Satana Deberry has cleared tens of thousands of traffic cases this year, and she has separately asked courts to clear thousands of fines and fees that are more than two years old. Parts of this initiative were launched under Deberry’s predecessor, Roger Echols. The program will result in thousands of county residents regaining their eligibility to have a license, though informing them of this is yet another challenge.

This initiative utilizes reform avenues that state law already grants to counties, and Willets writes that DEAR hopes its initiative will function as a model for other jurisdictions.

States can also altogether end the practice of revoking licenses due to nonpayment of fines and fees. Mississippi’s Department of Public Safety announced such a reform in 2017, and Maine’s legislature followed suit last year. In Illinois and Montana, bills that would restrict the practice have each advanced one legislative chamber. Willets found no active effort to do this in North Carolina as of March.

Even in the absence of legislation, initiatives to expand public transit—when done with an eye toward equity goals—can assist the housing, employment, and legal outlook of people whose ability to drive has been restricted.

They can also help all people move across their region. Poor transportation, whether it stems from difficulties in acquiring a car or accessing transit, harms the reentry of many people involved in the criminal legal system, independently of whether they are eligible to have a driver’s license. This prospect showcases the pernicious nature of ideas like a New York proposal to ban people from using the subway for life if they have been convicted of certain offenses.

“We need to be providing better transit options everywhere,” Schmitt said, even as she emphasized this could not replace reform to stop license suspensions for non-driving related reasons. “And Durham is a great example of a place with poor transit options.”

Durham seemed on its way to improving this aspect of the problem as well with its light rail project. Local officials, in conjunction with those of neighboring Orange County, had agreed to increase county funding after the state budget was cut, and they talked about linking people to jobs and housing; advocates were demanding additional access to affordable housing and jobs as part of this development. But Duke’s announcement cut these conversations short and fatally wounded the project. Residents held protests against Duke this week.

Such failures to expand public transit, as well as failures to design projects in ways that improve equality, are missed opportunities to help disentangle people from the criminal legal system’s cycle of penalties.

“I think access to transit and affordable transportation is critical to combat poverty and the collateral consequences of being justice involved,” Wendy Jacobs, who leads the Durham County Board of Commissioners and who last month called Duke’s decision “devastating,” told me via email. “Transportation means freedom, freedom to access opportunities … If you do not have this, then you are severely limited to what [you] have access to in life whether it is jobs, education, healthcare, healthy food, etc.”

“We will need to find a new path toward equitable access to housing, jobs and transportation because these urgent needs remain,” Jacobs added, referencing light rail’s demise.

The post How Public Transit, State Reform, and DA Practices Can Counter Driver’s License Suspensions appeared first on Bolts.