Gascón and Price’s backgrounds are starkly different—he’s a former beat cop who left his job as San Francisco DA to run in LA; she’s a longtime civil rights attorney—but both came into office vowing to use the power of the DA to redress the harms, abuses, and disparities of mass incarceration. Both issued ambitious policy proclamations that involved keeping young people out of the adult criminal system, ending the use of the death penalty, holding police accountable for wrongdoing, and tamping down on harsh sentencing. And both became the target of intense and sustained opposition campaigns from virtually the day they stepped into office. Reform DAs “are being watched so closely, not only by their constituents, but by people all around the country with big pulpits,” Mona Sahaf, the director of the Vera Institute’s Reshaping Prosecution Initiative, told me back in January. 

In 2020 and 2022, Gascón and Price represented a new chapter in counties where decades of top prosecutors embracing harsh sentencing had led to extensive racial disparities without making residents feel particularly safe. Gascón’s election was fueled by the George Floyd uprising that summer; Black Lives Matter’s LA chapter had protested every week outside his predecessor Jackie Lacey’s office. Describing the sentiment that led to Price’s win two years later, Ella Baker Center political director Jose Bernal said, “We want community members to thrive. We want to feel safe walking on the street. And in order to do that, we need to address the root causes of these social problems.” 

Voters embraced the vision that both candidates laid out—a vision of racial justice, restorative justice, second chances, and accountability for police who abuse their power. But this time around, many of those same residents have rejected the two prosecutors.

“We all have a lot to learn here around how to get past the policy-politics divide,” Sahaf told me when we spoke again on Wednesday. “There’s no evidence that the reforms that Gascón and Pam Price and other reform candidates promote don’t work,” she said, but “what’s very real is people feeling that they are not safe, people feeling that they’re not being heard, people not understanding how these solutions are going to actually make their lives better. That’s where we have a lot of work to do.”

The election results have left reformers asking where the progressive prosecutor movement goes from here. Sahaf cautioned against interpreting the losses as a referendum on the movement’s viability. “I do see wins outside of California for the same exact policies that Gascón and Price put forth,” she said. In Orlando, for instance, Democratic prosecutor Monique Worrell won her job back after Governor Ron DeSantis removed her and installed a Federalist Society member instead. In Austin, reform DA José Garza beat back tough-on-crime challengers in the March primaries and again on Tuesday to hold onto his seat. 

“I think this is about a much larger bucket of frustration that people have with government that they feel is not providing for them,” Sahaf said. But, she added, “it is also that larger frustration that opens up this environment where justice reform is an easy target.” 

The repudiation of Price and Gascón was part of a broader shift in California politics. This week, residents also voted down a ballot measure that would have outlawed forced work in prisons and passed another to increase penalties for certain drug and theft crimes, functionally repealing a landmark 2014 sentencing reform that helped reduce severe prison overcrowding. 

This didn’t happen in a vacuum: Since 2020, right-wing politicians, corporations, and police associations have waged a coordinated backlash campaign that has successfully capitalized on people’s fear and anguish during a devastating pandemic. And Democratic leaders in the state and across the nation have responded by shrugging off the mantle of prison and police reform, ramping up the criminalization of homelessness, endorsing tougher penalties for retail theft, and even in some cases directly undermining local Democratic officials elected on a reform platform. In 2020, reform DAs were held up as a solution—perhaps an unrealistically quick fix for decades of mass incarceration. In 2024, they were left holding the bag.

“It was really left on the backs of the people, of grassroots organizers, to push for Gascón,” Black Lives Matter LA co-founder Melina Abdullah told me. “The Democratic Party should have been pushing for Gascón.” 

In the intervening years, the fountain of money that fueled progressive wins back in 2020 has slowed to a trickle: Democratic megadonor George Soros spent nearly $2.5 million on Gascón’s initial election, only to avoid the race entirely this time around. Meanwhile, both candidates’ campaign promises to prosecute abusive and violent cops spurred police groups into action: All 14 law enforcement associations in Alameda County endorsed the Price recall, and at least eight donated to support it. In LA, local and statewide sheriff, police, and prison guard associations gave over $2 million to support Hochman, Gascón’s challenger. Both DAs were opposed by the deputy prosecutors in their office, sparking embarrassing lawsuits and bolstering a narrative of internal turmoil. 

And with the successful ouster of reform DA Chesa Boudin in San Francisco in 2022, recalls were ratified as a viable playbook for monied interests seeking to unseat democratically elected candidates whose policies they opposed as quickly as possible. Gascón, for his part, survived two recall attempts before his defeat at the polls. In Price’s case, a petition urging her recall circulated as soon as a month after she took office, and an official recall committee was organized within seven months. The campaign ultimately raised more than $3 million, receiving hefty donations and loans from the same donor who spent big to recall Boudin. 

“When you’re doing recalls, you gotta have some money somewhere,” Brenda Grisham, the public face of the Price recall movement, told me. “Somebody’s got to pay for those signatures.” 

Price and Gascón were widely seen as flawed leaders who made strategic missteps while in office. They both struggled to rise to the challenge of transforming calcified bureaucracies staffed with people who broadly opposed the sort of change they heralded. Gascón disappointed many by backing away from nearly all of his blanket policies to varying degrees, and by failing to more vigorously prosecute police officers responsible for a number of high-profile shootings that outraged Angelenos. Alex Trantham, secretary for the LA public defenders’ union that endorsed Gascón in 2020 but withheld its endorsement this year, told me that the DA was “definitely an improvement from under Jackie Lacey, but he still, as many elected officials can, changed his policies based on public perception of what was going on with certain cases.” 

Price didn’t have much time to disillusion her supporters. “She had it tough going in…I don’t think she got a lot of support,” Bernal said. From the start, the DA contended with community anger over youth crime and demands for harsher punishment, which clashed with her platform for juvenile justice, which prioritized rehabilitation and keeping young people in the youth system rather than transferring them to adult criminal court. 

But Bernal also noted that the high staff turnover that characterized the office under Price gave the appearance of dysfunction: “It’s not a good look, that many transitions while in office.” He added that Price would have benefited from doing more and better community outreach. Both DAs failed to effectively communicate their accomplishments to the broader public, were prickly and at times hostile to media, and could come off as tone-deaf when dealing with crime victims’ families. 

“You gotta have allies—and she doesn’t feel she needs to,” Grisham said of Price when we spoke in May.

The Alameda County Board of Supervisors is now responsible for selecting an interim DA, a task with high stakes considering the appointee will be in office for at least two more years, as much time as Price has spent in office; voters won’t select a DA to serve out the remainder of her six-year term until 2026. (Meanwhile, the president of the Oakland City Council will serve as interim mayor until a special election is held to replace Thao.) Bernal noted that the passage of Proposition 36, which will reduce funding for mental health services in Alameda County, only raises the stakes for the DA appointment. He urged that the board “really look at someone who’s going to continue to really prioritize mental health for our community members, expand mental health courts and pretrial diversion.” 

Grisham, who pushed for the recall, said she hopes the next DA will eschew blanket policies for young people who commit crimes and be more open to working with victims’ families.

In LA, Hochman has vowed to overturn all of Gascón’s blanket policies, including what has been the least controversial and only blanket policy Gascón has stuck to during his first term: his prohibition on seeking the death penalty. Trantham with the public defenders’ union also worries that a return to widespread use of sentencing enhancements and prior “strikes,” both of which Hochman has vowed to revive, will strain the public defender’s office and coerce defendants into unfair plea deals. “You’re forcing people to plead because they’re so afraid of the total maximum time they could be facing,” she said. 

While Gascón walked back his blanket prohibition on charging young people as adults, the office currently only seeks transfers to the adult system in cases of murder. The public defenders’ union believes that Hochman may begin seeking adult prosecutions of young people for a wider variety of crimes. The DA-elect has pledged to seek a “hard middle” that doubles down on long punishments for repeat offenders but preserves second chances for first-timers, but both Abdullah and Trantham say they’re skeptical. 

“No such thing as a hard middle,” Abdullah told me. “What Hochman threatens for Los Angeles County is a new era of lock ‘em up—and devastating and decimating Black communities especially.” 

After we spoke, Tranthem sent me a follow-up message: “We hope that we are wrong about Hochman and that he proves to us that he sees our clients as human beings who deserve a chance at rehabilitation.” 

“The loss of Gascón and that seat is devastating,” Abdullah said. She still thinks it’s worth focusing on DA offices as an important lever of power, but noted that Gascón’s election, and the policy vision he outlined, was always a response to community demands. “An electoral strategy is an important strategy, but it’s also only one strategy,” she said. “November 5th was for voting…I think the answer for November 6th is to organize. To keep the movement going, to redouble our efforts.”

The post Voters Dismiss Two of California’s Leading Progressive Prosecutors appeared first on Bolts.

Last July, in the hillside neighborhood of Montclair, California, Alameda County District Attorney Pamela Price faced a church overflowing with people, many of whom blamed her for the crime in their neighborhoods, and said: “I am the person who is not supposed to be here.”

Price was talking about her childhood. She described how she was arrested as a teenager, how she spent time in foster care, and how the criminal legal system might have been her future if things had gone slightly different. 

Price—battling a recall attempt that kicked off just months after she took office as Oakland’s first Black female DA—had shown up to the town hall that night to defend her vision for the office, which included an unwavering refusal to over-criminalize young people. She ran on a 10-point plan to reform criminal justice. And since taking office, she has instituted policies to keep 16- and 17-year olds in the youth justice system instead of transferring them to adult prisons, and reevaluated how the county treats young adults between the ages of 18 and 25. These issues, Price said, were what had inspired her to run for DA in the first place. She told the crowd, “When I looked at our racial disparities for our young people in Alameda County, I could not look away.” 

Price was making this appeal in enemy territory. Montclair, whose location abutting a freeway may have made it a target for theft, had not voted for her. Neither had the rest of the Oakland Hills, where handsome Craftsman homes and tree-lined streets perch high above the much poorer city with which they share a chief prosecutor. And so after the DA spoke about racial disparities in youth justice—87 percent of children in the county’s juvenile system are Black or Latino—and emphasized her belief in redemption for young people, a member of the neighborhood association that hosted the event took the mic and asked about “one of the elephants in the room”: a series of recent robberies allegedly committed by teenagers. Rumors had been going around that Price’s office had let the young people go without so much as a charge. 

The issue of youth crime has become a flashpoint in Oakland politics. Local news stories of retail theft, robberies, and a small number of serious crimes have captured public attention. People grimace over the news that more than half of Oakland’s students are chronically absent from school, double the national average. This spring, The Berkeley Scanner, a local paper that has been relentlessly critical of Price, broke the news that the DA had decided to keep in the juvenile system a young man who was 17 when he opened fire at a birthday party, killing teenage brothers Angel and Jazy Soleto. This outraged members of the Soleto family, who later held a press conference supporting the recall.

Citizens at the town hall—and especially those backing the recall effort—are looking to the DA to use her prosecutorial powers to halt what they see as a crime wave. “It has gotten out of hand,” one attendee told local news outside the event. Violent crime was up in Oakland in 2023, sparking talks of a “crime surge,” though homicide numbers were lower than in 2022; overall crime is now down 33 percent this year, with reduced rates of homicide, assault, and burglary. Only robbery numbers are up. Still, residents are frustrated at the feeling that nothing is being done to stop young people who commit crimes from developing into violent and unaccountable older people.

Price, meanwhile, wants people to see how the system’s traditional response often forges broken adults as well. With her invocation of her younger self, the DA was asking the town hall attendees to consider an alternative path for young people who have committed crimes. Given the right guidance and resources, she argues, someone they see as a threat now could grow up to become someone like her. In these differing visions lie the fundamental problem: How should the state meaningfully intervene in a young person’s life? What is the line between doing nothing and sending a kid to prison? 

At one point, Price made a request to the audience in Montclair. She asked people to volunteer with the organizations and advocates who work with young people—plenty of whom went through the criminal legal system as teenagers themselves. 

These youth justice workers are Price’s partners in trying to enact a system that prioritizes care over criminalization. For the most part, they argue that the inflamed rhetoric around youth violence bears little resemblance to the teenagers and young adults they see in their daily work. “It feels like young people are being scapegoated,” Dieudonné Brou, the youth advocacy and program coordinator for the nonprofit Urban Peace Movement, told me. 

“We’re hearing things like this is as bad as we’ve ever seen it—without any mention of the pandemic,” and how it affected young people’s mental health and development, said Vamsey Palagummi, the managing director of Communities United for Restorative Youth Justice (CURYJ). Palagummi spent time in juvenile hall and on probation as a teen and now works on a number of county initiatives that focus on juvenile justice. The recall, he said, “has absolutely consumed our work daily, whether we’re in the commission spaces, whether we’re on the streets talking to folks.”

As recall proponents argue that the county’s approach toward youth crime has become too lenient, people who work on juvenile justice point to a complex mix of issues—legislative changes, resource allocation, trauma and mental health needs—that shape the system long before the district attorney comes into play. Ultimately, Price’s position, influential as it is, represents just one point in this matrix of courts and probation and youth services and school. 

“We also have to work in collaboration with many other actors who are able to intervene in many other points in this complex arena,” Cynthia Chandler, the Alameda County DA’s senior assistant policy chief, told me. “The DA can only intervene in a very small subset of harm.” And by definition, by the time the office is poised to intervene, that harm is almost always already done. 

Palagummi said he appreciates that the DA’s office seems to be considering how to “provide the support that this young person needs, thinking outside of the box, working more with community members,” but he added, “quite frankly, it’s not too different and drastic from the previous administration.” The problem, advocates argue, is not that the system has changed too much or too swiftly—it’s that it hasn’t changed enough.

In theory at least, the juvenile justice system is predicated on the notion, backed by extensive scientific evidence, that young people are both less culpable for their actions and more capable of change than older adults. In this sense, it’s arguably the most compelling place to make the case for criminal legal reform, because it’s where the connections between societal and personal adversity—poverty, discrimination, disinvestment, abuse—and crime are the most obvious. 

“I don’t think that punishment is often, if ever, the answer for young folks,” said Celsa Snead, the executive director of Oakland’s The Mentoring Center, whose work on violence prevention puts the organization into contact with adolescents caught up in the criminal legal system. “Rehabilitation, support, recognition, accountability—all those things are important.” 

