The use of the death penalty in Utah County, a majority Republican county that’s the second most populous in Utah, had been rare when Leavitt took office in 2019, two years after the Baum murders. The last time a Utah County attorney had sought the death penalty was in 1984, when prosecutors pushed for the exections of Ron and Dan Lafferty, who had been charged with capital murder for the killings of their sister-in-law Brenda Lafferty and her 15-month old daughter, Erica. (Dan was sentenced to life in prison, where he remains, while Ron died of natural causes on death row.)

As the Baum prosecution got underway, Leavitt, a Republican, assigned four full-time prosecutors to the case. But then he quickly saw how they detracted from other prosecutions. At the start of the Baum case, Leavitt said his office was handling 17 homicide prosecutions and around 230 cases involving sex crimes. Typically, Leavitt said, each prosecutor in his office would work more than 100 cases. 

Leavitt eventually decided that seeking death was no longer worth it, announcing last September, that he would take the death penalty off the table in Baum’s case and never again seek the ultimate punishment, saying it deterred him from his ultimate goal of public safety. 

“My commitment to you when I took office was to focus our efforts on community protection rather than on methods of the past that have long since proven ineffective,” Leavitt said in a statement at the time. “Focusing on ALL victims by no longer seeking the death penalty advances that commitment.” In April, a jury convicted Baum of aggravated murder. Leavitt’s office argued for four consecutive life sentences without the possibility of parole, and a jury agreed during Baum’s sentencing last week. By not seeking the death penalty, Leavitt says his office only had to assign two lawyers to the case instead of four, and estimated the trial was shortened by about three months. 

“The doctrine of limited government is that government acts only to the extent necessary to get the job done,” Leavitt told Bolts in an interview. “But what is the job? The job in this case is protecting society. And we can protect society far better with life in prison without parole than we can with the death penalty.” 

In recent years, conservative politicians across the country have joined in Leavitt’s thinking, shifting from once zealous proponents of capital punishment to supporters of limiting and ending the practice. Leavitt, however, may be the only known conservative prosecutor to have done so. He has been lauded as a trailblazer among the nation’s conservative groups fighting to end the death penalty, who typically frame their stance as pro-life, fiscally responsible, and in line with limited government. 

But at home, his move sparked a heated political battle: the county’s commissioners have voted in favor of abolishing the death penalty, while the Fraternal Order of the Police and a group of former prosecutors issued a vote of no confidence in Leavitt. 

Leavitt’s pivot away from the death penalty might now cost him his job in Utah County. He faces tough competition to keep his seat in Utah’s June 28 Republican primary, up against an opponent who cites his stance on the death penalty and the Baum case in pushing the narrative that Leavitt is soft on crime.

“I think it’s a violation of his oath not to pursue the death penalty in appropriate cases,” Jeff Gray, who is an assistant Utah solicitor general, told the Daily Herald in January. Adam Pomeroy, who currently works under Leavitt as a deputy county attorney and who dropped out of the primary in early June to endorse Gray, told Bolts that Leavitt has “become a rogue prosecutor who simply refuses to follow what the law is.” Pomeroy also called it “completely inappropriate for a county attorney to unilaterally decide, disregard the will of the people and nullify a law he personally disagrees with that usurps the legislative function.”

Before becoming Utah County attorney, Leavitt served as top prosecutor for Juab County from 1995 to 2003. After he lost the 2002 election, he started working in Ukraine and Moldova to reform their criminal justice systems. “In 2018,” Leavitt said, he “realized that I really had very little business traveling 7,000 miles to try and reform someone else’s criminal justice system when my own was falling apart around me.”

After taking office, he first introduced a pre-filing diversion program that would allow people accused of low-level crimes to avoid conviction and prison time by participating in classes, community service, and treatment programs. He also aimed to reduce incarceration for non-violent offenses, and change the office’s charging practices. 

