Local DAs like Willis have become a key GOP target this year, as Republicans go after prosecutors who they think are standing in the way of their political or policy ambitions. New laws in Georgia and Texas give courts and state officials more authority to discipline DAs. Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, who is challenging Trump for the GOP’s presidential nomination, has over the last 18 months removed two Democratic prosecutors from office, angry over their policies like not prosecuting abortion. 

The presidential election is also pulling sheriffs into its orbit. Far-right sheriffs have allied with election deniers, using local law enforcement to amplify Trump’s lies about 2020, ramp up investigations, and even threaten election officials. One such sheriff, Pinal County’s Mark Lamb, is now running for the U.S. Senate in Arizona, leaving his office open. Over in Texas, Tarrant County (Fort Worth) Sheriff Bill Waybourn inspired a new task force that will be policing how people vote while he runs for reelection next year.

With roughly 2,200 prosecutors and sheriffs on the 2024 ballot, voters will weigh in on county offices throughout the nation next year, settling confrontations over the shape of local criminal legal systems while also choosing the president and Congress.

Bolts today is launching its coverage with our annual overview of which counties will hold such races and when: Find our full list here.

Which Counties Elect Their Prosecutors and Sheriffs in 2024?

Learn whether your county is hosting a prosecutor or sheriff race next year.

These offices often get overshadowed since the criminal legal system is so decentralized, but that’s also what makes these offices so powerful: DAs exert a great deal of discretion within their jurisdiction, choosing what cases to prosecute and how harshly, as do the sheriffs who run their county jails like fiefdoms. 

Most of the counties choosing their prosecutors and sheriffs in 2024 last elected these officials in 2020, a tumultuous year defined by the summer’s Black Lives Matter protests and amplified attention to racial injustice.

Many candidates broke the traditional mold of law-and-order campaigning that year, making the case instead that punitive practices haven’t delivered on safety even as they’ve ballooned prisons. Reform-minded prosecutors were elected or reelected in the counties that contain Los Angeles, Chicago, Austin, Tucson, and Ann Arbor, among others; voters also elected some new sheriffs who interrupted immigration detention. But progressives fell short in high-profile races in the contain Houston, Detroit, Fort Worth, and Phoenix.

Those offices are all back on the ballot in 2024. Criminal justice reformers are defending more incumbents than ever but also hope to gain some new ground where they’ve faltered in the last cycle, with the future prospect of policies that would ramp incarceration up or down on the line.

To kick off our coverage of criminal justice in 2024’s local elections, here is an early guide to storylines to watch.

1. The reform-minded prosecutors seeking second terms

Los Angeles County’s size (ten million residents) and the tensions around George Gascón’s reelection bid are enough to make LA the marquee DA race of 2024. After Gascón ousted his tough-on-crime predecessor in 2020, he faced an internal revolt from staff prosecutors unwilling to implement his reforms and survived several efforts by his critics to force a recall. (One of the loudest champions for recalling Gascón, Sheriff Alex Villanueva, was ousted by voters in 2022.)

Gascón, who has dubbed himself the “godfather of progressive prosecutors,” now faces a very crowded field to secure a second term. While he’s also faced criticism from the left for not delivering on some of his promises, his opponents are largely running to his right, promising to roll back his sentencing reforms.

Other first-term progressive incumbents are also up for reelection. They include former labor organizer José Garza in Texas’ Travis County (Austin), Eli Savit in Michigan’s Washtenaw County (Ann Arbor), Deborah Gonzalez in Georgia’s Clarke County (Athens), and Laura Conover, who went from protesting the death penalty as a youth activist to promising to never seek it as the chief prosecutor of Pima County (Tucson).

Police groups have taken note and are already involved in these races. In Austin, police groups have tried to drum up complaints against Garza, who used his first term to prosecute police officers accused of violence, breaking with usual norms of impunity in a way that has made him a target for the national right. Last week, though, Garza dismissed the felony assault charges he had brought against 17 officers for their actions against protesters in 2020. 

Other new prosecutors who’ve clashed with police include Mike Schmidt in Oregon’s Multnomah County (Portland), whose challenger Nathan Vasquez has a closer relationship with the police, and Mimi Rocah in New York’s Westchester County. Rocah, who won her DA race in the wake of a major police scandal, vacated convictions that were tied to the testimony of a disgraced police officer. She won’t seek reelection next year, sparking an open race.

2. Clashing visions of public safety 

Cook County State’s Attorney Kim Foxx is retiring in 2024, eight years after ousting Chicago’s chief prosecutor and starting to implement some reforms. So far, the Democrats running to replace her are walking a line between promising to keep Foxx’s changes and vowing to work more closely with law enforcement; a GOP candidate, meanwhile, has denounced Foxx for turning the office into a “social service agency instead of the prosecuting arm of the people.” 

However hyperbolic, that statement underscores the clashing visions of public safety in many of these prosecutorial races. Reform-minded candidates often make the case for strengthening a broader array of public services as an answer to crime, while their critics want to keep the focus on the more conventional tools of policing and incarceration. 

In Ohio’s Hamilton County (Cincinnati), for instance, Republican incumbent Melissa Powers hopes to prevail in a county that’s trending leftward by stroking fears about the effects of a Democratic takeover. She recently said her loss would turn Hamilton County into “a Baltimore, a Saint Louis,” naming two of the nation’s big cities with the highest share of Black residents. To prevail in November, Powers would need to perform strongly in the county’s populous suburban areas, which are far whiter than its urban core of Cincinnati.

But many of next year’s most intriguing elections will be decided within the Democratic Party. Incumbents with a record of fighting local criminal justice reforms, and who beat back progressive challengers in 2020 or 2022, may choose to seek new terms in 2024.

These incumbents include: San Francisco DA Brooke Jenkins, who has embraced harsher policies and dropped police prosecutions since replacing Chesa Boudin, a progressive who was recalled in 2022; Harris County (Houston) DA Kim Ogg, a fierce critic of local bail reforms whose clashes with reform-minded Democrats have escalated this year; Cuyahoga County (Cleveland) Prosecutor Michael O’Malley, known for the frequency with which he seeks death sentences; Wayne County (Detroit) Prosecutor Kym Worthy, who has defended punitive practices toward minors; and Albany County DA David Soares, who is a leading voice among New Yorkers demanding more rollbacks to the state’s recent bail reforms. 