With youth crime rates broadly declining since the mid-’90s, many states have tried to overhaul their youth justice systems, with varying degrees of success. Hawaii has touted its investments in community-based alternatives to youth incarceration; in 2022, the state announced that it had reached zero girls in juvenile detention. Maine, meanwhile, has attempted to transform its own approach to juvenile justice, but failed to provide and fund the services necessary to do so, leaving the state a “cautionary tale about the path to reform,” as a joint investigation by the Bangor Daily News and The New York Times put it.

In recent years, California has sought to reshape its youth justice system, but its efforts at improvement have had mixed results. For a long time, young people convicted of serious offenses and kept in the juvenile system—in Alameda, about five people a year—would be sent to youth prisons run by the state’s Department of Juvenile Justice, which were rife with abuse, violence, and neglect. But a “realignment” law signed by California Governor Gavin Newsom in 2020 closed down the remaining facilities and put youth custody in the hands of counties—specifically, their probation departments. Now, teenagers from Oakland who would have once been sent to state facilities that could be hundreds of miles from the Bay Area are housed in juvenile detention centers much closer to their communities. 

“While that’s a great thing, because DJJ [facilities] were essentially gladiator schools and really horrible places, and young people now have an opportunity to be closer to home, from my perspective, we’re replicating a lot of the harms that we worked really hard to rally against,” said Palagummi.

Since the realignment law, Palagummi and Brou have both remarked that judges are sending more kids to juvenile hall’s “secure track”—essentially, long-term confinement. They worry that judges are expanding their criteria to determine which young people deserve this comparatively punitive outcome (their observations are borne out by Probation Department data).

At the same time, Palagummi said, not enough investments are being made in the sort of care and support-oriented services that kids need. The problem is not in overall criminal legal funding levels, he said, but in how the money gets allocated: “We firmly believe that there are enough resources as it exists right now to provide robust therapeutic services.” On the realignment commission, he tries to advocate for using state juvenile funding “to focus more on diversion and community based solutions” rather than things like overtime for probation staff, a significant chunk of the current budget. Palagummi also cited a therapist shortage combined with a higher level of need after the pandemic’s total disruption to kids’ school routines and mental health. “We do not have 24/7 clinicians—we don’t even have clinicians that can work regularly on the weekends,” he said.

Groups like Restorative Justice for Oakland Youth (RJOY) now have contracts to send “credible messengers,” formerly incarcerated adults who can act as mentors, into the juvenile detention facilities to work with young people. But these types of offerings are still a small part of the overall system, and they’re up against a daunting level of need. Teiahsha Bankhead, RJOY’s executive director, told me that the org also ends up providing critical post-release services for kids—holding welcome-home circles within 24 hours of release, helping them out with groceries, or calling them a rideshare so they can make it to a new job—without a formal contract. (RJOY is currently in the process of applying for one.) “I get kids who are from juvenile hall calling me, my staff, telling us that they’re hungry,” she said. “I don’t care who’s funding us. We’re going to respond to that.” 

Today, Brou is in his mid-30s, a UCLA graduate who runs a footwear company in addition to his work with Urban Peace Movement. The organization is a member of the Alameda County DA Accountability table, a coalition of local organizations who have pushed Price to, among other things, end the practice of transferring youth to the prison adult system in her first 100 days in office. 

Brou knows intimately the harms that can befall a young person in an adult prison. After first coming into contact with the criminal legal system in middle school, he was arrested again at 18 and entered a California prison about a year later. In total, he was incarcerated for seven years—an eternity for an 18 year old, but far shorter than the average young person transferred into the adult system, who, depending on the severity of their crime, might receive a sentence of multiple decades.

Soon after his arrival at High Desert State Prison, about 250 miles away from home, Brou was stabbed in his sleep during a riot. He remains traumatized by the experience. “When I’m sleeping, my family has to be cautious about the way they wake me up,” he said. 

Brou said that any personal growth that he underwent in prison happened in spite of the environment. “There’s no real rehabilitation taking place in the adult system,” he told me. He also stressed that he had other advantages, like a family that cared for him and supported his efforts to enroll in school upon returning home, that many young people lack. “There’s plenty of other young men, I remember they would go home, and they would be back [in prison] within a week,” he said. “I know I can easily be in those other guys’ situation where they’re going back to a traumatic environment where there’s no real support there for them, and then they’re going to be faced with those same decisions.” 

Price has little sway over many aspects of the youth system, but one power the DA does enjoy is the ability to set charging priorities. In May 2023, Price released juvenile sentencing guidelines prohibiting transfers into the adult system absent “extraordinary circumstances” or a highly vulnerable victim. Chandler says that while the office is reviewing a small number of transfer requests made under Price’s predecessor, no new transfer processes have been initiated during her administration. 

Price’s commitment to this directive has drawn fire from critics, including Brenda Grisham, one of the organizers of the recall effort. “I don’t care if they’re 16, 17—when they use an adult gun to kill somebody, they need to be held accountable more than the juvenile system gives them,” she told me. Grisham’s son was murdered in front of her in 2010, but his killer was never caught. She feels as though Price has not done enough to listen to victims’ families or establish transparency about her office’s charging and conviction rates.

Snead of The Mentoring Center told me she suspects that people tend to conflate keeping a young person in the juvenile system with a lack of consequences for their actions. “The philosophy that says if you’re not charging 16 and 17 year olds with crimes as adults [you’re letting them off easy]… what they’re really saying is that you’re not punishing them,” she said. But she stressed that the youth system has always, at least theoretically, centered rehabilitation over punishment—Price didn’t come up with that paradigm. 

Of course, part of the issue is that some parents who’ve lost children to gun violence may want punishment—faith in personal growth and transformation can be difficult to extend to someone who has taken any possibility of a future away from your own children. Relatives of the Soleto brothers, who were killed at the birthday party, have said they thought the case should qualify as one of the exceptions that Price leaves room for in her youth sentencing policy. Grisham agrees. “Nobody said anything about locking people up and throwing away the key,” she said. “Over the course of 25 years, they could become a better person.” (Twenty-five years is the minimum sentence for first-degree murder within the adult system.)

Still, California law leaves the window for a transfer to adult court quite narrow. Owing to recent reforms passed both by the legislature and directly by voters, only minors who are at least 16 years old are eligible to be tried as adults, and then only if the court finds that the teenager in question is “not amenable to rehabilitation” within the juvenile system. According to data from the Alameda County Probation Department, only five teenagers in the county were recommended for transfer to the adult system between 2016 and 2022, when Price’s predecessor was in office. 

In March 2023, when Price’s office announced that the young man who allegedly killed the Soleto brothers would be kept in the juvenile system, CURYJ defended the decision, noting that the probation department also recommended that he be kept in juvenile court. The group has worked with the defendant since he’s been in custody. “While we’ve seen some young people who may not be tried as adults… it’s not like we’re letting kids free,” Palagummi said. He noted that the juvenile detention population has stayed essentially the same since Price took office. 

Another of Price’s campaign promises centered around establishing “age-appropriate programs” for transitional-age youth accused of a crime—essentially, an attempt to extend the rehabilitative principles of the juvenile system to young adults under 25. “When a child reaches the age of 18, that is not some magical line that they cross where they’re ready for the world,” Price told The Imprint after her campaign. 

These efforts are still preliminary. At various town halls, press conferences, and rallies, Price has touted a pilot program that pairs young men between 18 and 25 charged with firearms possession with a mentor, hoping to intervene in their lives, avoid the life-changing consequences that can attend a criminal record, and stop harm before it happens—a rare case where the DA may have some power. 

The DA’s office told me this program currently has three participants, who are being mentored by the Alameda County Probation Department. Participants who are selected have to choose to go through the program rather than follow the traditional path through the criminal legal system. It’s too soon to draw any real conclusions, according to Chandler. Still, she said, “our team has viewed it as successful in that no one who has been involved in this pilot project has engaged in any kind of recidivist behavior.” She said the office is in talks with the court to expand the program, and is also planning to establish other early-intervention models for young people under 18, though they’re far from being ready to implement anything. 

In the future, participants will be working with Youth Alive, an independent public health organization, through their Pathways program, a 12-month-long intensive case management and life-coaching process. “We’re helping them get those supports they need to live a healthy life, whether that be support in getting back in school, in finding a job so they have income security, making sure they have housing security,” Youth Alive’s executive director, Joseph Griffin, told me. “For many of them, what got them to this point was just a mere matter of survival.”

Youth Alive’s intensive mentoring has proved transformative for some of its past participants. “Today, we have many of them who are in college, who are gainfully employed, who have families, who got back in school and back on track,” Griffin told me. But the pilot program through the DA’s office only has the resources to work with six individuals for now, meaning that the vast majority of 18-to-25 year old Alameda County residents will still be routed through the traditional criminal system. Griffin said he hopes the DA’s office will partner with other organizations and county departments to expand the services available for that age group, including people who might not jibe with the Youth Alive model. “It’s important [for the DA] to really keep eyes open and recognize that addressing violence and addressing the type of healing and support that’s needed isn’t one size fits all,” he said.

During her campaign for DA, Price talked often about restorative justice. “Our goal is to keep people out of the system and to create a pathway that does not involve punitive prosecution,” she told me about a month before her election. But fully integrating restorative justice into the criminal legal system would require a level of transformative change that still feels a long way off, the youth justice advocates I interviewed said—even for young people, who already benefit from a more restorative approach than their adult counterparts. 

Grisham, the recall proponent, said that she hasn’t seen restorative justice as she understands it being employed in the Alameda County criminal legal system. “Restorative justice is the person that committed the crime is supposed to go to the person that they harmed and make amends,” she said. “None of that’s being done… none of the victims I know have talked to the people that killed their kids.” 

Palagummi argues that restorative justice can be practiced even without this type of formalized sit-down, though he said that CURYJ tries to engage with families of victims whenever they can. He praised organizations like RJOY’s work with young people in custody, but noted that “we have yet to see anything formalized as part of the court process” with regards to restorative justice. “We would love to see just more intentionality around that, but it would really take a paradigm shift from all parties, not just the DA’s office,” he added.

The idea of some greater paradigm shift toward restorative justice for youth offenders may have seemed possible, if optimistic, when Price swept into office in November 2022. Now, though, as her November 5 recall election date draws nearer, and voters bay for more punishment, including for young people, it seems positively fanciful. 

One issue may be how the office is explaining its distinct approach to the public. Price’s first goal in the 10-point plan she campaigned on was to “restore public trust in our criminal justice system,” but her administration’s relationship to the press ranges from bewilderingly disorganized to outright antagonistic. As I reported this piece, Price’s office stalled on my requests for an interview with the DA for months, while declining my entreaties to speak with any other member of the office who worked on youth justice until the last possible second.

Price’s sense that she has been subjected to unfair scrutiny and criticism because of her identity and goals for the office is doubtless legitimate. “Reform prosecutors are under a serious microscope,” Mona Sahaf, who runs the Vera Institute’s Reshaping Prosecution Initiative, told me. “There’s very little grace or forgiveness given even though prosecutors all over the country are making mistakes and errors all the time.” And a special level of vitriol has been reserved for Black female DAs who advance a reform agenda. 

The recall against Price, which is majorly funded by one of the biggest donors to the successful effort to oust DA Chesa Boudin just across the bay, was launched before she’d had a chance to prove herself in the job, and Price has received little support from Governor Gavin Newsom, who recently announced he’d be sending National Guard prosecutors to take over narcotics cases from the Alameda DA’s office—an act of preemption that feels more in line with recent moves by hard-right Southern governors like Louisiana’s Jeff Landry and Florida’s Ron DeSantis than the act of a fellow Bay Area Democrat. But Price and her deputies’ unwillingness to communicate clearly about their policies and practices may have left the office more vulnerable to criticism, good and bad faith alike. 

There is no public polling available to give a hint of how Price may fare in November, but the recall committee has raised well over $3 million in their efforts to oust her, including large donations from real estate interests and hedge fund managers. A committee defending the DA has raised less than 10 percent of that. And even if Price holds on to her seat, she will still be attempting to realize her agenda in more or less the same climate as now: up against the disorganization of her own office, a generalized backlash to criminal justice reform, and a voter base with little patience for the time it would take to bring about the change in people’s lives that might reduce crime in the first place. 

“It took us 30 years, with those old policies, to put us in this predicament that we are now,” Brou reflected when we spoke. “It’ll take just as much time for us to get out of those practices of punishment, and really focusing and really investing in rehabilitation, alternatives to incarceration, and healing.” That’s the sort of work that can’t be measured on the same timeline as district attorney elections—or recalls, which happen even quicker.

The post In Oakland, a DA’s Vision for Youth Justice Collides with a Recall Movement Leery of Second Chances appeared first on Bolts.

In 2005, David Soares’ arrival to the Albany County district attorney’s office marked a victory for criminal justice reformers in New York’s capital county. Backed at the time by the progressive Working Families Party, Soares railed against the harsh mandatory minimum sentences imposed by the state’s notorious Rockefeller drug laws, ultimately landing 55 percent of the county’s vote. 

Two decades later, Soares is still in office, but his persona has changed markedly. He has used his pulpit in recent years to attack a trio of criminal justice reforms passed by New York’s Democratic legislature, and to pressure lawmakers sitting in the New York State Capitol, which is just a few minutes from his office by foot, to undo them.

Legislation that reformed the state’s bail and discovery laws, and raised the age at which young people can be prosecuted as adults, “sent the wrong signal to criminals; a green light,” Soares wrote in testimony submitted to a legislative hearing on criminal justice last February. His message in recent years, which has garnered support from tough on crime conservatives, has been consistent, drawing a direct line between these reforms and violent crime in Albany County. 

As president of the state’s influential DA association in 2018 and 2019, Soares became one of the state’s most vocal opponents of these changes. Since their adoption, he has helped lead a steady rhetorical drumbeat against them, undergirding a series of rollbacks that have attracted support from politicians of both parties. 

Next week, in the county’s Democratic primary, Soares faces a challenger with a different perspective on justice reform in New York. While longtime criminal defense attorney Lee Kindlon doesn’t shy away from pointing out high rates of violent crime in Albany County, and says the reforms in Soares’ crosshairs are imperfect, he has also seen their positive impact firsthand and doesn’t blame them for crime in Albany. 

Kindlon says Soares’ opposition to these policy changes is off-base, and a distraction from a larger problem. “I think he assails the system as a way to just have somebody to blame for his own failures,” Kindlon told Bolts. “I mean, I really just think it’s a cynical ploy to rail against these reforms, because he’s out of good ideas.” 