Leavitt was presented with the Baum case his first year in office. Initially, he remembered thinking, “If there was ever a crime that in my estimation warranted the death penalty it is that one.” But the resources and time devoted to the case at the expense of others made him rethink his position. Leavitt said that he also considered that even if the jury sentenced Baum to death, it would be decades before he would be executed, if ever. (The last person Utah executed, Ronnie Lee Gardner, spent nearly 25 years on death row between his conviction and execution, and Utah has not carried out an execution in 12 years.) Leavitt said he also had problems with coercive plea bargaining in capital murder cases and the possibility that an innocent person could be executed at the government’s hands. 

“My evolution with the death penalty really came down to the fact that I realized that the only person that really benefits from seeking the death penalty is me as the elected prosecutor because it makes me look tough on crime,” Leavitt told Bolts. “But at the same time, the prosecutor is spending all the government resources, we’re diminishing the effectiveness of all the other cases in the office.”

He added, “In my mind, the choice was clear. I’m not here to get and stay elected. I’m here to reform the criminal justice system.”

The families of Baum’s victims have criticized Leavitt’s decision to drop the death penalty. “There is no reform for this man. There is no rebuilding,” Amanda Davis, Otteson’s aunt, said of Baum during an interview with local news outlet KSL. “Taking the death penalty off the table makes it, like, he won. He got what he wanted.” 

Leavitt isn’t the only prosecutor in Utah to move away from the death penalty. Shortly after his announcement in September, he was joined by three others, two Democrats and one independent, in an open letter urging the state legislature and Governor Spencer Cox to repeal the state’s death penalty statute. Instead, they favored the introduction of a 45 years-to-life sentence to replace the death penalty, along with the existing punishments for aggravated murder of life without parole and 25 years-to-life. 

Leavitt is part of a growing movement of Republican politicans who are increasingly fueling efforts to end the death penalty. In January, two Republican Utah lawmakers who had formerly supported capital punishment introduced legislation that would prohibit prosecutors from seeking death; the bill failed in committee by a 6–5 vote. In Kentucky, a conservative lawmaker introduced a bill that was signed into law in April that would prevent people with certain mental illnesses from being sentenced to death. Missouri’s legislature is now considering a Republican-sponsored bill that would abolish the death penalty on the grounds that the government cannot be trusted with administering the ultimate punishment. And a bill to end the death penalty in Ohio, which has a Republican governor and legislature, is gaining traction, having gone further than others before it. 

Utah’s conservative activists have not responded positively, though. Pomeroy led with 46 percent of the vote in April’s county GOP convention, a gathering which grassroots activists usually dominate, while Gray had nearly 44 percent. Leavitt won just 10 percent but will appear on the June ballot because of the signatures he collected. 

Regardless of the outcome, Leavitt has already helped change the debate on capital punishment among conservatives, says Demetrius Minor, national manager for Conservatives Concerned About the Death Penalty. “I believe that because of David Leavitt, that could possibly open up the gateway for for other prosecutors to come forward in opposition to the death penalty,” Minor told Bolts. “There’s definitely a shift happening. It’s not a matter of if it’s a matter of when.”

The story has been updated to note that one of the primary candidates dropped out in early June.

The post Utah Prosecutor Tests GOP Appetite for Opposing the Death Penalty appeared first on Bolts.

The filing period for candidates to run for prosecutor closed in five states over the past month, adding clarity to the question of where the midterms may shake up the criminal legal system’s status quo. With primaries looming as early as May, criminal justice reformers are pressing their case from North Carolina’s biggest cities to Omaha and the Portland suburbs.

Public defenders and legal aid advocates are running in Arkansas, Nebraska, and Oregon, enlivening proceedings in places like Little Rock and Salem that have not seen a contested election in decades. In North Carolina, where racial justice protests drew thousands into the streets in 2020, challengers are now running on reform promises. And Utah brings the uncommon sight of a Republican reform incumbent who faces a tough-on-crime challenger. 