Some of these races will be slow to take shape since the filing deadlines are still months away. But in Houston and Cleveland, the primaries are already around the corner. On March 5, Ogg faces Sean Teare, a former prosecutor in her office whose platform is more muted than some of Ogg’s prior opponents but who has support from some of her progressive critics. On March 19, O’Malley faces law professor and former public defender Matthew Ahn, who has pledged to never seek the death penalty and decrease pretrial detention. 

Bolts will keep an eye on these and many more races next year, with prosecutor elections still taking shape all around the nation, from Bernalillo County (Albuquerque) and Maricopa County (Phoenix) to Milwaukee and Honolulu.

3. Can criminal justice reformers even run for local prosecutor in certain red states?

When DeSantis suspended Tampa prosecutor Andrew Warren over policy disagreements in 2022, Bolts writer Piper French pondered how to take future Florida elections seriously in light of that abrupt move. “What does it even mean to run for office when the governor’s political whims could turn a win into a loss?” she asked. Since then, Warren’s DeSantis-appointed replacement has rolled back some of his reforms, and DeSantis has since fired a second prosecutor, Monique Worrell, in Orlando. (Worell is still contesting her ouster in state court.)

Nearly all Floridians will vote on their prosecutor in 2024. That means that in Hillsborough (Tampa) and Orange (Orlando) counties, residents will get to weigh in for the first time since DeSantis summarily dismissed the officials they’d elected in their last local elections. 

But the atmosphere created by DeSantis will make it tricky for there to be real policy choice in those elections. In Tampa, Orlando, and everywhere else in the state, candidates will know that their win may be overturned by the governor if they run on a vision that differs from his.

A similar dynamic exists, to a lesser extent, in Georgia, where the GOP adopted a new law that makes it a removable offense for local DAs to propose certain policies that progressives have prized, as well as in Texas, where some DAs are facing similar efforts to oust them. Conservative critics of Garza, Austin’s DA, filed a complaint seeking to remove him from office this month over his approach to prosecuting lower-level offenses.

4. Who will speak up against gruesome jail conditions?

Aggravated by routinely poor health care, jail deaths are a crisis all over the country—including in states such as Georgia, Michigan, Texas, and West Virginia that will be electing all of their sheriffs in 2024. 

Sheriff Bill Waybourn, for instance, has overseen a startling string of deaths in Tarrant County, Texas, though that didn’t stop the Republican incumbent from narrowly securing reelection in 2020. 

Patrick Moses, one of Waybourn’s two Democratic challengers next year, promised to step up investigations into jail deaths when he launched his bid last week. “I view the 60 in-custody deaths at the Tarrant County Jail since 2018 as 60 individual reasons to run for office,” he says on his new website. 

Other counties with sheriff races are under investigation by the U.S. Department of Justice for conditions in their local jails, including Fulton County (Atlanta) and parts of South Carolina. 

Fulton County Sheriff Pat Labat, a Democrat, is facing heavy fire and calls for his resignation due the many people who’ve died under his custody in Atlanta and due to his flailing response. Asked by Atlanta News First last week if Labat should step down, the chair of the county board pointed to the upcoming elections: “In the final analysis, it’ll be up to the voters come 2024.”

5. The rise of the far-right sheriffs

After Kansas’ most populous county, Johnson County, voted for Joe Biden by eight percentage points in 2020, Republican Sheriff Calvin Hayden went on a crusade claiming that elections are marred by widespread fraud and ramping up investigations, echoing Trumpian conspiracies.

Hayden is just one of the many sheriffs who have linked up with election deniers and other far-right organizations, using the power of the badge to push their agenda. And now he’s already facing an opponent in what’s likely to be a tough reelection bid next year. 

Many sheriffs with similar politics represent far redder territory, though recent examples show they may still lose against fellow Republicans or independents. The GOP primary to replace Mark Lamb in conservative Pinal County will be especially noteworthy if it yields a new sheriff who won’t see his role as propping up so-called constitutional sheriffs all around the nation. 

6. Immigrants’ rights will define more sheriff elections

Several Southern counties in 2020 interrupted their history of anti-immigration policies. In Charleston County, South Carolina, and Cobb and Gwinnett counties, Georgia, voters elected Democratic sheriffs who terminated their counties’ so-called 287(g) contracts—agreements with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) that authorizes sheriff’s deputies to arrest and detain people they suspect to be undocumented immigrants.

These sheriffs are all up for reelection in 2024, all in counties that may be competitive in a general election.

It may be hard for immigrants’ rights activists to break up more of these contracts through the polling booth in 2024, though. Per Bolts’ analysis, there are almost 90 counties presently in the 287(g) program that hold sheriff’s races, but they’re mostly in staunchly conservative areas. The exceptions are largely in Florida, due to a recent law signed by DeSantis that mandates that sheriffs join 287(g) whatever their own preferences. Outside of Florida, only one Biden-carried county has a 287(g) contract and is voting for sheriff in 2024: Bill Waybourn’s Tarrant County. 

But collaboration with ICE extends far beyond 287(g). Many sheriffs rent out jail space to ICE, or seek out federal grants to police immigrants. And come 2024, sheriff races in Arizona—a border state with a long history of anti-immigrant practices—may be the central battleground for those debates, especially with yet another unpredictable election taking shape in Maricopa County. 

Home to Joe Arpaio, one of the nation’s most visible far-right politicians, Maricopa County in 2016 saw Democrat Paul Penzone oust Arpaio and end some of the county’s most aggressive practices against immigrants. But Penzone also severely disappointed immigrants’ rights activists by maintaining close ties with ICE and keeping federal agents in his local jails.

Penzone announced this fall that he’ll resign in January, making the race unpredictable at this stage. In early 2024, the county board will need to replace him with a new Democrat, who’d then decide whether to seek reelection; already in the running is Penzone’s 2020 Republican rival, Jerry Sheridan, a former Arpaio deputy. In this county of 4.4 million, the race may present an opportunity for local immigrants’ rights activists to gain a stronger ally, though it also opens the door for one of the nation’s largest law enforcement agencies to swing back to the far right. 

7. The many other elections that will matter greatly for criminal justice policy 

Sheriffs and prosecutors are just slices of the vast institutional edifice that runs the nation’s criminal legal systems. In 2024, big cities such as Baltimore and San Francisco will elect their mayor—an office that often, though not always, exerts direct control over the police department.

Ten states will elect their attorneys general, a role with broad authority over law enforcement. At least 33 will elect supreme court justices, who’ll shape local policy and individual criminal cases. 

And all of these races are bound to be overshadowed by a presidential campaign likely to pit President Biden against his predecessor. Trump is again playing up a strongman image, proposing the death penalty over drug sales and outlining a vast deportation infrastructure for which the collaboration of local sheriffs could prove critical. 