Throughout his campaign, Soares has painted himself as a voice of reason that won’t hesitate to continue his crusade against a legislature that he believes has endangered communities through its embrace of reforms.

“All in all, the implication that you can’t implement the laws, take note of their effect, then critique them, is absurd,” Soares told Bolts in a statement. 

The Albany County Democratic Committee withdrew its endorsement of Soares earlier this year, though it hasn’t endorsed Kindlon. This time, the Working Families Party, the group that was once a Soares ally but has also fiercely championed the state reforms he’s opposed, is backing his challenger.

Kindlon jumped into the race this spring as an alternative to the incumbent, after news broke that Soares had awarded himself a $23,000 bonus using grant funding from the state’s Division of Criminal Justice Services (DCJS). After a flurry of press attention, Soares returned the cash, but defended his choice to take the funds in the first place, arguing that using the grant to give himself and other staff bonuses had been approved by DCJS. 

Kindlon, who previously lost a challenge to Soares in 2012, saw the funding snafu and decided this was his moment to offer Albany an alternative. 

On the campaign trail, he points out the controversial bonuses along with what he says is a staff retention problem in the DA’s office. But Kindlon also differs from Soares in his view of criminal law reforms and the role of a DA in carrying them out.

Local Democratic officials have split their endorsements since Kindlon’s entry into the race. While Soares has the support of law enforcement unions and Democratic County Sheriff Craig Apple, Kindlon has been endorsed by Albany County Executive Daniel McCoy, and by Albany Mayor Kathy Sheehan, who announced she was backing him in May “because we deserve a District Attorney who follows the law, regardless of whether they agree with that law.”

Anita Thayer, a longtime Albany attorney and former secretary of the Working Families Party’s capital district chapter, is similarly concerned about Soares’ positions on reform. “The legislature has done a lot to pass good progressive criminal justice laws, and we need a district attorney that’s going to work to implement the laws and work to get the resources he or she needs to implement the laws,” Thayer said. 

“We don’t need someone that spends that time simply bashing the legislature,” she added. 

Some of Soares’ recent criticism has focused on the state’s “Raise the Age” law, passed in 2017. The law increased the age at which a child can be prosecuted as an adult from 16 to 18, bringing New York into line with the majority of states in the country. Since then, critics like Soares have said the law lacks clarity and creates a lack of accountability for young people who commit crimes.

“Raise The Age is the gentle parenting public safety policy for those in most need of the serious intervention teenagers need,” Soares told Bolts in a written statement. “As far as ‘programming’ to fully implement Raise the Age, we used to have a program that would stop teenagers headed to drive-by shootings. It was called ‘removal from the community.’ Short of that, I don’t think anything will work to stop the incessant violence among 16 and 17-year-olds in the inner city.”

In July 2023, Soares called on the legislature to amend the law and remove hurdles to charging young people with violent felonies. Weeks later, Republican Assemblyman William Barclay cited Soares when he introduced a bill to roll back Raise the Age. 

Soares’ critiques of the state’s recent criminal justice reforms echo those from members of both parties, as well as many other prosecutors, sheriffs, and police leaders in the state. Ahead of the 2022 midterm elections, opponents of these reforms leveraged concerns about crime in New York state to successfully push the legislature to amend the 2019 bail reform law, which eliminated cash bail for most misdemeanors and some nonviolent felony charges, as well as discovery reform, which change the rules for how prosecutors must share evidence with the defense in a case. 

In 2022, Republicans’ gubernatorial nominee Lee Zeldin also routinely highlighted incidents of violent crime throughout the state, while voters in both parties polled that year cited crime as their top concern. It was a message echoed by New York Republicans, who flipped several congressional seats. Zeldin came within five percentage points of Hochul in this overwhelmingly Democratic state.

But Kindlon believes the attacks on bail reform are misguided. 

“I don’t think that bail reform is the danger that Soares wants to turn it into,” he said. “It’s not the primary driving force in crime here in Albany County.” Kindlon also noted that the county’s violent crime problem long preceded bail reform, and that judges still have and exercise ample discretion to set bail for people accused of violent crimes. 

A recent study from neighboring New Jersey, which largely eliminated cash bail in legislation passed in 2014 and enacted in 2017, found bail reform did not increase gun violence in the state. These findings square with research in New York City that found no increase in arrests of people who were granted supervised release rather than being held on cash bail, and had no negative effect on court appearance rates.

For Lukee Forbes, a longtime Albany activist and executive director of the youth empowerment organization We Are Revolutionary, getting Soares out of office is personal. At 15 years old, he was prosecuted by Soares’ office for providing two other teens with a tree limb used to assault a University of Albany professor. Forbes, who ultimately served seven years in prison, tells Bolts he struggled as a teenager with the death of his mother, running away from home repeatedly, skipping class, and turning to substances to cope. When he was locked up as a teenager, Forbes says he felt “like the system was punishing me for my trauma.” That’s a pattern he continues to observe in the capital region—struggling teens facing prosecution from Soares’ office, rather than getting the support they need to succeed.

Following the enactment of Raise the Age, 16- and 17-year-olds facing felony charges had their cases heard in a newly-created “youth part” of the criminal court system, and 16- and 17-year-olds with misdemeanor charges were automatically funneled into family court, where punitive resolutions are less severe than criminal court. When the cases of teens facing felony charges are heard in the “youth part,” prosecutors have an opportunity to argue whether the case should stay in the criminal court system or be moved to family court. Between 2019 and 2023, the majority of 16- and 17-year-olds arrested in Albany had their cases transferred to family court or probation, but that percentage has mostly declined over time, according to data from DCJS.

“What I see from his office personally, I can’t ignore,” Forbes told Bolts about Soares’ charging decisions. “I see them taking advantage of a community that has a lack of understanding of the law, I see them taking advantage of family members who just want to get back home, I see them taking advantage of young people, of people who just don’t understand what is going on.”

In Albany County, Black people comprise roughly 14 percent of the population, but 44 percent of felony adult arrests. Doctor Alice Green, a lifelong advocate for racial justice and criminal justice reform in the county, is particularly concerned about how Black teens are being treated by Soares’ office, and says Soares, who is Black, has alienated a community that once supported him. “There has been concern in the Black community about how he treats Black people,” said Green, who is also Black. “There’s a mistrust there.”

Soares, however, insisted that Green doesn’t speak for Albany’s Black community, and told Bolts she “represents the political interests of defendants and white liberals.” 

Rather than leveraging the potential of Raise the Age to divert even more young people out of the adult system, Green says, Soares continues to insist dangerous young people should be funneled into adult facilities. “All the research tells us that if you put a kid into a secure facility or a prison, that they are going to eventually come back and recidivate and cause more damage, and they’re going to be harmed mentally,” said Green. 

Green says the county is failing to make use of state funding provided for diversion programs, and wants to see more cooperation between the DA’s office and other county offices and local nonprofits that serve kids. 

Forbes says he wants the DA’s office to do a lot more to confront the root causes of crime: “We need to really focus on addressing why kids are moving towards guns in the first place, versus just locking kids up and sentencing them to adult time.”

But Soares says that the failure to prevent kids from both perpetrating and being victimized by gun violence rests with legislators. 

“I still believe in second chances, and fairness, but as I did in 2004, I believe Black children should be able to learn and play without bullets whizzing past their heads on a regular basis,” Soares told Bolts in an emailed statement. “Holding gun-wielding teens accountable is a common-sense way to aid in that cause, which shouldn’t be controversial.” 

In spite of his opposition to Raise the Age, Soares has supported some new alternatives to incarceration and programming intended to help people with criminal convictions successfully reintegrate into the community. In 2017, he announced a “clean slate” initiative that diverted 16- to 24-year-olds with nonviolent felony convictions into a program designed to support them in finding work and staying in school, ultimately sealing their records if successfully completed. At the same time, Soares has blamed bail and discovery reform for decreased participation in diversion programs such as drug courts. 

Kindlon agrees with Soares on one thing: Gun violence in the county is a big problem. If he takes the helm of the DA’s office, Kindlon says he’ll focus on charging people and groups who funnel guns into the state, attempting to stem the tide of gun violence with conspiracy cases. Now, he says, the office is too focused on going after individuals.

“The main focus of gun prosecution here in Albany County is the young man with the gun and a car,” said Kindlon. “So they grab that guy, they grab the gun, they force him into a plea, and then it’s done.”

Kindlon also says he’s eager to invest the office’s resources in pretrial diversion programs, particularly for young people like those he has represented. He concedes that Raise the Age isn’t perfect and says he hopes the legislature will ultimately amend the law. But in the meantime, he thinks clarity about how to apply the law should come from litigation in the state’s appellate courts, which he would file if elected DA.

 “I would love for legislators to clear up some of the language and give some more guidance,” said Kindlon. “But in the absence of that, I understand that that’s what the courts are for.”

The DA’s office isn’t short on resources, particularly after the adoption of the laws Soares so fervently attacks. After the passage of discovery reform, Hochul secured $40 million to offset the costs of adapting to the law’s requirements. More than $2 million of that funding went to the Albany County DA’s office between 2022 and 2024, according to data shared with Bolts by DCJS, which administers the funding. 

Soares dismissed this investment as inadequate to address the burden imposed by the law. “Discovery reform has achieved nothing but the reduction of staffing in prosecutors’ offices,” he told Bolts. “No matter how much funding is thrown at discovery reform, it still burdens a prosecutor with administrative tasks as opposed to furthering investigations.

DA offices statewide also received a massive boost in “aid to prosecution” funding from the state in the last year. While in fiscal year 2022-2023 Albany County’s DA office received $176,540, that number soared to $943,253 in 2023-2024. Over the same time period, the office received a $400,000 boost in funding through Hochul’s Gun Involved Violence Elimination (GIVE) initiative. 

Kindlon wants to leverage some of these funds to ensure effective alternatives to incarceration exist.

“We’re Albany County; we’ve got resources, we’ve got brains, we’ve got opportunity,” he said. “Let’s bring together all the stakeholders and the nonprofits who want to see these things work, to community groups who want to see young men and women return to school, to support systems that we can build.”

Forbes believes Kindlon is more open than Soares to engaging in meaningful conversations with him and other concerned community members about how to address the root causes of crime in Albany. But ultimately, he needs to see him in action to believe he has something different to offer.

“We won’t see what a district attorney or any politician is really going to be like until they’re in those offices,” said Forbes. “David Soares was the golden child…and now, he’s flipped the script and is a completely different person.”

The post Albany’s Incumbent DA Battles a Challenger—And State Criminal Justice Reforms appeared first on Bolts.

When the Massachusetts supreme court banned sentences of life without the possibility of parole against children in late 2013, the state was ahead of the curve—just five states had taken that step as of the start of that year. 

Today there are 28. In an unusually rapid sea change over the last decade, red and blue states alike have rushed to bar that punishment, which denies someone any possibility of ever leaving prison, for anyone under age 18. That includes GOP-run Ohio in 2021, and Democratic-run Minnesota and New Mexico last year. 

Will a similar surge now shield even more youths from being incarcerated for life with no hope of release?

Once again, Massachusetts is ahead of the curve: The state supreme court issued landmark rulings on Jan. 11 that expanded its earlier holding, and raised the minimum age for a life without parole sentence from 18 to 21. 

In a 4-3 vote, the majority ruled that youth aged 18 to 20 are never beyond redemption, and that they should receive the same consideration as minors due to their continuing mental development. “A sentence of life in prison without parole eligibility review for those up to age twenty-one—individuals with diminished culpability and a heightened capacity for change—is no less cruel or unusual than it is for those up to age eighteen,” Justice Scott Kafker wrote in a concurrence that drew a direct line between the court’s decision in 2013 and its new ruling. 

The decision doesn’t guarantee actual release to anyone. Rather, it grants people opportunities to appear in front of a parole board to showcase their growth—and only once they’ve spent 15 to 30 years in prison, depending on the case. State officials estimate that the ruling made roughly 200 people newly eligible for a parole hearing.

“Emerging adults… must be granted a ‘meaningful opportunity to obtain release based on demonstrated maturity and rehabilitation,’” Chief Justice Kimberly Budd wrote for the majority, quoting from a 2010 U.S. Supreme Court ruling that applied to children. The court was considering the cases of two people, Sheldon Mattis and Jason Robinson, who were convicted of first-degree murder and sentenced to life without parole as 18- and 19-year olds. (All seven justices who took part in the decision were nominated to the court by Governor Charlie Baker, a Republican.)

Massachusetts is just the second jurisdiction to ensure that everyone incarcerated over a crime committed before age 21 has some opportunity for release. 

In 2021, Washington, D.C., adopted a “second look” reform that’s functionally equivalent: People convicted as young adults can ask for a review after serving 15 years in prison. (D.C. does not call this review “parole,” so people in this group can technically still be sentenced to life without parole, but they have a mechanism to petition for release.) 

In fact, D.C. applies that reform all the way to age 25, rather than 21, a narrower definition of who is a full adult in the eyes of the law.

The Massachusetts ruling also builds on other very recent gains for reformers pushing for a higher cutoff age than 18. 

Just over the last twelve months, Connecticut and Illinois both adopted laws to restrict LWOP up to age 21. In Michigan and Washington state, judges banned sentencing rules that mandate life without parole for people under 19 and 21, respectively. Each has important carve-outs: Illinois’ law does not apply to people convicted of predatory sexual offenses, nor does it apply retroactively; Connecticut’s law applies only to people convicted before 2005; in Michigan and Washington, judges still have discretion to impose the sentence as long as it’s not automatic. But each concretizes the same principle as Massachusetts’ ruling: that 18 is not the proper place to set a limit for who gets to be considered a young person deserving of special protections. 

“People who committed crimes at a very young age have the capacity to turn their lives around and become productive citizens,” said Alex Taubes, a Connecticut lawyer who represents people on parole and supports his state’s 2023 reform. 

Preston Shipp, who advocates for such reforms nationwide as policy counsel with the Campaign for the Fair Sentencing of Youth, says his advocacy work gets easier when he can tell lawmakers that more and more states have acted against juvenile life without parole. “When one domino falls, it causes the next domino to fall,” Shipp said. “These are very important steps that we’re continuing to take on our journey to make sure that people who don’t have fully formed brains are not thrown away and told there’s no hope.”

Reform proponents in other states are already lining up to be next. California’s supreme court heard a similar case in early December; it could prohibit life without parole up to age 26. 

