A BFD deal today: Charleston County, in SC, was long run by a very pro-ICE GOP sheriff, but he was ousted in 2020 by a Dem who pledged to cut ICE contracts.
She's keeping that promise today, her first day in office, by terminating the county's contract with ICE's 287(g) program.
The same thing happened Friday in Gwinnett County, GA, a notoriously pro-ICE county: The new sheriff ran on terminating 287(g), & he did so immediately upon taking office.
In October, I did a list of the 12 most important elections for immigration & ICE cooperation. These two, of course, were on it. theappeal.org/politicalrepor…
You know of this new DA, Deborah Gonzalez, if you’ve been following me: she won a runoff in a race that almost didn’t happen after Brian Kemp tried to cancel it.
I reported last month Gonlazez was among a wave of new DAs who ran on never seeking the death penalty. (Hence why I focused on that in first tweet: memo says a lot else.) theappeal.org/politicalrepor…
George Gascon in LA has also confirmed this policy since taking office in December.
The big "gasp"-inducing allegation in this story is that... Gascon, LA's new DA, is communicating & "working with defense attorneys."
That some think of this as a bombshell really says a lot about how messed-up the metrics & conventions of the current criminal legal system.
This is the second story in as many weeks where a deputy prosecutor has been apopletic over collaboration between the prosecutor's office & a defender's office. See below.
Local judges are key punitive cogs in mass incarceration. But in 2020 they were rumblings of change: activism, reform candidates, & then—big results!
But this remains neglected. We at @TheAppeal were intent on chronicling more of this "flip the bench" movement. A thread on 2020:
1️⃣ There was 🔥 in New Orleans: A group of 7 current & former public defenders ran for judge, with the stated goal of using the vast discretion of judicial offices to fight mass incarceration.
2️⃣ New Orleans's Nov. elections came a few months after something of a "dress rehearsal": New Orleans husing activists used a summer judicial election to put heat on power of local judges to do something about the eviction crisis, & their powers.
A staff prosecutor in Los Angeles says prosecutors have come together to reject implementation of policies that the newly-elected DA ran on for a year, and then reiterated on his first day in office.
Much like DAs used to resist & sue reform iniatives & laws.
Eye-opening to what makes it toweringly difficult task to fight mass incarceration: many elections show voters reject tough-on-crime politics, over and over — but staff prosecutors (& police unions) retain a lot of power to stymie efforts, ignore results, threaten over new laws.
See also: how badly prosecutors & police unions misfired in NY this year; results of many DA & sheriff races in recent years; and the results of CA’s Prop 20, a rollback of sentencing reforms CA voters roundly rejected even as it had fearmongering support from many prosecutors.