The post The Thousands of Local Elections That Will Shape Criminal Justice Policy in 2024 appeared first on Bolts.

Rachel Mitchell, the prosecutor famed for her role in Brett Kavanaugh’s Supreme Court confirmation hearings, may soon be prosecuting abortions. Four years after questioning Christine Blasey Ford on behalf of Senate Republicans, Mitchell is now the chief prosecutor for the nation’s fourth most populous county—and Kavanaugh could soon hand her the power to criminalize reproductive rights.

According to a leaked opinion, the U.S. Supreme Court’s conservative majority is poised to overturn Roe v. Wade in the coming weeks. Arizona is one of many states with a “trigger” law that would criminalize abortion if Roe falls. As interim Maricopa County attorney, Mitchell is in charge of prosecutions in a county that is home to Phoenix and 4.5 million residents, putting her on the front lines of enforcement. She has said she will bring criminal charges under the state’s anti-abortion statutes if the Court greenlights them.

But a special election later this year may cut Mitchell’s tenure short and shift the local policies on abortion in a county that is home to the majority of Arizona’s population. 

Julie Gunnigle, the only Democrat running in this prosecutor’s race, has promised not to prosecute abortion cases if she is elected in November. “As Maricopa County attorney I will never prosecute a patient, a provider, or a family for choosing to have an abortion or any other reproductive decision,” she told The Appeal and Bolts. “Not now, not ever.”

This is a stance Gunnigle also took in the 2020 race for Maricopa County attorney, which she very narrowly lost to Republican incumbent Allister Adel. But Adel resigned earlier this year, amid a series of scandals, and the county government appointed Mitchell to replace her. Adel’s resignation has triggered the special election to fill the remaining two years of her term. To get to the general election, Mitchell must first win an August primary against Gina Godbehere, who shares Mitchell’s views on abortion.

Arizona has passed plenty of anti-abortion laws in recent years. Earlier this year, the state adopted a ban on abortions after 15 weeks that is similar to a Mississippi law currently under review by the U.S. Supreme Court. Even if the Court does not overturn Roe v. Wade, it may still affirm the Mississippi law—a somewhat narrower step reportedly favored by Chief Justice John Roberts that would still amount to a drastic new restriction on access to abortion in Arizona.

Such a decision would open the door to Mitchell and other Arizona prosecutors bringing cases against abortion providers. Arizona’s 15-week ban, which goes into effect in September, states that any doctor who performs an abortion after 15 weeks can be prosecuted for committing a Class 6 felony and can have their medical license suspended or revoked. People who obtain abortions would not be prosecuted under this law, which makes no exceptions for rape or incest. 

In 2020, physicians in Arizona performed 636 abortions after 15 weeks, according to a report from the state’s Department of Health Services. 

If Roe falls entirely, a complicated patchwork of laws and court rulings will take effect. For one, the state has a full abortion ban on the books that dates back to 1864 and could trigger into effect if Roe is overturned. That one-sentence law stipulates that anyone who provides an abortion can be sentenced to two to five years in prison (except in cases of medical emergencies). 

However, there is some uncertainty over how promptly that ban would apply if the court overturns Roe v. Wade. 

“While Arizona has pre-Roe criminal laws on its books, they are currently enjoined and therefore would not immediately take effect if Roe v. Wade is overturned,” Brittany Fonteno, president and CEO of Planned Parenthood of Arizona, told The Appeal and Bolts via email. “A court would have to issue an order lifting the injunction on these laws.”

Perhaps most aggressively, Arizona adopted a sweeping anti-abortion law in 2021 that, among other clauses, established so-called “fetal personhood.” That provision grants “an unborn child at every stage of development all rights, privileges, and immunities available to other persons, citizens, and residents” of Arizona. If Roe falls, abortion-rights organizitations have warned that “fetal personhood” clauses could give prosecutors the ability to charge abortions as anything from civil-rights violations to homicides, given that a fetus at any stage of development in Arizona is now legally considered a “person.”

Arizona Republicans, who control the legislature and governor’s office, may also take new steps to further criminalize abortion. 

“If Roe is overturned, we expect that anti-abortion politicians will continue working to make abortion inaccessible in Arizona,” Fonteno said.

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The impending U.S. Supreme Court decision has significantly raised the stakes in the race for top prosecutor in Arizona’s most populous county.

“Having these people elected and holding this much power over perpetuating harm to our communities is really scary,” said Eloisa Lopez, executive director of the Abortion Fund of Arizona. 

She stressed, for instance, that many people who seek abortion care are already parents. “We are looking at a future of criminalizing parents, putting them in prison, stripping them away from their existing families, and those people will probably be funneled into child protective services.” 

Lopez added that it would make a difference if county attorneys instructed their staff to hold off on prosecuting abortion. “These prosecutors are one of those few lines of defense against the criminalization of pregnancy outcomes,” she said.

In Arizona’s second largest county, Pima County Attorney Laura Conover has already drawn such a line in the sand. She tweeted earlier this month that her office will “do everything in our power to ensure that no person seeking or assisting in an abortion will spend a night in jail.”

Another Arizona prosecutor, Coconino County Attorney Bill Ring, told The Appeal and Bolts that he thinks the state’s 15-week ban is too “vague and illusory” to be enforceable, though he only said he was “unlikely” to actively prosecute under it.

Two of Arizona’s nine abortion clinics are in Pima County. One is in Coconino. The other six are in Maricopa. 

Mitchell, Maricopa’s new prosecutor, has worked in the county attorney’s office for almost 30 years. A self-proclaimed “pro-life” conservative who supports the death penalty, Mitchell is known nationally for her role in Kavanaugh’s 2018 confirmation hearing, when Republican lawmakers tapped her to question both Kavanaugh and Ford on their behalf. Many former prosecutors admonished Mitchell for getting involved in a partisan political process and making misleading and disingenuous statements after the hearing.

Asked whether she would prosecute people who provide or obtain abortions if the Supreme Court allows it, Mitchell confirmed to The Appeal and Bolts that she would, reiterating a stance she has taken elsewhere. 

“As County Attorney, I follow the law,” she said in a written statement. She added that she may use her discretion to not prosecute cases that involve incest. “I’ve sat across from a young girl who became pregnant through incest,” she said. “I will not treat victims as criminals, and I will ensure that cases prosecuted by my office meet the charging standard of a likelihood of conviction at trial.”

The only other Republican in the race, Godbehere, did not respond to a request for comment. But Godbehere, who has also spent the better part of her career working for the Maricopa County Attorney’s Office and is running with the endorsement of several police unions, has largely echoed Mitchell’s views on the issue.  