In Washington state, legislation that would end life without parole up to age 25 received its first hearing on Jan. 15, just days after the Massachusetts ruling. Chelsea Moore, an advocate with the ACLU of Washington, and co-founder of Look2Justice, an organization centered on the rights of incarcerated Washingtonians, is championing that bill. “It’s wonderful that we see this acknowledgement spreading across the U.S.,” she said. “It’s very helpful for us to be able to interact with folks in those states, and to point to those states.”

This momentum reflects the extraordinary changes since the “superpredators” panic of the 1990s, which fueled more life sentences for children. The notion that a young person who commits a crime is particularly dangerous and unredeemable has been debunked, replaced with a consensus that youth is redeeming, a sign that one really could change. But to translate that idea into law would seem to demand drawing a bright line—a legal age that separates youth and adulthood, at least for the purpose of deciding what counts as too young to be sentenced to die in prison. And with different visions of change competing, that task itself is making reformers confront the nuances of age and development, and ponder how to best restrict a sentence that many refer to as “death by incarceration” without leaving too many people behind. 

This sense of an emerging momentum is not just a political boost for reformers like Moore. In the Massachusetts ruling, it actually served as legal evidence.

To justify raising the age from 18 to 21, the state supreme court appealed to the “evolving standards of decency,” an approach to constitutional law that connects people’s rights to contemporary norms, and that’s long been used to expand protections on juvenile defendants. The majority talked about recent laws and rulings in other states—as well as reforms in other nations—to conclude that these standards are shifting. 

Among the reforms the court cites: D.C.’s 2021 law, and Illinois’ 2023 law. 

Bolts asked Lindsey Hammond, policy director of the Illinois-based organization Restore Justice, for her reaction about the Massachusetts court drawing on a law she championed hundreds of miles away. “I think it’s incredible to see this momentum continue to build,” she said. In turn, she hopes that this out-of-state ruling can help her persuade Illinois lawmakers to revisit last year’s law and make it retroactive. 

“It is so encouraging for legislators to know that other states are reaching that same decision that young people are different,” she explained.

Besides these “evolving standards,” the Massachusetts court grounded its ruling on research in neuroscience and psychology that shows that people’s brains continue to develop into their mid-20s. “Advancements in scientific research have confirmed what many know well through experience: the brains of emerging adults are not fully mature,” the majority wrote.

Stephanie Tabashneck, a psychologist and senior fellow at the Center for Law, Brain and Behavior at Harvard Medical School, offers an example: Young adults “can’t regulate their emotions” as well as older adults because their frontal lobes are not fully developed. Tabashneck is not surprised that such findings resonated with the court. She often gives presentations to judges and attorneys, showing them brain scans highlighting the marked differences between younger and older adults; just seeing those images has a powerful effect on her interlocutors, she said. 

Some public officials echoed the science in praising the Massachusetts ruling. “The practice of putting a person behind bars forever, without paying attention to decision-making ability based on age and the science of brain development, should end,” Kevin Hayden, the district attorney of Suffolk County (Boston), said in a statement. Hayden succeeded Rachael Rollins, a reform-minded DA who’d also backed the litigation against life without parole, as well as efforts to raise the age of youth justice from 18 to 21 in other contexts.

But here’s a rub: Much of this research has found that people’s brains continue developing for years beyond age 21, leaving a gap with where the Massachusetts justices landed. The majority recognizes this, writing that “we acknowledge that the scientific record in this case suggests that the unique attributes of youth may persist in young adults older than twenty-one.” 

And here, too, the majority invoked examples from other states to explain how it reached its decision—except this time, it did that to justify not going up higher, say to 25, rather than to support going beyond 18: “The contemporary standards of decency that govern our decision today do not suggest a societal consensus that those aged twenty-one and above should be treated differently from older adults.”

On this point, the dissenting justices harshly criticized the majority for having it both ways. “[E]ven if it could, science does not definitively place the line of brain maturation at twenty-one, but rather suggests that it extends into the mid-twenties,” wrote Justice David Lowy. He accused his colleagues of “manufactur[ing] a new category of individuals entitled to distinct constitutional treatment,” and usurping the prerogative of lawmakers by deciding what he argues ought to be a political question—what is youth for the purposes of punishment. 

“Perhaps nothing speaks louder to the flaws in the court’s holding,” Lowy wrote, “than the court having crafted a line that ends at age twenty-one, thereby engaging in legislative line-drawing inconsistent with the science upon which it relies.” 

If there’s no switch that flips in a person’s brain the day they turn 18, neither is there one the day they turn 21. For Lowy, the seeming arbitrariness of setting a line at one’s 21st birthday was a reason to not raise the age at all. But for some reformers, it’s a reason to think even bigger.

Moore, the Washington advocate, feels a twinge of concern that if politicians and judges settle on 21 as the new age for juvenile justice, it may make it trickier to push bills with a higher age cutoff—like her state’s proposed legislation, which goes to 25, closer to what scientific studies envisage. “Just like the age of 18 was socially constructed, I think the age of 21 is also socially constructed,” she said. “We’re hopeful that we will continue to move past these social constructions of what we see as mature, into what we really know in science.”

Still, Moore is confident that, no matter how a particular reform defines who counts as young enough, it’ll pave the way for still more change down the line. Since Washington state abolished life without parole for teenagers under 18 in 2018, “We have people running nonprofits, we have people doing anti-violence work,” she said. “It’s so impressive what folks have done.” She points to a study conducted last year by two University of Washington scholars that showed low recidivism among the incarcerated people whose petitions were granted. 

“We just know that that model can be replicated if we bump the age up to 25 for those folks serving life and long sentences,” she added. “Those folks can come home safely and our parole board can determine when it is safe to return to their homes: They’re already doing it, and so they would be able to do it for this other group of folks.”

James Zeigler, who leads the Second Look Project, a D.C.-based group that championed D.C.’s reform and has helped implement them, questions if an age cutoff is needed at all. “If you have to draw a line somewhere, identify when someone becomes a full blown adult for culpability purposes, [25] probably makes the most sense, and it makes more sense than 18 or 21, which are both ages after which people continue to grow and develop quite a bit,” Zeigler said.

But “developmental maturation process doesn’t end at 25 for anybody,” he pointed out. “While it may slow down as a kind of general rule, everybody continues to kind of grow, change, and mature… I have seen it in my work that plenty of people who commit crimes and make serious mistakes well into adulthood, past the age of 25, past the age of 30, can still grow and change in the way that we are talking about, that you hope for in people.”

Katy Naples-Mitchell, a special litigation advisor at Harvard Law School’s Criminal Justice Institute, also wonders how to draw a rigid line as to when one enters adulthood, when the characteristics that make humans capable of change don’t just disappear as one ages.

As the Massachusetts supreme court considered the Mattis and Robinson cases, Naples-Mitchell co-authored an amicus brief in support of ending life without parole for young adults in Massachusetts. The brief focused on the huge racial disparities in who’s serving life without parole in Massachusetts, finding that Black youth between ages 18 and 20 are sixteen times more likely to have received that sentence than white youth.

“People of color are facing more extreme charges for less serious conduct,” Naples-Mitchell told Bolts, explaining that Black people in particular are more likely to face a charge that triggers life without parole. Research by the American Psychological Association has found that people perceive Black youth as older than they are, making judges more prone to treating Black defendants as full adults than they are with white defendants.

Those disparities also apply across age groups, though. According to research conducted by the Sentencing Project, an organization that researches criminal justice, the majority of people serving life without parole in Massachusetts as of 2020 were Black and Latinx; those groups make up less than one-fourth of the state’s overall population. Studies nationwide show prosecutors and judges use harsher charges and sentences for people of color.

For Naples-Mitchell, the debate over young adults should be a gateway for a broader reckoning with how we dole out punishments. “This is an opportunity to reshape norms about life sentences more broadly, beyond the categorical approach in the brain science,” she said. She described the neuroscientific research as critically important to understanding the need for reform but also says “the brain science is a window for the public to access new empathy.”

“There are lots of ways to build on that,” she added, “whether it’s to build to another later-in-life bright line, or to think more holistically about sentences of life without parole, and whether that is something that public policy should promote.”

D.C. underwent just the trajectory that Naples-Mitchell envisions. It first provided an opportunity for release to anyone convicted as a minor. Then, in 2021, it extended that approach to offenses committed up to age 25. And then, the local government chose to expand its reform yet again by guaranteeing any incarcerated person a judicial review after a lengthy term in prison—no matter their age at the time of the offense. That ordinance was part of the omnibus package that was blocked by Congress and President Biden last year. 

State Senator Liz Miranda, a progressive politician from Boston, wants Massachusetts to take the same route. She is sponsoring legislation that would repeal life without parole sentences regardless of the age at which someone commits a crime. Under the bill, anyone incarcerated in Massachusetts would receive a parole hearing after 25 years of incarceration.  

At a hearing for her bill, Miranda talked about her brother, who was murdered in Boston, explaining why she opposes life without parole as a punishment for his alleged killer. “I believe life without parole is death by another name, and I do not believe in death sentences,” Miranda said.

The post A Wave of States Reduce “Death by Incarceration” for Young Adults  appeared first on Bolts.

For more than 25 years, Mike Rose felt alone. After his son Jeremy was arrested at age 17 in 1994, sentenced to life in prison, Mike and his wife had no community with which to share the pain of losing a son to prison. “In the battle to help your loved ones, it feels like you’re by yourself, fighting this battle on your own,” he says. Jeremy was shipped to an out-of-state prison, as New Mexico does with many kids serving long sentences, deepening his parents’ isolation. 

Then, about four years ago, Mike says his world opened up after he stumbled upon a coalition that had assembled in New Mexico to fight extreme sentences imposed on children. 

“It was like a breath of fresh air,” he told Bolts. “I was able to join them and it’s like, I’m not by myself anymore. We’ve got resources, we’ve got people who are in the same situation, we can pull our knowledge and our strengths and start working on the passage of legislation. It was a godsend.” 

The coalition has for years pushed legislation to give every ‘juvenile lifer’ a meaningful chance at release, which faltered in repeated legislative sessions until they finally succeeded this spring: In March, lawmakers adopted Senate Bill 64, a law abolishing sentences of life without parole for children. 

The law also addresses other extreme sentences by making anyone convicted of a crime they committed under the age of 18 eligible for parole hearings—usually after 15 years in prison, though in some cases after 20 or 25 years behind bars. 

“In a moment of pretty extreme political polarization around crime and public safety, our community was able to pass one of the more progressive juvenile parole laws in the country, and we did it with bipartisan support,” said Denali Wilson, an attorney at the ACLU of New Mexico who co-founded this coalition, though she also stresses that 15 years remains too long a time. “For people that went to prison when they were 15-16 years old, we’re talking about a lifetime to wait for just an opportunity—just an opportunity to come home.”

The law does not guarantee release for anyone. It only provides review by a parole board, a shot to showcase one’s rehabilitation inside and ask for a second chance that the governor-appointed board can still deny. Many people newly eligible for review will still likely remain in prison for decades. 

Still, Mike Rose calls himself “eternally optimistic” and says the law’s passage opens the door to having his son home by the end of the year. Jeremy, who was convicted of murder alongside two other minors for the stabbing deaths of two elderly people three decades ago, received a sentence that made him eligible for parole after 30 years in prison, and likely would have had a parole hearing next near even without the new law. But Mike, whose wife died of cancer two years ago without seeing her son have a hearing, is keenly aware of what shaving even just a few years off his sentence could have meant—and now he’s eager to help others besides his son get a second look. 

“He left a boy of 17 and hopefully I get the opportunity to have him here shortly as a man of 47,” Mike said of his son. “There’s a huge push across the country to recognize the fact that we as a society cannot sentence our juveniles to a life behind bars… You’re not doing things to solve the crime problem, what you’re doing is throwing the next generation away.”

So far in 2023, two other states besides New Mexico have adopted similar reforms, making people convicted as children eligible for release after some lengthy term of incarceration: Illinois with House Bill 1064 in February, and Minnesota, which included the reforms in a large public safety package, in May. 

They are just the latest states to adopt such laws over the last decade, ever since the U.S. Supreme Court issued a series of decisions in the late 2000s and early 2010s affirming that minors deserve “meaningful opportunities to obtain release.” The laws passed in New Mexico, Illinois and Minnesota mean there will now be 28 states that no longer sentence kids to life without parole.

“Every state that ends the practice of condemning children to die in prison creates pressure for the next state to do so,” said Preston Shipp, a policy counsel with the Campaign for the Fair Sentencing of Youth, a national organization that is helping spread those reforms.

Shipp traveled to Santa Fe and St. Paul this year to lobby lawmakers and share information about the many similar reforms that have already been implemented elsewhere, pointing to the low recidivism rate for people who have been released on parole in other states. He also tries to talk to lawmakers about research in neuroscience and psychology showing developmental differences between adults and youth.

“We know from the science of adolescent brain development that [kids] don’t appreciate all the consequences of their conduct; peer pressure hits differently,” Shipp said. ”In a flash point, this person does something that’s tragic, and it changes people’s lives, but it doesn’t mean that they cannot experience rehabilitation. It doesn’t mean that they’re beyond the hope of redemption.”

More states could soon make reforms. Shipp has traveled to Lansing three times this year to help bills that would end juvenile life without parole in Michigan. Connecticut already adopted similar reforms in 2015 for kids under age 18, but in June lawmakers passed a bill that extends parole eligibility to people with long sentences who were convicted before age 21. (The new Illinois law also applies to people up to age 21.) That measure now goes to Governor Ned Lamont, a Democrat who has blocked other efforts to curtail long sentences for juveniles. 

Despite the similarities, the youth sentencing reforms that three states have passed so far this year will vary widely in actual impact. In Illinois, people already serving extreme sentences for juvenile convictions are still set to spend their lives behind bars without review: The bill that passed this year—just like the 2019 law it builds on—isn’t retroactive. 

In New Mexico and Minnesota, by contrast, dozens of people incarcerated for decades are now suddenly poised to receive parole hearings very soon because of the new laws. “There are just a lot of people who have spent a lot of time in prison being introspective and growing and developing into adults,” State Representative Sandra Feist, a Democrat who helped shape Minnesota’s legislation, told Bolts. “And I’m just excited for them to get a second chance.”

For advocates like Wilson who hope to reduce the prison population and spent years guiding these bills through the state legislatures, that effort was just about setting up the difficult parole processes that are only now starting.  