But away from those fireworks, the filing deadline is more often than not the end of the road for a prosecutor election, as most races only drew one candidate. In Oregon, whose filing deadline passed on Tuesday, just two of 15 DA elections feature multiple contenders. 

The situation is only slightly less desolate in Arkansas and North Carolina, where filing deadlines passed last week. Roughly one-third of their elections will be competitive this year. In each of Nebraska and Utah, the two most populous counties at least will have contested elections. (In Texas, as Bolts reviewed last month, 76 percent of elections are uncontested this year.)

Still, those elections that will be contested offer rare opportunities to confront local injustices. Arkansas, for instance, has a unique law that criminalizes falling behind on rent, empowering local prosecutors who choose to use it. And North Carolina allows children to be prosecuted at an unusually young age, though the state reformed its statutes last year. 

Below is Bolts’s preliminary guide to the prosecutor elections in those five states.

Arkansas

Larry Jegley has been the prosecutor in the state’s most populous judicial district (Perry and Pulaski counties, home to Little Rock) since 1997, and yet he has never faced an opponent—not once, over eight elections. This year Jegley is retiring, and voters will get a choice for the first time in decades. And it may be a historic election: Alicia Walton is running to become the first Black prosecutor in the history of a district whose population is 37 percent Black.

Walton, a public defender, vows to reform what her website calls a “fundamentally flawed” criminal legal system. Her opponent Will Jones is the chief deputy prosecutor in a neighboring district who worked under Jegley for more than a decade. 

Another public defender, Sonia Fonticiella, is running for prosecutor in the eastern part of the state, in a district that covers Clay, Craighead, Crittenden, Greene, Mississippi and Poinsett counties. She will face deputy prosecutors Martin Lilly and Corey Seats. And in Northwest Arkansas (Madison and Washington counties), incumbent Matt Durrett faces Stephen Coger, who says incarceration is too high in the district and that he would change bail and jail practices, though Coger also attacks Durrett for being too lenient toward people accused of higher-level crimes.

The state has five other contested races, all in smaller jurisdictions (twenty districts drew only one candidate). The full list of candidates is available here.

These are nonpartisan elections scheduled for May 24.

Nebraska

Each of Nebraska’s 93 counties will elect its prosecutor this year, but stakes are highest in the only two counties with at least 100,000 residents with a contested election.

Both races pit a Republican incumbent against a Democratic challenger who proposes some reforms in counties that went for Joe Biden in 2020. In Lancaster County (Lincoln), County Attorney Pat Condon faces Adam Morfeld, a former lawmaker who founded the progressive organization Civic Nebraska and helped lead efforts to expand Medicaid in the state.

But the state’s premier battle is in Omaha: Douglas County Attorney Don Kleine switched to the GOP two years ago after the Democratic Party accused him of furthering white supremacy; he had brought no charges against the man who killed James Scurlock, a Black protester. In November, Kleine will face Democratic challenger Dave Pantos, the former director of Legal Aid of Nebraska, whose platform is largely centered on reform themes.

North Carolina

Mecklenburg (Charlotte) and Wake (Raleigh) counties, each jurisdictions of more than one million people, mirror one another this year. 

In each, a Democratic DA is seeking re-election but must face a defense attorney in the May primary. In Charlotte, challenger Tim Emry has been part of the local coalition Decarcerate Mecklenburg, which has sought to reduce jail population during the COVID-19 pandemic; he faces DA Spencer Merriweather. In Raleigh, Demon Cheston, whose criminal defense practice involves capital punishment cases, is challenging DA Lorrin Freeman. Cheston and Emry are each running on progressive platforms that include never seeking the death penalty and accountability for police officers who lie or commit misconduct. During the Black Lives Matter protests of 2020, Charlotte and Raleigh drew thousands of protesters who demanded action against racial injustice and more accountability for the police. 

Other populous North Carolina districts are hosting competitive DA elections as well.