Speaking on a local radio show last month, Godbehere said that Gunnigle’s stance on abortion prosecutions should disqualify her from the office and that prosecutors cannot “disregard a whole category of offenses because you believe that your opinion is better than the legislature’s or the voters’ of our community.” Mitchell mirrored that language in her statement to The Appeal and Bolts. “Anyone who refuses to uphold the law based on their personal beliefs is unfit to hold office and a danger to democracy,” she said.

Gunnigle contends that Mitchell and Godbehere are denying the discretion that they already exercise as prosecutors. “It’s clear that my opponents don’t understand the role that they’re applying for,” Gunnigle said. “Every single day the role of the county attorney is to go in and decide which cases to prosecute.” She added, “I find statements like that to be incredibly disingenuous, particularly when the office right now only charges about half of the cases, and the county attorney right now is picking which cases to prosecute.”

Defenders of Gunnigle’s take on prosecutorial discretion point out that there are crimes that even conservative prosecutors choose not to prosecute. Eli Savit, a prosecutor in Michigan, recently told Bolts that adultery is still a criminal offense in his state, but “not a single prosecutor is spending any time and any resources prosecuting people for cheating on their spouses.” Adultery is also a criminal offense in Arizona.

Complicating matters further in Arizona is that the state’s attorney general may try to override county attorneys who choose not to prosecute abortion. Some states, like Michigan, allow the attorney general to prosecute criminal cases. 

Arizona law outlines several specific criminal offenses attorney generals may prosecute. Abortion is not one of them. But it is possible that an attorney general could use a creative interpretation that stretches the meaning of other criminal offenses, as prosecutors are wont to do, in order to go after abortion providers. 

“I think there’s definitely the possibility of a legal showdown and asking the court to interpret what this really means,” Gunnigle said about the attorney general’s role. “I will fight tooth and nail to make sure the integrity of this office isn’t sacrificed and doesn’t become beholden to the attorney general’s office.”

Arizona voters will elect a new attorney general this year, and abortion access has already emerged as a major fault line in that race. Kris Mayes, the sole Democratic candidate, has said she would encourage state courts to block new anti-abortion rules, and she has ruled out prosecuting abortion cases if elected. 

But several of the Republican candidates have expressed elation at the thought of Roe being overturned, and some, like Rodney Glassman, have said they will “vigorously” defend anti-abortion laws as attorney general. Another Republican candidate, former prosecutor Abraham Hamadeh, called abortion “murder” and said he is running for attorney general to “stand up for the most vulnerable.” All six Republican candidates in the race are anti-abortion.

Regardless of who’s in office, a ruling against abortion by the U.S. Supreme Court in the coming weeks, coupled with the state’s laws, would create rapid legal and criminal liabilities for people across Arizona.

“These bans won’t stop abortion,” said Lopez, of the Abortion Fund of Arizona. “They will just make it dangerous and unsafe for people. We’re going to see maternal mortality increase, infant mortality increase. There will be more abuse of children. Pregnant people will be criminalized. There will be more family separation. There will be many long-term harms in our community.”

The post Abortion Prosecutions May Hang in the Balance in Maricopa County Election appeared first on Bolts.

In April, as Arizona advocates warned that prisons would become an incubator for the COVID-19 pandemic and demanded that public officials reduce the state’s incarcerated population during the crisis, Maricopa County Attorney Allister Adel wrote an opinion article stating that activists are “exploiting a public health emergency to forward a political agenda.” 

In the following months, the novel coronavirus spread in Arizona’s crowded prisons and jails, infecting hundreds of prisoners and staffers. This spread was fueled not just by state officials’ reluctance to decarcerate once the pandemic’s risks were known, but also by decades of “tough on crime” policies that have made Arizona’s incarceration rate one of the nation’s highest.

That carceral legacy, and the prospects of the “agenda” Adel denounced in April, are now at stake in November’s general election. Adel, a Republican, was appointed to the county attorney position last October when her predecessor resigned to take a seat on the state Supreme Court. She will face Democratic challenger Julie Gunnigle, a former prosecutor who is running on a pledge to lower Maricopa County’s incarceration rate by 25 percent.

Such a reduction could transform the criminal legal system in the county, which is home to Phoenix and nearly 4.5 million residents. The top prosecutor can set policies that influence what crimes are prosecuted and how, what charges prosecutors bring, what sort of sentences prosecutors seek, and who to keep in jail before trial.

Advocates who have scrutinized Gunnigle’s track record as a former Cook County, Illinois, prosecutor have called into question whether she would follow through on that promise, as The Appeal reported in August. Still, she has outlined policies that would mark a significant departure from Maricopa County’s decades under the leadership of Republican county attorneys who favored punitive policies and harsh sentences.

Since taking office in 2019, Adel has largely maintained the office’s status quo and pursued severe sentences. The Appeal reported last week, for instance, that her office is seeking to sentence a 61-year-old man, Brian Stepter, to eight years in prison for failing to return a rental car on time. 

But public opinion about the criminal legal system is shifting in Arizona, and so has the state’s political landscape. A 2019 poll commissioned by FWD.us showed voters strongly support measures like allowing imprisoned people to earn time off their sentences. Those measures have stalled in the state legislature, in part due to the opposition of past Maricopa County prosecutors. The county has long been a Republican stronghold, but it has shifted away from the GOP and it is one of the most hotly contested jurisdictions in the year’s presidential election.

“The stakes are incredibly high,” said Analise Ortiz, campaign strategist for the American Civil Liberties Union of Arizona’s Smart Justice campaign. “The Maricopa County Attorney’s Office is the third-largest prosecuting agency in the nation. It cannot be understated the sheer impact this office has on mass incarceration in Arizona. And because criminal justice advocates have had such trouble passing reform at the state legislature, the county attorney’s office is where the most change can happen.”

Besides deciding their next prosecutor, county voters will also settle a sheriff’s race that features former Sheriff Joe Arpaio’s longtime lieutenant.

—

For years, the Maricopa County Attorney’s office has been led by prosecutors who have deployed harsh charging and sentencing policies. Charge stacking, or bringing multiple charges related to a single offense, has been commonplace. So has the use of “Hanna priors,” a practice unique to Arizona in which prosecutors are allowed to charge people as “repeat offenders” if their indictment includes multiple charges, even if they have never been convicted of anything in the past. Former County Attorney Andrew Thomas, who was in office from 2005 until 2010, also implemented a policy, known as “plead to the lead,” which required people to plead guilty to the most severe charges against them in order to accept a plea deal. 