“It’s the moment that our community has been preparing for,” Wilson said. “We knew that passing the law was only the first step. Making the law mean something, making it mean real opportunity for people to come home, is the next chapter.”

The states that adopted new juvenile sentencing reforms this year significantly limited if not eliminated discretionary parole in the late 1970s and early 1980s, a period during which many states toughened sentencing and gutted paths to release throughout the country. That gives advocates a chance to start fresh—after all, established parole boards are typically dysfunctional and punitive—but creating a new process out of virtually nothing is also a daunting task. 

Wilson warns that legal services in New Mexico aren’t trained to counsel the people who are newly eligible for parole, even as their hearings are coming up soon. “The work ahead is happening outside of existing institutions in the state because this is new work,” she said. “This reform was passed without any kind of budget allocation from the state, and so much of the work is around shoring up resources to make sure that people are supported in the way that they deserve.” Wilson has set up an organization, Deserving Life, that’s crowdfunding to help provide people with this support. 

Wilson says she knows of at least 75 people incarcerated in New Mexico who were given decades-long sentences for crimes they committed as minors and will be affected by SB 64. More than half are already eligible for a hearing under the new law because they’ve served more than the minimum period (15 to 25 years, depending on the crime). The actual number is likely higher: ProPublica exposed in March how the state lost track of nearly two dozen people locked up since they were sentenced to life in prison as kids. 

Meanwhile, close to 100 people will be affected by Minnesota’s new law, according to Perry Moriearty, who helps run a law clinic at the University of Minnesota that represents “juvenile lifers” and played a central role in crafting and championing the reforms over the last decade. In Minnesota, like in New Mexico, most people will be eligible after 15 years in prison, though it will be longer for some categories of crimes. Moriearty says nearly half have been in prison long enough that they are already eligible for a hearing.

But the panel that will review these cases doesn’t even exist yet. Minnesota lawmakers this spring created a brand new review board that must still be staffed. For cases that involve people who were sentenced as minors, that five-member board will be supplemented by two additional members who must be experts in neurodevelopmental science.  

Advocates for the law say these two additional members will be critical to remind the rest of the board of what makes youth different. “One of the things that neurodevelopmental experts may be able to speak to is why, with a lot of kids who are incarcerated, the first few years look bumpy,” said Moriearty, the University of Minnesota professor.  “For kids who are told that they’re entering prison and they’re gonna die there, there tend to be more infractions in those early years.”

Avra Anagnostis was 14 when her 16-year-old best friend, Roberto Lopez-Rios, was arrested and sentenced to life in Minnesota in 2001. “Life in prison, obviously, as kids, we couldn’t really comprehend what that meant,” she told Bolts. “It sounded so scary and overwhelming.” 

For more than two decades, Anagnostis has advocated for her friend to get a second look. She and Lopez-Rios co-founded an organization called Juvenile Sentencing Reform MN, paired up with Moriearty to advocate for reform, and reached out to people who have been incarcerated since they were kids. “Some of these guys are really alone,” she said. “Several have never had anyone reach out to them.” 

“For them to know that this group of people was coming together, people that they’ve never met, and advocating for them and saying, you are more than the worst thing you did as a child, that was huge,” she added.

From prison, Lopez-Rios has developed his painting, working with a group called Art from the Inside to have his art sold and shown at exhibitions. In April, this Minnesota-based organization hosted an art workshop in St. Paul alongside Juvenile Sentencing Reform MN that featured Moriearty and other coalition members talking about their bill.

Moriearty says that most kids sentenced to spend their life in prison in Minnesota come from Hennepin and Ramsey counties, which include the twin cities of Minneapolis and St. Paul, the most diverse area in the state—and that the vast majority, 81 percent, are also Black and Latinx. The prosecutors who represent these population centers—Ramsey County’s John Choi, who has long backed this issue, and Hennepin County’s Mary Moriarty, who was elected in November in a victory for progressives—both supported the reform this year. 

Nevertheless, the statewide association of county attorneys opposed Minnesota’s bill this year. Robert Small, its executive director, told Bolts that the organization agreed with the principle of ending juvenile life without parole but thought that people should wait for longer periods before being eligible, and that the decision should be made by a judge and not by a parole board. Feist says the support her bill received from Choi and Moriarty helped counter the idea that local law enforcement was uniformly hostile to it.

New Mexico’s prosecutors association, which has a long history of torpedoing criminal justice reforms and opposed prior iterations of this bill, remained neutral on the 2023 version after extracting concessions that extended how long kids have to wait before becoming eligible for parole. (An earlier version of the bill made most minors eligible for parole after 10 years.)

Advocates in both New Mexico and Minnesota say they insisted the bills be retroactive, bringing hope to the very people who were championing them. They also pressed lawmakers to cover anyone who was convicted of a crime as a kid, no matter how serious. 

“The reason why we are so adamant that there should not be carve outs is because this whole policy is all about the difference between kids and adults,” Shipp said. “It’s not about the nature of the offense.”

All three bills adopted this year passed Democratic-led legislatures and were then signed by Democratic governors. In each case, the opposition largely came from GOP ranks, even though the bills in Illinois and New Mexico each received Republican support. (Minnesota’s package, which incorporated many other reforms, passed on strict party lines.) Some GOP-run states have adopted similar legislation—most recently, Ohio in 2021. 

In Illinois, a Republican state senator even played a lead role this year in pushing lawmakers to fix the fact that HB 1064 does not apply to past cases. In the same week Governor J.B. Pritzker signed it into law in February, Senator Seth Lewis filed new legislation, SB 2073, to make it retroactive. Lewis’ bill would also apply to an earlier sentencing reform that Illinois adopted in 2019, which curtailed juvenile life without parole but did not eliminate it. If it passes, it would make hundreds of people incarcerated since they were kids eligible for parole, according to Lindsey Hammond, policy director of the Chicago-based Restore Justice. 

SB 2073 drew numerous Democratic co-sponsors but it received no vote by the end of the legislative session in May. Majority Leader Kimberly Lightford, a Democrat, did not respond to a request for comment on her plans for next year.

While the sentencing reforms in Illinois are limited to only new convictions, the state has still gone further than most others (including New Mexico and Minnesota) in another dimension: age. 

Reforms that take a more rehabilitative approach to youth are traditionally written to apply to people who committed a crime before age 18, but the laws Illinois passed in 2019 and 2023 instead both draw the line at 21. Hammond says the usual arguments for treating kids differently apply to young adults too. “Eighteen isn’t a line that you magically become an adult,” she told Bolts. “The emerging brain science shows that our brains continue to develop till the mid-20s.” 

Hammond says there was interest in the Illinois legislature to set the age of eligibility at 25: “Why are we stopping?”

Back in 2021, Washington, D.C., became the first jurisdiction to eliminate life without the possibility of parole for anyone convicted of a crime committed under age 25. Bolts reported last year that the reform sparked releases but at a slower pace than its proponents hoped for because of pandemic delays and recalcitrant prosecutors. Other states, like Massachusetts and Vermont, have also raised the age until which someone can be treated as a juvenile past 18. Connecticut could join that roster if its governor, Lamont, signs SB 952, the bill that ends life without parole for youth under 21. 

People in other states are watching these developments closely. In Minnesota, Moriearty says they didn’t press raising the age of adult criminal liability in this year’s session but hopes to revisit it in the future. “We didn’t necessarily feel like we had time,” she says.

Some advocates also hope to build on these new laws to make a broader case: They wonder if re-opening the door to parole for juveniles may make people more receptive to the idea that we shouldn’t throw anyone away for life. They’re pushing for reforms to cap prison terms, expand parole hearings for the elderly, or guarantee everyone some form of “second look.”

“If we allow ourselves to believe or to entertain the possibility that a child is more than the worst thing that they’ve ever done,” Wilson says, “it’s really not that far of a leap for people to wonder if that may be true for everybody.”

The post “Just an Opportunity to Come Home” appeared first on Bolts.

In Minnesota, a disagreement on how to prosecute two teenagers suspected of killing a 23-year-old has put two of the state’s leading criminal justice reformers into a high-profile political dispute, testing how much change even progressive politicians are willing to embrace.

Last Friday, Governor Tim Walz assigned State Attorney General Keith Ellison–a former six-term congressman and Deputy Chair of the Democratic National Committee–to handle the prosecution of the murder, taking the case away from Hennepin County Attorney Mary Moriarty. Walz decided to give Ellison the case after Ellison criticized Moriarty as too lenient and requested it be transferred to him. His move is a direct rebuke of the newly elected Moriarty, whose win in November had marked a major triumph for criminal justice reformers. 

Moriarty is one of many progressives who believe there is a false choice between public safety and a punitive carceral system. She ran last year for prosecutor because after the murder of George Floyd she saw “an opportunity for racial reckoning” in Minneapolis, and the possibility of it slipping away as racialized fears of crime took hold. Moriarty promised to change the criminal legal system in Hennepin County by using more rehabilitative options and diversion programs to reduce incarceration as opposed to imposing harsh sentences. 

A central plank of that vision, as she explained to Mother Jones and Bolts last October, was changing how the criminal legal system treats kids, including moving away from trying minors as adults. “It’s really important to focus many more resources on our youth. And also to look at it from a science perspective,” she said. “We know kids are very susceptible to impulsive behavior….And with so many guns out there, we’re ending up with a lot of tragic consequences.”

A recent memo from Sarah Davis, Moriarty’s Director of the Children and Families division, translated that campaign rhetoric into office policy. Citing youth brain development as “the foundation of our approach,” Moriarty’s prosecutors would “make every effort to keep children out of the court system when possible” to reduce youth recidivism. 

Ellison and Moriarty have long worked together in Minnesota to push reform. A Democrat who endorsed Senator Bernie Sanders for president, Ellison gained nationwide acclaim for leading the successful prosecution of former Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin for the murder of George Floyd. At the time, Moriarty had recently been controversially dismissed from her position as chief public defender. During the Chauvin trial, she worked as a local television analyst, translating Ellison’s prosecution for a lay audience. Ellison called for an investigation of her dismissal and publicly raised the possibility that it was punishment for her racial justice advocacy. In 2022, when Moriarty began to campaign for County Attorney, Ellison endorsed her. The political nonprofit TakeAction hosted canvassing events supporting Moriarty’s election and Ellison’s reelection. 

This case radically changes their relationship. After narrowly winning his election for attorney general against an opponent who called him “soft” on crime, Ellison has swooped in to prosecute the murder despite Moriarty’s insistence he should not. 

She harshly criticized the move by Walz and Ellison as an “undemocratic” overreach, likening the decision to those made by Republican politicians nationwide who have attempted to usurp the authority of local prosecutors. 

The case shows the immense difficulties that progressive prosecutors face as they attempt to carry out the mandate of reform on which they were elected, and guide the public away from a tough-on-crime approach. “One of the reasons being a prosecutor is so difficult is because you have to look at a case where there’s an unimaginable harm and then decide what accountability, justice and punishment are appropriate to request,” Moriarty said in a press conference Friday.

On November 8, 2022, just days after Moriarty and Ellison won their elections, Zaria McKeever, 23, was killed in a home invasion in the Minneapolis suburb of Brooklyn Park. Prosecutors claim two brothers, ages 15 and 17 years old at the time, killed McKeever on behalf of Erick Haynes–McKeever’s ex-boyfriend and the father of her one-year-old child. Initially, Michael Freeman—the long-serving county attorney who embodied the traditional carceral approach Moriarty ran against and came under immense criticism for his handling of police killings—planned to try the brothers in adult court. 

After Hennepin County elected Moriarty, prosecutors changed course. Instead of a trial, her office offered plea deals that sentenced the brothers to two years in a juvenile facility with extended probation in exchange for testimony against Haynes. If they violated their probation, the brothers would be subject to an adult sentence under a doctrine called Extended Juvenile Jurisdiction (EJJ)– a hybrid approach reserved for young people over the age of 14 who are accused of committing certain serious crimes, the adult sentence can be imposed up to the age of 21. The elder brother accepted the deal.

The announcement of the change in prosecution deeply angered McKeever’s family. “It was choked down our throat without any concern about how we felt,” her stepfather Paul Greer told the Star Tribune. “We will not stand for it.”At a community meeting that McKeever’s family attended at Shiloh Temple, a prominent Black church in Minneapolis, Ellison voiced his disapproval of the plea deals. Ellison then sent a letter to Walz last Thursday asking to take over the case before the Friday hearing for the young brother. In the letter, he noted that Moriarty had “refused” his initial request to take over the prosecution. Walz granted the request, saying that “this authority is rarely used, and it should remain an option of last resort.” According to the Star Tribune, a Minnesota governor has stepped in only one other time in the state’s modern history to reassign a case against the will of a county attorney. 

“While I share the belief that too many juveniles are involved in the adult criminal-justice system, accountability for the seriousness of this crime has been missing in this case,” Ellison said in a statement on Friday. “I respect that county attorneys are duly elected by their constituents to exercise their discretion; however, the disposition of the juvenile shooter that Hennepin County has proposed in this case is disproportionate to the seriousness of the crime committed and falls far short of the family’s and community’s expectations for justice and safety.”

In a tense press conference on the same day, Moriarty defended the plea deals as her following through on campaign promises–changing how the county attorney’s office would deal with young people involved in gun violence. In 2021, when homicides approached a near record high, two thirds of shooting victims in Minneapolis were under the age of 31, according to a city report. “I am keeping a promise,” Moriarty said “[Ellison and Walz] are not.”

Moriarty said Ellison and Walz “are entitled to their opinion, but their actions here show that they also don’t really believe fully in democracy–because they are stopping me from doing the job voters elected me to do. That is unacceptable. They have set a very dangerous precedent.” 

In fact, Ellison is doing what his recent Republican opponent Jim Schultz warned of throughout the campaign last fall. “In a scenario in which we have somebody like a Mary Moriarty in the Hennepin County Attorney’s office,” Schultz told MinnPost when asked about the possibility of taking over prosecution, “I think we have to take a look at something along those lines.” Ellison denounced this overreach at the time. (When Mother Jones and Bolts asked about using a technique Ellison criticized, his office said they “don’t have anything to add” beyond the initial statement.) 

The Minnesota chapter of the National Lawyers Guild sent a letter to Walz and Ellison expressing their “vigorous objection” to the decision, warning that it joins a national trend. 