In Forsyth County (Winston-Salem), the race will come down to the November general election. In this county that voted for Biden by 14 percentage points, Republican DA Jim O’Neill will face Democrat Denise Hartsfield, a retired judge who is also a former prosecutor and attorney with the Legal Aid Society.

There are also Democratic primaries to watch in Buncombe (Asheville), Durham, and Guilford (Greensboro) counties, though some of the candidates who filed do not appear to be running active campaigns as of publication. In Buncombe, the incumbent faces tough-on-crime attacks from at least one challenger.  In Durham, two defense attorneys filed to run against DA Satana Deberry, who has built a reformer profile, rolling out bail reform and clearing thousands of old fines and fees. Deberry testified in Congress earlier this week on behalf of progressive prosecutors. “Stop pretending reform is the real threat to public safety,” she said.

The North Carolina primaries are on May 17th. The full list of candidates is available here.

Oregon

Even by low national standards, Oregon has a striking problem with democracy when it comes to its DAs. It has long been marred by a pattern of DAs resigning shortly before their terms conclude—with governors filling the resulting vacancies by appointing deputy prosecutors who then get to face voters as incumbents. That dynamic struck again in 2022, though only in one county. What’s more shocking is that only two elections out of 15 drew multiple candidates.

At least both of those races offer voters a real choice on the direction of local criminal justice policy.

Populous Washington County, right next to Portland, features a clear-cut divide between DA Kevin Barton and challenger Brian Decker, a public defender who is active in various reform drives and advocates for investing in programs that fall outside the criminal legal system. Barton is attacking Decker’s views as “dangerous” and holding up neighboring Portland, which is led by a reform-minded DA, as a boogeyman. (Barton’s 2018 election featured a similar contrast, and he won with some ease after an uncommonly expensive campaign.) Further south, in Marion County (Salem), public defender Spencer Todd is challenging DA Paige Clarkson, saying he wants to turn the page of “tough on crime” policies. Marion County has not had a contested DA race since at least the 1990s.

Oregon’s DAs are notoriously active in opposing criminal justice reform legislation, making these elections meaningful for statewide policy as well. However a coalition of three reform DAs formed in the wake of the 2020 elections, with the new DA of Multnomah County (Portland) banding together with those of smaller Deschutes and Wasco counties to defend reform bills. But the group is set to lose one of its three members as Deschutes County DA Jon Hummel is retiring. He will be replaced by Steve Gunnels, a longtime prosecutor who is the only candidate who filed. (The Multnomah and Wasco DAs are not on the ballot this year.) 

Oregon’s DA elections are nonpartisan elections that are scheduled for May 17. The full list of candidates is available here.

Utah

David Leavitt is the rare Republican prosecutor who grabs headlines for championing criminal justice reform. As county attorney of Utah County, he established new diversion programs after he came into office, and last fall he announced he would no longer seek the death penalty. “It simply demonstrates our societal preference for retribution over public safety,” he said of capital punishment in a public release. 

Leavitt’s re-election race will test the GOP’s appetite for such changes. He faces Jeffrey Gray, an assistant Utah solicitor general who touts his ties to law enforcementand promises to bring back the death penalty if elected. 

Over in Salt Lake County, Democratic prosecutor Sim Gill triggered a national furor during the Black Lives Matters protests of 2020, filing gang enhancements against protesters accused of spilling red paint in front of his office, which threatened sentences of up to life in prison (the charges were later amended). Protestors were criticizing Gill’s decision to decline charges against officers who killed 22-year-old Bernardo Palacios-Carbajal earlier that year. But Gill is in relatively good shape in his reelection bid this year; he drew no challenger in the Democratic primary, which can be decisive in this blue-leaning jurisdiction. Republican challenger Danielle Ahn has no campaign website or campaign account as of publication.

Utah only has two other contested prosecutor races: one in Washington County where a GOP incumbent faces a Libertarian challenger, and one in the very sparsely populated Grand County.

The primaries will be held on June 28, followed by the November general elections. The full list of candidates is available here.

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