Adel’s predecessor, Bill Montgomery, who led the office for almost a decade after Thomas’s departure, was also a staunch opponent of statewide reform proposals. He used his bully pulpit to sink legislative efforts to reduce sentences and implemented punitive policies as a prosecutor. He faces a federal civil rights lawsuit for allegedly turning the county’s marijuana diversion program into a money-making scheme that exploited poor people.

Though Adel has stated that she is “different from [her] predecessor,” her charging and sentencing decisions have often belied that claim. The eight years in prison that Stepter faces are over five felony charges, fitting the office’s pattern of overcharging. Adel has also pursued DUI charges—more than four years after the crime occurred—against a veteran who had since turned her life around. And in her past as a prosecutor in the vehicular crimes unit, Adel sent a young man to prison for 51 years for causing a car accident that injured four people. In June, she told The Appeal she stands by that sentence. 

Lorna Romero, a spokesperson for Adel’s campaign, told The Appeal: Political Report in an email that Adel has continued to use charge stacking and Hannah priors. She said that “prosecutorial discretion is key.” Romero said that Adel has ended her predecessors’ plead to the lead” policy, though stressing that the requirement may still be used on a case-by-case basis. In December, Adel said she was evaluating the policy; this is the first time her office has said it is no longer in place. 

Gunnigle has pointed to numerous policy changes she would pursue in Maricopa County to reduce incarceration. Her most striking proposal is to stop filing criminal charges on a range of low-level offenses. In July, she told The Appeal: Political Report that she would altogether decline to prosecute sex work, as well as crimes linked to poverty and homelessness such as trespasing and shoplifting. She has also said she would decline to prosecute cases involving personal possession of marijuana. (Adel’s spokesperson did not indicate categories of offenses the incumbent will decline to prosecute, but said that Adel favors a “treatment first” approach.)

Gunnigle has also promised to end the use of cash bail to the extent permitted by state law, and to lobby for legislative changes, like ending mandatory minimums.

Gunnigle told the Political Report that she would roll back the harsh charging rules that have been used by the county attorney’s office. She said she would stop prosecutors from charge stacking and using “Hannah priors.” She also opposes the “plead to the lead” policy.  

Gunnigle has faced criticism for her involvement in the heavy-handed prosecution of a woman who spent 18 months in jail on computer tampering charges, but she has maintained that the charges were warranted. She also said the case taught her that prosecutors need more options for dealing with mental health issues in the criminal justice system. 

“This election is a referendum on leadership,” Gunnigle said in an interview on “The Briefing,” The Appeal’s daily livestream show. “For the last 40 years, we have seen what a county attorney office that has been led by individuals who put themselves first instead of people they serve, what that looks like. Now more than ever, we need criminal justice reform, and we need it now.” 

—

In the months leading up to the general election, Adel herself has announced a number of changes at the county attorney’s office, though critics have dismissed her efforts as insufficient.

“The critics are upset that she is a principled and effective leader who is actually getting things done,” Adel’s campaign spokesperson said in an email to the Political Report.

In August, Adel implemented a new policy allowing anyone who was arrested for simple marijuana possession to avoid prosecution if they obtain a medical marijuana card. Critics have pointed out that the policy only helps those who can afford a card, while poor people continue to face prosecution. 

Also over the summer, Adel published a dashboard with prosecution data on the county attorney’s website, stating that she did so to “support my vision for a more transparent process.” But, according to the ACLU of Arizona, who had sued the county attorney’s office to release the data, Adel fought to withhold the information and released it only after the ACLU won the lawsuit. And the data shared on the website is unclear, as it lumps all drug crimes into one category, which, the ACLU claims, obscures the fact that the office prosecutes simple drug possession more than any other crime.

In recent years, reform advocates in Arizona made a strong push for the state legislature to change sentencing statutes so that these sorts of reforms are not up to individual prosecutors, but Adel’s predecessor was instrumental in derailing those changes. Adel has not committed to supporting specific reforms, including proposed changes to Arizona’s “truth in sentencing” law, which requires imprisoned people to serve at least 85 percent of their sentences before they can be released. 

Statewide debates may already shift next year because a progressive candidate, Laura Conover, is set to become prosecutor in Pima County, the state’s second most populous jurisdiction. Conover, who won a contested Democratic primary in August and is now uncontested, ran on championing reforms at the legislature, unlike that county’s retiring incumbent.

Adel’s office also recently supported an enhanced sentencing statute that allowed prosecutors to seek harsher sentences for gang members. Earlier this month, the state Supreme Court unanimously found the statute unconstitutional and ruled that sentences against gang members who threaten people cannot be enhanced unless there is a connection between the crime and the defendant’s gang membership.

And Adel recently came under fire for making a dismissive joke about transgender people, and has since apologized.

Whether Adel remains in office or Gunnigle takes over, criminal justice reform advocates like those at the ACLU of Arizona are vowing to monitor what goes on at the county attorney’s office.

“Accountability is crucial, regardless of who is in these positions,” Ortiz said, explaining that it would be crucial to ensure that reforms apply across the board. “We will be looking at individual cases. … We are going to be doing a lot of data analysis. We also plan to have a court-watching presence. We want to make sure prosecutors don’t ask for cash bail, and charges aren’t being stacked.”

The post How One Election Might Strike a Blow to Mass Incarceration in Arizona appeared first on Bolts.

Jerry Sheridan, the Republican nominee for sheriff in Maricopa County (Phoenix), doesn’t seem entirely excited to talk about his old boss.

In a campaign video released last November, Sheridan, noted that, in the 38 years he worked as a Maricopa County sheriff’s deputy, he served “under four sheriffs” before he finally retired “as chief deputy” in 2016. Those are, technically, true statements. Someone without a working knowledge of Phoenix area politics might be forgiven for thinking that Sheridan seems like an experienced cop who knows how to run a big-city police department.

“I know what I’m doing,” Sheridan, a 62-year-old who keeps his white hair in a meticulously groomed military flat-top, states in the video as sepia-toned photos from his long career in law enforcement float across the screen.

But in the clip, Sheridan  doesn’t name the sheriffs he has worked under. Nor does he mention whose chief deputy he was—or why he retired four years ago. Addressing those points would force Sheridan to acknowledge an elephant in the room: For the last six years of his career, he served as the right-hand man to Sheriff Joe Arpaio, the former top cop in Maricopa County who lost his 2016 re-election bid after he was held in criminal contempt of court for refusing to stop racially profiling Black and Latinx Phoenix residents. Sheridan, too, was held in civil contempt of court as part of the same racial-profiling incident; he retired in disgrace amid the scandal.