In Florida, Ron DeSantis removed twice-elected Hillsborough County state attorney Andrew Warren after Warren pledged not to prosecute those who seek or provide abortions. In Pennsylvania, the state legislature attempted to impeach Larry Krasner, one of the most well-known reform prosecutors in the country. In Missouri, the attorney general is in the process of trying to remove St. Louis Circuit Attorney Kim Gardner from office. A new bill in the Georgia state senate would create a “Prosecuting Attorneys Oversight Commission” with the power to remove prosecutors from office, just as Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis ramps up an investigation into Donald Trump’s attempt to overturn the 2020 election. 

“You have tragically become part of a disturbing reactionary national trend and placed yourselves in the company of the likes of Florida Governor Ron DeSantis and Missouri Governor Mike Parson by preventing a local progressive prosecutor from exercising her prosecutorial discretion in acting consistently with her principles–and the principles that she was elected to carry out,” the Guild wrote. “Your decision to play to the crowd does grave damage toward making reform a reality.”

The Minnesota County Attorneys Association voted unanimously to oppose Walz’s decision to hand the case to Ellison, despite the attorney general asking for their support. The MCAA is made up of prosecutors across the state, showing a rejection of this kind of jurisdictional encroachment that transcends traditional political lines. “To so-called left wing prosecutors and so-called right wing prosecutors there seemed to be general agreement that this was a problem,” said Friedman.

During the 2022 campaign, Ellison was hammered by Schultz as being “soft on crime,” before narrowly defeating him in the closest statewide race of the year. “To what extent is this about the perception of him politically across the state versus what he thinks is justice in this situation?” asked Michael Friedman, the former Executive Director of the Minneapolis based Legal Rights Center. “I’m not saying that with a specific accusation. I just think those are the kinds of questions that would need to be asked of him.”

At the press conference Friday, Moriarty said that in offering the two teenagers a plea deal she was trying to “make sure that there is accountability” without incarcerating someone for an extended period of time, after which it is likely they would “come out more dangerous to the community.” 

There is research to back up this idea. “If you can keep children out of the adult justice system until they’re in their mid-twenties, they’re extremely unlikely to enter it,” said Chris Uggen, the Distinguished McKnight Professor in Sociology, Law, and Public Affairs at the University of Minnesota-Twin Cities. “So in that sense, much of the science is on [Moriarty’s] side.” (However, Uggen added that “blended sentences” like the EJJ offered to the two teenagers is itself a “compromise” that has mixed results.)

But at the event, Moriarty was shouted down by McKeever’s loved ones for these ideas.

“What do you get for executing someone and shooting somebody five times? What’s the law for that? asked McKeever’s cousin Shontell Bishop and her sister Tiffynnie Epps.” “The law, not the science.”

“We could send this 15-year-old to prison and he’d get out in his early 30s,” Moriarty explained. 

“Wonderful,” a supporter of McKeever shouted back. “Zaria didn’t make it to her early 30s.”

This confrontation highlights the complex racial dynamics of the case. Ellison is the most powerful Black political figure in the state coming to the aid of a Black family who believe their calls for justice have gone unheard in a place where Black people are “overpoliced and underprotected.” In 2021, there was one Black shooting victim for every 150 Black residents in Minneapolis. For white people, there was one shooting victim for every 3,768 residents. According to a data analysis by the Minnesota Reformer, police fail to solve nearly eight in ten shootings in Minneapolis. 

Moriarty is a white prosecutor with a track record of calling out racist practices in the office she now leads. Her 30-plus year career on the other side of the courtroom has enshrined a steadfast belief that punitive policies disproportionately harm Black people, and don’t produce public safety in the long term. “There was no bait and switch here,” said Uggen. “This is exactly what she ran on.” 

Her opponent last year, a Black former judge and prosecutor who argued for a more punitive approach, framed Moriarty’s policies as putting criminals first, saying she was insensitive to the dilemma that Black people who live in high-crime neighborhoods face. Moriarty went on to win every single one of those neighborhoods. But this episode reveals the hurdles that await reform prosecutors as they seek to go about the job differently, especially among the populations experiencing violence most acutely.

“I don’t want to imply that Moriarty is on the wrong side of the racial justice issues at all, because she has been a true champion,” said Uggen. “[But] race is very much front and center in this issue, as it is in everything regarding justice in Minnesota.”

The post Minnesota’s Keith Ellison Thwarts a Reform Prosecutor He Endorsed appeared first on Bolts.

Public defender Sajid Khan still remembers watching his fourteen-year-old client walk into court in California’s Santa Clara County, laden with shackles around his waist, wrists, and ankles. It was 2015, and Christian Haro Cotero was being charged as an adult for stabbing an older boy who’d threatened him. He had confessed without an attorney or his mother present, and prosecutors were seeking steeper punishment over a gang affiliation. Khan had urged prosecutors to keep Christian’s case in juvenile court. He detailed the abuse Christian had suffered at the hands of his father, and the resulting depression and suicidal ideation that had plagued him since childhood. But District Attorney Jeff Rosen’s office refused.

“It was just viscerally, emotionally, professionally, one of the most jarring experiences of my career,” Khan told Bolts. The DA’s office, he said, “insisted that this 14-year-old child who had a serious history of trauma, but had also manifested a significant display of potential for rehabilitation—they insisted that he suffer an adult felony conviction, that he suffer a prison sentence.” In court, he said, Christian was very quiet. He seemed bewildered by the legal proceedings. 

After Christian pled guilty and was sent to prison, Khan and Rosen moved their showdown into the legislative sphere. In 2018, they argued on opposite sides of a measure to ban the prosecution of children under age 16 as adults, a frequent practice under Rosen at the time. When the California legislature passed Senate Bill 1391 in 2018, Rosen joined a lawsuit attempting to strike it down, though the effort failed. Veronica Haro, Christian’s mother, advocated fiercely on behalf of Senate Bill 1391 “so that other families wouldn’t have to go through what my son went through,” she told Bolts in Spanish. The bill’s adoption, she said, “was huge for me. I knew it wasn’t going to help my son, but it would help other young people.” 

With Rosen up for reelection this year, the fight has moved to the ballot box: Khan is now running against the incumbent DA.

Youth justice remains a key component of Khan’s critique of Rosen, whose office has continued to charge some 16- and 17-year-olds as adults—a policy that Khan says he would end outright. “The DA has the power, right now, to stop prosecuting kids as adults, … to stop pursuing life sentences against youthful offenders,” Khan told Bolts. 

But Khan, who works in Santa Clara County’s Alternate Defender office, has long called for changing the norms and practices of prosecution far beyond youth sentencing. “We should fire our very righteous outrage, fury and ire at District Attorney’s [sic] offices too,” he wrote in a blog post published in 2020, at the height of the Black Lives Matter protests, that condemned prosecutors’ role in furthering systemic racism. Rosen replied to that post by accusing Khan of threatening violence against his office and filing a formal complaint, which he later retracted.

Beyond the two candidates’ contentious public relationship, their race underscores a larger debate over what DAs should do to curtail mass incarceration. The race has already revealed growing rifts within the reform community about what constitutes meaningful criminal justice reform in the Black Lives Matter era.

Rosen, who was first elected DA in 2010 and has never faced an opponent since, also casts himself as a reformer. He is quick to cite a series of accomplishments, including a major legislative measure adopted in 2019 that created a new mechanism to release people from prison by empowering DAs to review their sentences. Rosen now enjoys the endorsement of Hillary Blout, a prominent reformer who spearheaded that law. (Blout declined an interview for this piece.) 

Rosen has also broken with the old guard of tough-on-crime prosecutors on other occasions. In 2014, he was one of just three California DAs to support Proposition 47, a successful ballot initiative that reduced sentencing for some lower-level offenses. In 2019, he invoked a public health approach to drug use, announcing he would prosecute fewer simple possession cases. But Rosen has also proven a fierce opponent of some of the state’s milestone sentencing reforms, such as the law that banned the adult prosecution of children under 16 and another major reform adopted in 2018 that narrowed California’s felony murder statutes. He long drew fire from progressives for seeking the death penalty, though he announced in 2020 that he would no longer do so.

As more DA candidates across the nation don the mantle of the “progressive prosecutor,” the expectations for those who claim that label have also risen. “We’ve seen a tremendous sea change over the last five years in what it means to be an elected prosecutor,” said Miriam Krinsky, the California-based executive director of Fair and Just Prosecution, an organization that promotes criminal justice reform through DA offices. 

Khan has criticized the “squishy” standards that allow many DAs to dub themselves “progressive prosecutors.” He co-wrote a law review article grousing,  “Any person prepared to say, ‘We need to be smart on crime,’ can claim to be a card-carrying member.” He told Bolts that the Santa Clara DA’s office needs to spearhead “drastic, transformational change,”  calling for a slate of policy upheavals that Rosen has thus far resisted. 

Rosen declined requests for an interview. “DA Jeff Rosen is a nationally recognized leader in criminal justice reform that works,” said Leo Briones, his longtime political advisor. Rosen and Khan are running alongside former Santa Clara prosecutor Daniel Chung in the nonpartisan June primary (if none of them receive more than 50 percent of the vote, the top two finishers will move to a November runoff). Like Khan, Chung says that Rosen sought to punish him over a piece of public writing, though Chung is criticizing the incumbent from the opposite direction. Chung claims he was demoted and later fired by Rosen for writing an article that criticized sentencing reforms proposed in California, on the grounds that they risked exacerbating  anti-Asian violence. Chung, who did not respond to a request for comment about his critiques of Rosen, has accused the DA of posturing as a progressive to get the governor to appoint him as California’s attorney general last year. “DA Rosen has had his finger to the wind, disingenuously pivoting himself to be perceived as a progressive prosecutor,” he wrote in a local outlet.

Jon Grobman first met Rosen when the DA attended a criminal justice reform symposium at California State Prison in Lancaster, back when Grobman was still serving six consecutive life sentences for a nonviolent drug-related robbery. Believing he would die in prison, Grobman had started creating and running programs for the other men, and eventually helped found Paws For Life, a dog rehabilitation and training program. In 2018, after the California Department of Corrections (CDCR) recommended Grobman’s release for “exceptional conduct” in prison, Rosen agreed —over the objections of the DA who’d presided over his original condemnation.  

“The DA’s office could have said, ‘This guy was given six life sentences for a reason. We wanted him off the streets,’” Grobman said. “But what Jeff did was truly look at the person that I had become.” 

Around the same time, Rosen helped write and publicly advocated for a landmark reform that allows California prosecutors to propose reducing incarcerated people’s sentences. Until then, DA offices were effectively barred from reviewing and changing past sentences they considered to be excessive. Rosen then made Santa Clara into one of the first counties to initiate a sentencing review pilot program. Rosen told Bolts through a spokesperson that the DA’s office has requested resentencing for around 25 people thus far.  

The community organization Silicon Valley De-Bug helps petition the DA’s office for the release of people with long sentences under the new program. Its founder, Raj Jayadev, told Bolts that the DA’s office began by mainly considering people without sentencing enhancements or charges considered violent. “We knew that our position and the district attorney’s version of who should be home would be starting from very different places,” he told Bolts, clarifying that reform efforts often “end up at this point where they will exclude people with violence charges or gang enhancements.” (Rosen’s office did not respond to a request to clarify the program’s scope). Still, Jayadev credited Rosen’s office with “starting to expand” its definition of who is eligible, noting that the resentencing program ultimately led to the release of two people with higher-level convictions after De-Bug advocated on their behalf. 

But Jayadev also cautioned that Rosen’s broader record is not in line with these efforts. “I’ve seen actions taken by his office that are very counter to a larger reform movement in California,” he said. (Jayadev has endorsed Khan in his private capacity; De-Bug does not endorse candidates.) 

In characterizing his approach to criminal justice reform, Rosen has said he strives to achieve a balance between reevaluating the sentences of those who’ve turned around their lives in prison and the aggressive prosecution of “murders, rapists, gangsters, [and] child molesters.” 

LaDoris Cordell, a retired state trial judge who has worked alongside Rosen and endorsed Khan, told Bolts that she finds many of Rosen’s policies inconsistent with his public persona. “You cannot claim to be a DA who cares about being progressive and oppose a bill that says you should not try 14- and 15-year-olds as adults,” she said. “They’re not compatible.” She further rebuked Rosen for a 2016 law he spearheaded that required a mandatory minimum prison sentence in cases of sexual assault of an unconscious victim. The law followed a public outcry over a judge’s perceived leniency in the case of Brock Turner, a Stanford student convicted of rape and sentenced to six months in jail followed by three years of probation. A mandatory minimum law, Cordell said, is “undoubtedly going to impact defendants of color more than it will white defendants.” 

Rosen has framed the mandatory minimum law as reflective of a societal shift in consciousness around the need to tackle sexual violence. In 2016, Khan defended Turner’s sentence and decried the new mandatory minimum law, writing in an editorial that “robotic, one-size-fits-all punishment schemes” will “disproportionately impact the underprivileged and minorities in our communities.”  

Khan’s stance on the matter may likewise prove to be a liability as a candidate. The leader of the movement to recall Turner’s sentencing judge has been sharply critical of Khan since he jumped into the race. This past August, Khan apologized for his language in the editorial, which, he wrote, “does not reflect my evolved views on how to discuss sexual violence,” while standing by the arguments he’d made about sentencing, rehabilitation, and race. Reflecting on his views more broadly, Khan told Bolts that he favors “a real investment in services and in holistic treatment of people—as opposed to what we’ve come to do, which is defining justice by months in jail and years of incarceration.” 

Just a decade ago, it would have been unlikely for someone with Khan’s background to run for prosecutor. But candidates like him are no longer anomalous. Other young public defenders have leveraged their outsider status to mount successful bids for DA, from Austin to San Francisco.

For a long time, Khan told Bolts, “I had a very difficult time understanding how running for the DA’s office would be in alignment with my values and pursuit of criminal legal system reform.” But during the 2020 protests, he began to see how running for DA could actually advance the demands for “true transformational change” articulated by local organizers and residents.

Khan now describes his experience representing the accused as an advantage. “Being a public defender for the last over 13 years here in Santa Clara County has given me unique insight into how our system perpetuates mass incarceration, how it perpetuates systemic racism, how it perpetuates police brutality,” he said. 

Khan is “wearing the mantle of a Chesa Boudin,” said Robert Weisberg, the faculty co-director of Stanford University’s Criminal Justice Center, referring to the former public defender who is now the San Francisco DA. “Rosen has sort of protected that flank by being, if not a radical, ‘progressive’ DA, a fairly liberal reformer,” Weisberg said, adding that the DA is “very, very good at promoting what his office does.”

But Rosen is now largely outflanked to the left by Boudin and other high-profile counterparts, like George Gascón in Los Angeles. Both DAs have instructed their staff prosecutors not to use some sentencing enhancements that can significantly increase prison sentences, for instance, and both have ended the prosecution of minors as adults.

Rosen has rejected taking either of those steps. While he supported a 2012 ballot initiative that narrowed the state’s Three Strikes statutes, and has written about the overuse of sentencing enhancements, his office has continued to file some enhancements over alleged gang affiliations or prior convictions . “We are very selective and careful about when we charge an enhancement under the Three Strikes Law and only do that for individuals who have repeatedly committed serious and violent crimes that endanger the community,” Rosen told Bolts through a campaign spokesperson.

The DA’s office currently charges 16- and 17-year olds as adults, and it only stopped prosecuting 14- and 15-year olds as adults when state law was changed to forbid it. Rosen continued to defend the practice afterward. “If we’re going to ask for 14- or 15-year-olds to be tried as an adult, it’s a horrendous crime,” he told Imprint in 2019.  “It’s someone we think is a psychopath.” (Rosen told Bolts through a spokesperson that since 2017, his office has only requested for 13 minors to be charged as adults.)

Khan rebuts that perspective. Beyond wanting to put a categorical end to the prosecution of minors in adult court, he told Bolts that he would work to create restorative justice programs and expand diversion opportunities for youth up to age 25, in recognition of research showing that the parts of the brain responsible for impulse control keep developing into the mid-twenties. He also said he would advocate to raise the age of qualification for juvenile court beyond 18, as other states are considering. Khan told Bolts that he’s running “so that we have a DA that honors individuals’ capacities for redemption and rehabilitation—that doesn’t define people, especially young people, by their worst moments.” 

Christian Haro Cotero, the teenager whose case spurred Khan to advocate for statewide youth justice reforms, was released in 2021 after spending seven years and three months in prison. His mother, Veronica Haro, said that he matured a lot in those years. Still, the experience of growing up inside prison has left its mark. “There’s a lot of injustice in those places,” she told Bolts, “they treat them horribly.”While incarcerated, Christian spent two years in a firefighting training program called Pine Grove, the last “fire camp” for incarcerated youth in the state. There, Veronica said, “they only paid $2 dollars an hour—while he was risking his life and his health.” Today, Christian is 21, and he’s hoping to become a professional firefighter. But many people who fight fires while incarcerated struggle to find work once released. “We just hope to god that they’ll give him an opportunity,” Veronica told Bolts.

The post Longstanding Grievances Between Prosecutor and Public Defender Boil Over in California DA Race appeared first on Bolts.

Washington State is now presenting a blueprint for how progressives can shield themselves and even amp up civil rights protections beyond what federal courts are willing to extend.

Its state Supreme Court last week issued a landmark ruling that bars mandatory sentences of life without parole for anyone under the age of 21. This decision is a judicial milestone in moving past the cutoff age of 18 that the U.S. Supreme Court established in its federal rulings. 

That decision came on the heels of another sweeping ruling, issued two weeks earlier, that struck down the state’s statutes criminalizing drug possession. The wide scope of the drug possession decision stunned even reform advocates who hoped for a favorable ruling. It has made drug possession effectively legal in the state, retroactively; the ruling is now forcing state and local officials to cease arrests, drop ongoing cases, and vacate old convictions.

For people who are wary of the federal judiciary’s rightward turn, these decisions may signal a path forward.

The Washington Supreme Court grounded its two new rulings in part on the state constitution’s due process clause and on its ban on “cruel punishments.” Federal courts tend to not review such interpretations, showing off what advocates have to gain by pursuing claims in state courts and strategizing on how to win there. 

The decisions also crystalize the stakes of who sits on state benches, even if the scrutiny around the selection of these judges pales in comparison to federal battles.

“It is hard to miss what I call the Trumpification of federal courts,” said Daniel Greenfield, an attorney at the MacArthur Justice Center. “Increasingly, there’s a feeling among civil rights litigators and other lawyers and organizations interested in challenging the criminal legal system that the focus has been on federal courts for too long, and that there’s another potent tool that ought to at least be tried. That doesn’t mean that important gains can’t be made in federal courts, … but there are these 50 other court systems, all of which have a duty to vindicate the rights of their citizens.” 

Some of these courts have “untapped potential” for civil rights litigation, he added. These judges shape the landscape on voting rights, criminal justice, labor rights, and more.

On Washington’s highest court, at least, a progressive bloc may now be consolidating. This shifting balance of power is clarifying that this is not just a matter of which party has more judges. On this liberal-leaning court, distinctions are emerging based on how broadly judges are interpreting rights and how willing they are to rock the boat when faced with violations.

Both decisions came in narrow 5-4 rulings that broke along the same lines. In each case, the controlling side was made up of the five most recent justices to join the court. Two of them were appointed just last year by Governor Jay Inslee—appointments that at the time raised the possibility that the court may swing toward bolder outcomes on criminal justice cases. They then won elections in November and clinched the majorities in these two 2021 rulings.

“This last year has been pretty extraordinary, and it’s heartening,” said Mary Kay High, a public defender who is chief deputy in Pierce County’s Department of Assigned Counsel. “Those are elected judges, and I applaud the courage of putting their names on a decision that may be controversial,” she added, pointing to law enforcement’s mobilization against the rulings.

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The Washington Supreme Court is not new to the business of overturning sentencing statutes. In the fall of 2018, it struck down the death penalty and barred all life without parole sentences for youth under 18. But with those rulings, the court was playing catch-up to standards set in other states. It made Washington the 20th state to abolish capital punishment and the 21st to end juvenile life without parole.

The rulings issued over the last month, by contrast, showed off a newfound willingness to forge ahead and set benchmarks for the rest of the country. 

The court’s evolution, fueled by the arrival of the two new justices, is evident compared to what happened almost exactly one year ago. In January 2020, a justice who had dissented in the 2018 case ending juvenile life without parole retired and was replaced with Raquel Montoya-Lewis. Even with that switch, the votes were still not there for those justices looking for a bolder path. In March, as the pandemic was spreading, all nine justices agreed that law enforcement should reduce unnecessary arrests to shield people from COVID-19 in jails, but they split 5-4 on how much to restrict arrests. The majority, which included judges who were part of the 2018 rulings, took a narrower approach. But now they faced a minority—made-up of Montoya-Lewis, Steven González, Sheryl Gordon McLoud, and Mary Yu—that was urging them to go even further.

Within weeks, the court’s membership changed again. Charles Wiggins, one of the five justices in the majority in that COVID-19 ruling, retired. Inslee replaced him with Helen Whitener, whose arrival flipped the balance between the two camps exposed by that pandemic decision. 

In both of the court’s new rulings on life without parole and drugs, the majority consisted of Whitener plus the four justices who argued that last year’s COVID-19 ruling was too timid. 

First, on Feb. 25, this five-member majority struck down the statute that criminalized drug possession. “Our state constitution’s due process clause provides even greater protection of individual rights [than the federal clause] in certain circumstances,” the court wrote.

State lawmakers are now considering whether, and how, to replace the overturned statute. Some have proposed criminalizing drug possession again, but reform advocates want the state to reckon instead with the failures of the war on drugs. Just four months ago, a ballot initiative made neighboring Oregon the first state to decriminalize drug possession. 

This decision was made on narrow grounds in that the court did not take issue with the broad aim of punishing drug possession. It took issue instead with a rare feature of state law: Washington convicted people without having to prove that they were aware they had drugs. 

But the problem’s specificity only underscores the boldness of the court’s choice to issue a sweeping remedy and overturn the statute in its entirety, which voided thousands of convictions. Courts, much like lawmakers, are often sensitive to arguments that it is just not practical to repair rights violations and that bringing finality to cases justifies ignoring the past, so they refuse to make changes retroactive. But not this time.

Reform advocates are delighted that the majority was undaunted by concerns that it would be too much of a burden to ask the state’s legal system to fix the unjust harm it has caused. 

“While it may strike some lawmakers and law enforcement as burdensome, it is only the beginning of what is required to deliver true justice to our communities,” said Kendrick Washington II, the youth policy counsel at the ACLU of Washington 

High echoed this assessment. “Do we really think that workload should outweigh a constitutional protection?” she asked.

The life without parole ruling, issued on March 11, will similarly force the state to confront the past and review existing sentences. 

Up to 26 people who are now incarcerated will be eligible for resentencing hearings, according to the Associated Press. Under the ruling, judges can still sentence people ages 18 to 21 to life without parole, but they need to consider factors specific to the individual, and they will have the option to offer another sentence in murder cases where that option did not previously exist. 

Advocates nationwide have been making the case for broadening youth justice by pointing to studies that show people undergo major cognitive development well into their 20s. 

“Washington State’s decision is important in that it ensures that there is consideration of youth,” said Heather Renwick, legal director of the Campaign for the Fair Sentencing of Youth. It recognizes that “nobody on their 18th birthday miraculously wakes up an adult” and “that all young people are capable of positive growth and change.” But, she added, “because it still leaves life without parole as an available sentencing option, there is room for the Washington legislature to take the next step and say that no young person should be sentenced to life without parole.” 

According to Renwick, the March 11 ruling is the first state court decision to extend the federal Supreme Court’s ban on mandatory life without parole for minors to youth beyond the age of 18. That said, some legislatures like in California and Washington, D.C. are increasingly taking even stronger steps in this arena. Just last month, a bill that would have barred life without parole for anyone under 25 passed in South Dakota’s  GOP-controlled Senate, though it eventually died. 

“I suspect that this decision reflects what is to come,” said Renwick, “and I think that it is going to be a combination of state constitutional analysis and state legislatures really thinking about what is age appropriate accountability for young people in their state.”

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The new dividing lines between Washington justices could pave the way for more transformative decisions. And it has observers asking what has fueled the court’s shift. 

When Whitener was appointed last year, High told the Political Report that her background as a defense lawyer was “not the typical path to the bench.” (Gordon McCloud, who wrote the lead opinions in the new life without parole  and drug cases, has worked as a criminal defense lawyer as well.) Whitener, a former prosecutor and trial court judge, has also worked as a public defender, which remains relatively rare for judges. A Political Report analysis in October found that California’s Supreme Court includes three former prosecutors, but that no state justice since the 1980s has been a public defender. Federal appointments have long followed similar patterns.

But California notwithstanding, a new attitude may be spreading to some governors. This week, for his second appointment to the New Jersey Supreme Court, Governor Phil Murphy announced that he had chosen a civil rights attorney and former ACLU of New Jersey staffer, Rachel Wainer Apter. Washington’s justices could also be a model for presidential appointments amid a push to rework who makes the bench. Locally, activism around the power of local judges is growing.

Greenfield warns that until now conservatives have been generally more proactive about organizing state courts.

In recent years, Arizona Republicans expanded the size of the state Supreme Court to drive it to the right; Georgia’s GOP governor maneuvered to cancel multiple judicial elections on the 2020 ballot; and Montana and Pennsylvania Republicans are plotting to overhaul electoral rules and set up gerrymandered judicial maps in hope of grabbing control of the judicial branch.

In addition, it remains challenging for advocates or candidates to explain the stakes of these  appointments and elections—especially in places, such as Washington, where these shifts are about ideological nuances that partisan identification alone cannot manifest. Making elections for local judge salient can be even more difficult despite their vast powers on matters such as bail.

Greenfield, whose litigation focuses on prison conditions, insists that far more can be done to advance civil rights by leveraging the power of state courts. “There’s no reason why, say, Washington can’t afford its citizens greater liberties than is the minimum required by the federal Bill of Rights,” he said. 

And he added that changes in one state can build into a national wave that ends up bigger than the sum of its parts. “If a majority of state courts ultimately hold that, say, prolonged solitary confinement is unconstitutional,” he said, “federal courts would likely take notice of that.”

The post Landmark Rulings Show ‘Untapped Potential’ of State Courts To Advance Civil Rights appeared first on Bolts.

Broward County, Florida, will elect a new prosecutor for the first time since 1976 in November. And it is all but assured that the winner will be a Democrat. Broward—home to Fort Lauderdale, Hollywood, around 2 million people, and the state’s strongest Democratic political machine—virtually always votes blue. But the county has historically been downright hostile to candidates who lean too far left—and friendly to public officials who champion carceral politics.

Joe Kimok, an unabashedly progressive defense lawyer running for state attorney in the Aug. 18 Democratic primary, believes Broward’s typically centrist-Democratic voting bloc is ready to elect a candidate who believes the criminal legal system needs systemic, top-down change. Kimok, who is endorsed by Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont, would stop prosecuting crimes related to sex work, stop charging cases that stem from poverty, and peel back “tough on crime” policies that have been the norm in South Florida for most of the last century.

“I will tell you, when I started campaigning, that was a question that weighed very heavily on me,” Kimok, who is also a former prosecutor, told The Appeal: Political Report this month about the county’s perceived politics. “I assumed I was going to have to go out and educate voters on the problems with the system. But that has not been my experience. On issues, voters seem like they’re there already—or even farther than we are.”

Signaling at least some shift in Broward County’s politics, some of the other seven Democratic candidates also emphasize a desire to change its status quo and bring about some criminal justice reforms, though their platforms are not as far-reaching when it comes to pushing for decarceration.

Perhaps no politician in Broward exemplifies the county’s punitive politics than its chief prosecutor, State Attorney Mike Satz, a stern, 77-year-old, unapologetically tough-on-crime conservative Democrat. Satz is retiring at the end of his term.

Satz was first elected in 1976, when Broward County was still mostly a Southern, white enclave and not an international tourism destination. For nearly five decades, Satz’s tough-on-crime ethos has barely changed. Broward County, for example, has convicted  11 people who were later exonerated —the highest total in the state. (That includes two people who’d been sentenced to death.) Despite the county’s history of wrongful convictions, Satz’s office didn’t create a conviction integrity unit until 2019.

For years, Satz’s loudest critic has been longtime Public Defender Howard Finkelstein, a ponytailed, media-savvy former defense lawyer for drug cartels who turned his life around after getting arrested for crashing his car while carrying cocaine and prescription pills in 1987. Finkelstein has been the county’s top public defender since his election in 2004 and is also retiring this year.