But Sheridan portrayed himself as a moderate candidate and won his August primary. That was only because he had been running against the 88-year-old Arpaio himself—who managed to avoid jail time for his criminal contempt charges because President Trump pardoned him in August 2017. Arpaio then ran for U.S. Senate, got battered in the primary, and decided to run for his old job overseeing the 3,000 employee sheriff’s department in America’s fourth most populous county. Sheridan beat his former boss by about 6,000 votes last month and will now face incumbent Sheriff Paul Penzone, a Democrat, in November. 

Penzone, a former Phoenix police sergeant who beat Arpaio in 2016, isn’t considered a progressive candidate. He has allowed ICE to continue working with the sheriff’s office, and he received heaps of scorn after his agency arrested Máxima Guerrero, a DACA recipient and immigrant-rights activist, during a Black Lives Matter protest in May. 

But Penzone has at least curtailed some of Arpaio’s worst abuses. He closed the Tent City outdoor jail, which Arpaio himself once called a “concentration camp.” Penzone’s office has also audited and temporarily shut down Arpaio’s armed civilian “posses,” which critics said had been unregulated and rife with abuse. Penzone also stopped dressing incarcerated people in pink underwear and forcing prisoners to work in chain gangs, legacies of the Tent City jail.

Sheridan has promised if elected to bring back Arpaio’s  “posses,” ramp up drug raids, and reopen the Tent City jail that Amnesty International once called inhumane. 

And longtime critics of Arpaio and his associates warn that, since Sheridan isn’t a household name like Arpaio, voters could bring the former sheriff’s ways back to Phoenix this November. 

When asked about the use of Tent City and sheriff’s posses, Sheridan told The Appeal: Political Report via email that, although there is no hard data to prove that either program benefited public safety or public resources, “anecdotal evidence from the inmates and former inmates” show that the jail’s harsh conditions “did make an impact.” An Arizona State University study that Arpaio himself commissioned in 1998 found that Arpaio’s jail policies did not deter crime any better than those of the typical police department.

Sheridan also called sheriff’s posses a “force multiplier” that had existed in Maricopa County for most of the office’s 150-year existence “until Penzone almost single handedly dismantled it.” In fact, Penzone temporarily suspended the posses after an audit  found that more than 50 sheriff’s office guns issued to posse members had gone missing under Arpaio’s watch.

Caroline Isaacs, the Arizona program director for the American Friends Service Committee, a Quaker immigrant rights and anti-mass incarceration activist organization, called the use of Tent City and sheriff’s posses deadly and “vacuous stunts.”

“Anyone who stayed in a department run by Arpaio for that many years and then rose through the ranks to a position of power just underneath a man who has been convicted of abusing the rights of people in the county has absolutely no business in public office,” she told the Political Report.

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For a brief period in 2016, it appeared that Arpaio was finally being held accountable for his practices. That year, federal prosecutors charged him with criminal contempt of court, a misdemeanor that could have sent the self-proclaimed “toughest sheriff” in the country to jail for six months. At that time, Hillary Clinton handily led Donald Trump in presidential polls and seemed all but assured a landslide victory. Some of Arpaio’s critics expressed absolute glee that the county’s former top cop might soon wind up on the opposite side of prison bars.

Of course, none of those things occurred. Trump won and pardoned Arpaio, so he never served a day in prison.

The pardon, however, sparked a Twitter thread from the Phoenix New Times alternative weekly newspaper outlining a list of Arpaio’s misdeeds as sheriff. They included running the Tent City jail in the summer Arizona heat  where prisoners died at a staggering rate; marching Latinx prisoners into a section of jail surrounded by an electric fence; staging an assassination attempt against himself; sending one of his employees to Hawaii to “investigate” President Barack Obama’s birth certificate; failing to investigate scores of sexual abuse claims in Phoenix; overseeing a botched SWAT raid in which deputies set a puppy on fire; teaming up with Steven Seagal and using a tank to arrest  a cockfighting suspect; arresting the then-co-owners of the Phoenix New Times for reporting critically on him; racially profiling Latinx people; and hiring a private investigator to dig up dirt on the judge who initially ordered his office to stop racial profiling. 

While public outrage has rightfully focused on Arpaio, Sheridan and other members of the sheriff’s office command staff were certainly complicit in his wrongdoing. Sheridan has held top administrative jobs under Arpaio since the 1990s, when Arpaio promoted Sheridan to chief of patrol. Sheridan then served as chief of custody over Arpaio’s jail system for 12 years, and finally as chief deputy in 2010. Throughout, Sheridan has marched in lockstep with Arpaio’s anti-immigrant agenda.

Take the contempt of court case: In 2011, a federal judge issued a preliminary injunction in a lawsuit brought by the ACLU, ordering Arpaio’s office to stop immigration sweeps that targeted Latinx drivers on the presumption that they were in the U.S. illegally.  

Separately, the Department of Justice’s Civil Rights Division under Obama in 2009 had opened an investigation into the sheriff’s office’s pattern of racially profiling Latinx drivers. Arpaio refused to cooperate with investigators, and the DOJ ultimately sued the office in 2012. In 2015, a federal judge ruled in the DOJ’s favor, and in July 2015, Arpaio reached a partial settlement with the government, agreeing to establish protocol for his immigration sweeps. The following month, the DOJ also started monitoring Arpaio’s compliance with the ACLU’s suit.

But Arpaio simply decided the law didn’t apply to him. He loudly boasted in the press that he believed his immigration sweeps were legal and that he would continue running them. So in 2016, federal prosecutors charged Arpaio with criminal contempt of court. He was convicted in July 2017 but pardoned a month later.

Sheridan, too, was initially found in civil contempt. A federal judge also recommended he be charged with criminal contempt alongside Arpaio, but the federal government ultimately dropped that case due to the statute of limitations.

Sheridan to this day says he was never made aware of the 2011 preliminary injunction barring his office from conducting immigration raids. But in 2019, outside investigators found that Sheridan had lied when he told a federal court monitor he had no idea that the injunction was issued. Investigators found that Sheridan had been sent emails from Arpaio’s lawyer about the injunction and had sat in on a meeting about it with Arpaio’s aides. The Arizona Republic also ran two front-page stories about the ruling. But Sheridan says he never opened the emails and doesn’t remember reading the articles or attending that meeting at all.

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Sheridan has tried at times to distance himself from his former boss. In an August interview with the local TV outlet Arizona’s Family, Sheridan said that he doesn’t want to be as outlandish as Arpaio was.