In August 2019, Finkelstein wrote an open letter to Satz accusing him of, among other things, lackadaisically filing death penalty charges, needlessly trying children in adult court, and refusing to discipline Broward sheriff’s department officials who oversaw a countywide crime lab that was caught mishandling DNA evidence and employing at least one person who was investigated for tampering with drug evidence. Satz’s office closed its investigation into that employee without alerting the public.

“We are requesting that you make changes in your office’s procedures to correct institutional failures impacting the fair administration of justice in our community,” the letter stated. (In response, a spokesperson for Satz’s office in 2019 dismissed the criticisms as “recycled old complaints from the Public Defender’s Office that we have responded to in the past” and added that the prosecutor’s and public defender’s offices simply have “differences of opinion regarding public safety.”)

Satz has also been criticized for allowing police brutality to flourish under his watch. During Black Lives Matter marches earlier this year, protesters routinely chanted the name of Howard Bowe, an unarmed man who was killed by Hallandale Beach police officers in 2014. Satz, however, never charged any of the officers involved. Nor did Satz’s office take action after reporting by The Intercept and the Florida Center for Investigative Reporting suggested that Damain Martin, a 16-year-old boy who drowned in a Broward County canal last year, was shot with a Taser by a Sunrise police officer.

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The race to replace Satz is crowded. Satz himself has endorsed Sarahnell Murphy, a current assistant attorney in his office. Former public defender and ex-Coconut Creek Mayor Joshua Rydell leads the pack in fundraising by a significant margin and has been endorsed by a major local police union, the Broward County Police Benevolent Association. 

All of the candidates have indicated in media interviews and their online platforms that they would be less carceral than Satz, but what that would mean in practice varies widely. The Political Report contacted all eight Democratic candidates, but only Kimok and Justin McCormack provided responses to a set of policy questions. 

McCormack, who says on his website that he wants to “stop the revolving door of mass incarceration” and expand pretrial diversion programs, told the Political Report that he  does “not want to make life even more difficult for poor people by saddling them with unnecessary criminal charges.” He also says he would not seek cash bail for nonviolent offenses. 

McCormack declined to take a stand on legalizing or decriminalizing sex work, but he told the Political Report that “our prosecutorial resources would be better utilized reducing the harms associated with sex work, including trafficking, underage workers, and violence.” 

Murphy, the candidate endorsed by Satz, has highlighted her prosecutorial experience, and has proposed few specific policy changes or reforms outside of boosting funding to diversionary programs already in place at Satz’s office and focusing on diversifying staff. 

Harold Pryor, a former prosecutor and current defense attorney, has scored endorsements from many of South Florida’s Black lawmakers and has promised to “change the system from within.” His website outlines some reform positions, with qualifications, such as ending the use of cash bail “for certain non-violent misdemeanor offenses and other non-violent offenses.” He also says he will “eliminate adjudications for Misdemeanor Traffic Offenses and other offenses that are remnants of poverty,” though he did not respond to the Political Report’s question on exactly how he would handle offenses that are related to poverty.

Rydell, the fundraising leader, promises on his website to tackle “mass incarceration,” but his proposals remain comparatively vague, including promises to “reevaluate who we send to jail and why” and “launch an initiative to start examining the costs and benefits for incarceration terms.” He did not reply to the Political Report’s more specific queries. His website says he would not use cash bail for nonviolent offenses, and he would end incarceration over technical parole violations. 

Kimok, by contrast, has outlined the most detailed platform. He pointed the Political Report toward a 44-page proposal explaining how he would handle everything from misdemeanor justice, to juvenile justice, to police misconduct and immigration-related offenses. 

He says he would decline to prosecute a range of offenses, a strategy used by other prosecutors intent on shrinking the scope of the criminal legal system. He says, for example, that he will not prosecute marijuana possession and behaviors related to consensual sex work. 

Many Florida politicians have used the specter of sex trafficking to crack down on consensual sex work—lawmakers created a “Soliciting for Prostitution Public Database” that was severely criticized by sex worker advocates last year—but Kimok instead told the Political Report he doesn’t “believe criminal justice should be involved in those types of cases at all.”

He also says he will not prosecute cases of loitering, trespassing, and panhandling, which are often associated with poverty and homelessness. His promise not to prosecute panhandling is remarkable in Broward County, since the Democrat-dominated Fort Lauderdale city government regularly makes national headlines for repeated crackdowns on homeless encampments. In 2014, for example, the city banned  feeding homeless people and then arrested a 90-year-old activist for distributing food.

When it comes to drugs other than marijuana, Kimok says he will keep drug possession cases within the criminal legal system, but steer them toward treatment or diversion programs. This is a more cautious approach than some other progressives who have won recent elections. In Austin, Texas, the likely next district attorney has pledged to not prosecute any cases of drug possession or sale under one gram, for instance. 

Kimok says he opposes cash bail, and the use of financial conditions for pretrial release, for any offense—a position that is less qualified than his opponents’. And he promised to never direct-file any minor into adult court. Under Florida’s direct file statute, prosecutors can unilaterally decide to charge youth as adults. Because of this unchecked power, Florida sends more youth through the adult court system than any other state. Kimok has said a grand jury should be involved if a minor is to be charged as an adult. 

In addition to Sanders’s endorsement, Kimok has earned support from some of Florida’s prominent activist organizations, including Dream Defenders, a civil rights organization that has led many of the state’s marches during the George Floyd uprisings.

Kimok told the Political Report that although his platform may seem radical now, he’s hoping to start remaking the criminal legal system so that his children can live in a drastically different world.

“My son is biracial,” he said. “I just was scared to death to wake up 10 years from now, with him being a teenager, and see us kind of still live in this same criminal legal system we have now.”

The other Democratic candidates are James Lewis, who has promised to put the “ass[es]” of heroin and fentanyl sellers “in jail,” Teresa Fanning-Williams, and David Cannady. All are current and former prosecutors. The Democratic nominee will face Republican Gregg Rossman and independent Sheila Alu in November—and will be heavily favored in a county where Donald Trump received less than  a third of the vote in 2016.

Explore our coverage of other elections for prosecutor nationwide.

The post Broward County Will Elect Its First New Prosecutor in 44 Years. Will the Office Veer Left? appeared first on Bolts.

It’s been almost two decades since Mario Smith made a decision he deeply regrets. He was 17 years old and impulsive and had been raised in a home marked by poverty and domestic abuse. One day in August 2001, he was caring for a friend’s 9-month-old daughter, who was agitated and upset. He wanted her to stop crying, so he hit her in the stomach. The baby stopped breathing and died from her injuries. Smith was convicted of felony murder, which carried a mandatory sentence of life without parole. 

As he has grown into an adult in prison, he has reckoned with the pain he caused. 

“If I had three wishes, all three would be to take back what I’ve done,” Smith said in a recent phone call with a criminal justice reform advocate that was shared with The Appeal: Political Report. He has completed all the anger management and other educational programs offered to him by the prison, and he hasn’t had a disciplinary infraction in many years. “I did that not because I was forced to, but because it was a choice that I made in becoming a man,” he said on the call.

Smith was one of more than 350 people in Michigan who were sentenced as children to mandatory life without the possibility of parole when, in 2016, a Supreme Court decision compelled prosecutors to reconsider all such sentences on a case-by-case basis. But prosecutors in Michigan have resisted change. 

Wayne County’s Kym Worthy is one of the prosecutors who have taken a hardline approach. When faced with these juvenile lifers’ resentencing hearings, her office originally recommended that courts reaffirm the life sentence in 43 percent of 144 cases, including Smith’s. 

After running unopposed for over a decade, Worthy is facing a stiff challenge in the Aug. 4 Democratic primary from a criminal defense lawyer who opposes all juvenile life without parole sentences.

Victoria Burton-Harris, Worthy’s first primary challenger since she was appointed in 2004, is campaigning on a promise to end juvenile life in prison. She told the Political Report that she views Worthy’s handling of juvenile lifers, and her repeated claims that she is reviewing the cases, as “cruel and callous.”

In a statement, Worthy told the Political Report that her office has held 95 resentencing hearings for juvenile lifers, and 64 of them have been released.

“My office has been working diligently to ensure that each and every juvenile murderer convicted in Wayne County receives an individualized sentencing hearing,” she said. “We can only go as quickly as the defense and the courts will allow.” 

When Smith’s sentence was up for reconsideration in 2018, Worthy’s office filed a motion seeking a new sentence of life without parole. Smith’s public defender eventually negotiated with Worthy’s office, and Smith agreed to a 30-year minimum settlement, which means he will be locked up until at least 2031. At his resentencing hearing, a judge praised his efforts to rehabilitate himself and said he would be a great asset to his community. 

“My thing is, if I’m a great asset today, why must I wait another 11 years before I’m able to show that?” Smith said in his call with Jacqueline Williams, a program associate with American Friends Service Committee’s Michigan Criminal Justice Program who routinely speaks with incarcerated people and shared recordings of the calls with the Political Report.

Since Smith was sent to die behind bars, the law on the sentencing of children has changed significantly. Based on a growing understanding of children’s brains, the U.S. Supreme Court outlawed mandatory life sentences without the possibility of parole for minors in 2012. (The Court left the door open for minors to receive life without parole at the discretion of judges, who often listen to prosecutors’ recommendations, in cases that reflect “irreparable corruption” rather than “transient immaturity.”) In 2016, the Court made that decision retroactive, ruling that people who automatically received life without parole sentences as children need to be given a “meaningful opportunity” for release and prompting dozens of states to hold resentencing hearings.

As of last year, nearly 200 of Michigan’s juvenile lifers are still waiting for resentencing. Together, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Louisiana now account for about two-thirds of juvenile life without parole cases, according to the Sentencing Project.

In 2016, when Michigan’s prosecutors had to submit resentencing recommendations, they requested continued life sentences for 66 percent of the state’s juvenile lifers, according to a Detroit Free Press analysis. 

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Worthy’s challenger, Burton-Harris, told the Political Report that, if she were elected prosecutor this year, she would upend the incumbent’s approach. “It is not acceptable, no longer an option, that we resentence to life,” she said.

She said she would make it a priority to bring relief to juvenile lifers and recommend that they be granted a new sentence that would allow for a release. “I’m committed to not just reviewing them but bringing them home,” she said. The only instance in which she would consider resentening to life in prison is if a person has committed new murders in prison while an adult.

Moreover, she said she would also revisit old resentencing cases and in instances where Worthy’s office objected or opposed, she would instruct her prosecutors to change the office’s position. 

“It would be a written policy,” she said. “All cases that have been previously decided need to be reopened and reviewed.” 

If she were at the helm of the DA’s office, her prosecutors would never seek life without the possibility of parole sentences against minors in future cases. “THERE IS NOTHING A CHILD CAN DO TO JUSTIFY DEATH BY INCARCERATION!” she told the Political Report in an email. “We are not the worst thing we’ve ever done, and people age out of crime. Prosecutors have a responsibility to protect our children, ALL children. All people have value.” 

She says she looks forward to advocating for a state law that rules out life without the possibility of parole sentences for children, as 23 states and the District of Columbia have already done.

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When Worthy assumed office in 2004, she became the first Black female county prosecutor in Michigan. Early in her tenure, she gained national recognition as an advocate for justice when she led the prosecution of Detroit Mayor Kwame Kilpatrick. Since then, she has been praised for clearing Wayne County’s backlog of rape kits and securing murder convictions for instances of police brutality. This year, she was endorsed for re-election by prominent figures like Governor Gretchen Whitmer. 

But criminal justice reform advocates have long criticized her stance on locking children up for life. Before the Supreme Court made its decision on mandatory juvenile life sentences retroactive, Worthy argued against it, saying it would force families of crime victims to relive the tragedies. After it became retroactive, she continued to seek life sentences. Even her predecessor, former Wayne County prosecutor John O’Hair, who led the office during a time when 90 minors were locked up for life, has said that after the Supreme Court rulings, “it’s hard to imagine that a prosecutor would blithely seek life sentences again.”

Worthy’s continued desire for life sentences comes despite the known racial disparities in her county’s juvenile lifer population. Although Black people make up roughly 40 percent of Wayne County’s population, more than 90 percent of the people serving juvenile life without parole sentences were Black, according to data from 2016.

Even in cases where her office is seeking resentencing to a term of years, Worthy has been slow to file the motions, saying that the office needed time to review all of the case files, be thorough, and contact the victims. And when questioned, she won’t address the delay, said Rai LaNier, Wayne County director with Michigan Liberation Action Fund, a Michigan Liberation Action Fund, a PAC that advocates for criminal justice reform and has endorsed Burton-Harris

“She does what I like to call crime porn,” Lanier said of Worthy. “As soon as you get her up against the ropes, she wants to tell you about how a 7-year-old laid an iron on somebody. It’s always the details of the case. She hasn’t been willing to address the fact that we have the largest caseload of these LWOP cases [in Michigan].”

“It’s a blatant disregard for the highest court in the land,” Lanier added. 

Machelle Pearson is a juvenile lifer from Washtenaw County who was resentenced and released on parole in 2018 and is now an advocate for reform. She says she worries for others who will not get a fair chance at justice because of prosecutors like Worthy. 

“We want her out of office,” Pearson said. “She feels like she’s been in office so long that she’s untouchable by law, she’s untouchable by the citizens that actually vote her in there.”

As someone who is prevented from voting because he is incarcerated, Smith said Worthy feels even more untouchable.

“Once you are a convicted felon and are serving time in prison, I can no longer vote for Kym Worthy, meaning I’m no longer useful to her,” Smith said in the recording. 

His anger at the legal system is even higher now, as the coronavirus spreads rapidly through prisons across the country. In April, 60-year-old William Garrison, a juvenile lifer who was resentenced and was scheduled to come home from prison in May after nearly 44 years, died of COVID-19 in a state prison. His sister had prepared a room for him in her home and was eagerly awaiting his return.  

“He died during the pandemic because [Worthy] took too long to let him out,” Burton-Harris said. “He died waiting to come home after a decision had been made in his favor.” 

Tina Olson, the Juvenile Lifer Unit manager at the State Appellate Defender Office, said the pandemic has made her office’s representation of juvenile lifers more important than ever. “We feel an added urgency to achieve results for our clients,” she said. 

Smith, who has asthma, said he worries that he will also fall victim to the disease.

“Hopefully we all make it through this,” Smith said. “Unfortunately that’s wishful thinking because there are going to be casualties of this pandemic. Hopefully I have my second chance. I was a former juvenile and they gave me a second chance, but possibly I won’t see it.”

Explore our coverage of 2020 prosecutorial elections throughout the country.

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