“I’m very uncomfortable in front of the camera,” Sheridan told the news outlet. “He loved and lived for the media attention. I’m not a grandstander. He did a lot of things for media attention. I will do things for the betterment of the citizens of Maricopa County, and good law enforcement practices.”

But Sheridan’s concept of “good law enforcement practices” doesn’t veer far from Arpaio’s. When the Arizona Mirror last month asked Sheridan about Arpaio’s contempt of court case, Sheridan stated that the judge in the case “got it wrong” and that the sheriff’s office’s racial profiling “just wasn’t as systemic as the media and ACLU made it out to be.” This then led Arizona Republic columnist E.J. Montini to state outright in an Aug. 31 column that “Jerry Sheridan IS Joe Arpaio.”

In addition to pushing a policy platform nearly identical to Arpaio’s, it seems Sheridan wants to bring much of his former boss’s ostentatious behavior back to the sheriff’s office. In one campaign clip, he filmed himself firing what appears to be a fully automatic machine gun while promising to “protect your right to keep and bear arms.” In another clip, Sheridan denounces “violence and anarchy” in contemporary America’s streets before promising that he’ll “enforce the law” and keep Phoenix-area residents safe.

And, in a move that could have been ripped directly from the Arpaio years, Sheridan at the end of August spoke at a virtual meeting of an Arizona State University student organization that was raising funds to help support Kyle Rittenhouse, the white, 17-year-old Trump supporter charged with killing two Black Lives Matter protesters and nonfatally shooting a third in Kenosha, Wisconsin, last month. Sheridan later told the Arizona Republic that, although he committed to speak before the shooting occurred, he was “neutral” about the group’s efforts to support the accused murderer.

Luke Black, the program manager for AZPoder, the political arm of the Phoenix-based Poder in Action civil rights group, told the Political Report that Sheridan seems to be dangling these policy proposals in order to get support from Arpaio’s far-right base of “white supremacists, Trump supporters, and people who believe folks of color have gone too far during the latest uprising.”

“Tent City was always a symbol Arpaio used to illustrate that he was tough on crime, that he was willing to publicly shame and humble anybody that came through the Maricopa County Sheriff’s Office, but there is no real evidence that Tent City deterred crime or that it deterred DUIs,” Black said. 

Despite rolling back some of Arpaio and Sheridan’s worst policies, Penzone has not been popular with reformers like Black since he took office in 2017.   Last month, activists roundly criticized Penzone for continuing to allow ICE agents to seize people at jail facilities.  And separately last month, the Associated Press reported that Penzone’s office had an 1,800-case Internal Affairs backlog.

“Penzone’s largest disappointment is the betrayal of the Latino community,” Black said. “Latinos all over Maricopa County, undocumented youth, DACA youth—they helped run Penzone’s campaign.” Since 2016, Black said, Penzone has seemingly had “no remorse” in continuing to cooperate with ICE. Black added that activists will need to keep pushing whoever wins the election to make changes.

Penzone has also come under fire for mishandling the COVID-19 crisis. In November 2019, a federal judge scolded Penzone for not fully complying with requirements from the ACLU suit. In June, the ACLU sued Penzone after COVID-19 spiked in his jails. Sheridan, in his email to the Political Report, blasted Penzone for the jail system’s high COVID-19 caseload and five employee deaths related to the disease. “Covid-19 is running rampant in the jails. Quarantine protocols for contagious disease were never properly implemented from the start and still are not,” he wrote. But he also criticized the incumbent for making fewer drug confiscations and DUI arrests that would further crowd the jails .

It seems Penzone’s main calling card is still simply his lack of ties to Joe Arpaio. But although Penzone may have been a disappointment, Isaacs, Arizona’s American Friends Service Committee director, told the Political Report that she worries about the culture Sheridan could bring back to the sheriff’s office.

“These policies—Tent City, posses, further prosecuting and criminalizing drug abuse—do nothing to make us safe,” she said. “They get idiots elected.”

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As the chief prosecutor of the nation’s fourth most-populous county for nearly a decade, Bill Montgomery grew into a chief antagonist of criminal justice reform. He used his bully pulpit to sink legislative efforts to reduce sentences, and he directly implemented punitive policies as a prosecutor, even facing an ongoing federal civil rights lawsuit for his approach to marijuana use. 

Montgomery left the office last year when he was appointed to the state Supreme Court. But his carceral legacy looms over this year’s prosecutor’s race in Maricopa County, which is home to Phoenix and nearly 4.5 million residents.

Three Democratic candidates want to change the county’s harsh approach to charging and sentencing—but they vary in how significantly they want to break with the past. Whoever wins in the Aug. 4 primary will go on to face Montgomery’s Republican successor, Allister Adel, in the Nov. 3 general election.  

“The stakes couldn’t be higher,” said Lola Lévesque, a spokesperson for Mass Liberation Arizona, a group that seeks to end mass incarceration in a state that has one of the highest rates of incarceration in the country. “County attorney is one of the most powerful elected seats in the state. So for us, it really amounts to whether or not we can end mass incarceration. It’s one of the most influential seats to proving whether or not Black lives matter because ultimately, mass incarceration disproportionately impacts Black people.”

Democrats sense an opening to seize the office. The county was long a Republican stronghold, but it has shifted away from the GOP since President Trump’s emergence and is now poised to play an outsize role in deciding the presidential race. Voters there elected Democrats for county recorder and for sheriff in 2016, the first Democrats to win countywide races since 1988, and they helped swing a U.S. Senate seat to Democrats two years later.

The office’s punitive approach is longstanding. From 2005 to 2010, County Attorney Andrew Thomas encouraged prosecutors to seek the harshest possible sentences and implemented a policy, known as “plead to the lead,” that required people to plead guilty to the most severe charges against them in order to accept a plea deal. Thomas was later disbarred over findings that he had brought false charges against political opponents in an attempt to embarrass them.

Montgomery largely kept up Thomas’s policies from his arrival to the office in 2010 through his departure. The Maricopa County Board of Supervisors appointed Adel to fill the position. She is now running for a full term as a Republican and is facing no opponent in the GOP primary.

Though Adel has stated that she is “different from [her] predecessor,” many of her actions since becoming county attorney have belied that statement, from refusing to bring charges against the police officer who killed Antonio Arce, a 14-year-old who was shot in the back while holding a toy gun in January 2019, to filing DUI charges against a woman four years after the crime occurred. In her past as a prosecutor in the vehicular crimes unit, Adel sought to send a young man to prison for 71 years for causing a car accident that injured four people, a sentence she said she still stands by today.

Reducing the prison population

All three Democratic candidates—Julie Gunnigle, a former assistant state attorney in Cook County, Illinois; Will Knight, a former Maricopa County public defender; and Bob McWhirter, a former Maricopa County and federal public defender—have committed to reducing the prison population if elected. 

Gunnigle, Knight, and McWhirter say they would decline to prosecute minor marijuana cases. Although possession of any amount of marijuana in Arizona is a felony, a proposition passed in 1996 prevents people from being sent to prison for their first or second marijuana possession offense. Still, as of May, 126 people are incarcerated in the state for marijuana possession, and many others are diverted to the Treatment Assessment Screening Center—a program that is the subject of a federal civil rights lawsuit and has been called a money-making scheme that extorts the poor by threatening them with felony prosecution.

From there, exactly how the three candidates plan to reduce the flow of people into the prison system diverges. 

Knight and Gunnigle have both set ambitious goals to that end. Knight says he wants to reduce Maricopa County’s contribution to the state prison population by half. Gunnigle said in response to an ACLU candidate questionnaire that she wants to bring the incarceration rate down in line with the national average, which would represent roughly a 25 percent reduction. McWhirter has also said he wants to reduce the prison population, but he did not specify a target percentage. 

These topline differences are reflected in their underlying policies. Knight is the only candidate to say that he would decline to prosecute all personal drug possession cases, not just marijuana. As of May, nearly 3,600 people were incarcerated in Arizona’s prisons for drug possession. Drug possession cases alone account for 8.7 percent of the state’s prison population.

“Our courts are the least healthy way to treat people struggling with addiction, a medical issue,” Knight told The Appeal: Political Report via email, promising to help create non-criminal options that treat people instead of stigmatizing and othering them.

Gunnigle has also said she would decline to prosecute some categories of cases, though she did not include drug possession, preferring to steer them to diversion programs. She and Knight said they would not charge cases that are symptomatic of poverty, and they have mentioned some cases of trespassing and shoplifting as examples. Both also said they would decriminalize sex work.

McWhirter did not respond when the Political Report asked if he would decline to prosecute anything other than marijuana possession.

Even when it comes to cases they would prosecute, Gunnigle and Knight have committed to ending some of the office’s harshest charging and sentencing practices. 

Both candidates promised to end Thomas’s “plead to the lead” policy. Gunnigle told the Political Report that this is “an outdated policy that disproportionately impacts BIPOC and lower-income folks that don’t have the resources for cash bail,” a reference to the pressure people feel to plead when they are jailed pretrial. 

Gunnigle and Knight have both also said they would end the use of so-called Hannah priors, which allow people to be charged as repeat offenders based on multiple charges stemming from the same incident. (For example, if a person sold drugs to an undercover officer multiple times in the span of a week, they could be considered a repeat offender and get a longer sentence.) 

By contrast, McWhirter has only said he would change the “misuse” of Hannah priors. He did not respond when the Political Report asked about his views on the “plead to the lead” policy.

Knight also said he would also seek to reduce the prison population by not bringing up all past offenses when prosecuting cases, which leads to lengthy sentences.

Although the three Democratic candidates expressed a desire to limit the use of money bail, which keeps people incarcerated pretrial if they can’t afford to pay, only Gunnigle and Knight have indicated they support eliminating cash bail altogether. Bail decisions involve the broader court system, but prosecutors play a major role in issuing recommendations. Knight has also said he would create additional legal protections for people who may face “preventive detention” orders instead of financial conditions.

The role of the prosecutor’s office

Under Montgomery, the office’s predilection for harsh sentencing was so pronounced that it blocked reformers’ statewide efforts.

“The deeply entrenched culture of this tough-on-crime mentality has been so damaging over the years,” said Analise Ortiz, campaign strategist for the ACLU of Arizona’s Smart Justice campaign, which issued the county attorney candidate questionnaire. “The biggest change that any candidate could bring into this office is to start seeing it as a means of rehabilitating people, not punishment, and to rid this office of the mentality of vindictiveness that has been there for so long.”

At a January town hall, Gunnigle and McWhirter said they would use their position to lobby at the state legislature for criminal justice reform measures and against laws that would increase mass incarceration. Knight initially embraced a more cautious approach, but he told the Political Report this week that he has changed his view and now sees that he has an “obligation” to use the county attorney position to lobby for criminal justice reform. He stressed he would do so “ethically and transparently.” “So no back room deals, no letter to the governor asking for vetoes after promising to stay out of it,” he said.

Gunnigle, Knight, and McWhirter have said they would use the county attorney position to lobby for the elimination of mandatory minimums, a reform that some lawmakers have been pushing for.

Knight differs from the other candidates in his desire to shrink the prosecutor’s office and direct some of its duties outside the criminal legal system, an echo of the demands of the Black Lives Matter to reduce the scope of the criminal legal system. He has pledged to “reduce MCAO’s budget” and said “we need to stop using our criminal courts to solve our mental health crises, our substance use crises, the opioid epidemic, and our poverty situation.” 

Gunnigle told the Political Report that she would rather focus on shuffling the office’s priorities rather than reducing its size. In stark contrast with his opponents and with the goals of many reformers, McWhirter has said he would seek additional funding for the office, and during a town hall in early May he cautioned against pushing decarceral goals too far. “Let’s not forget what the job [of the county attorney] is,” he said.

“I think one of the big things we need to look at is the difference and the fine line between someone who says they are reform-minded but are actually not working to shrink the power of the office,” said Ortiz. “Whoever becomes county attorney needs to divest from the criminal legal system. … Crimes of poverty don’t need to enter the criminal legal system in the first place.”

The death penalty

When Montgomery ran the office, he sought the death penalty so frequently that the county ran out of specialized attorneys to defend people facing death sentences.

Of the three candidates, only Knight has promised not to seek the death penalty. In his questionnaire, McWhirter said although he personally opposes the death penalty and would advocate for its repeal in the legislature, it’s “the law and the Maricopa County Attorney is, unfortunately, bound.” Gunnigle said she does not support abolishing the death penalty because there may be “a need for public safety in the use for the rare most egregious and heinous of crimes.” 

Knight, on the other hand, called the death penalty “an irrevocable sanction, and there are few things more fundamentally un-American than executing an innocent person” and pointed out that, across the country, at least 165 people who have been sentenced to death since 1973 were later exonerated. He later promised not to seek the death penalty if elected, calling it “racist,” “colossally expensive,” and a “disservice to victims.” 

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