It often seems like the people who face the most serious charges in court have been there before, and the Alamance County District Attorney’s Office is now focusing its efforts on a few dozen people deemed threats to the community.
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That is a fairly new idea, so whether or not it becomes controversial remains to be seen. What is controversial is District Attorney Sean Boone blaming bail reform for an increase in crimes committed while defendants are out on pretrial release.
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"This is a misguided policy that goes against the research showing that pretrial detention actually makes our communities less safe,” according to Katherine Hubbard, Deputy Director of Litigation at Civil Rights Corps, one of the groups that pushed Alamance County’s bail reform. “Data from jurisdictions that have enacted bail reforms shows that we can safely reduce pretrial detention and reliance on money bail while keeping court appearance rates high and re-arrest rates low."
The district attorney’s office and county law enforcement agencies made a list of 64 local people considered “community threat offenders” based on their criminal records and gang affiliations. District Attorney Sean Boone does not shy away from the proposition that his office is targeting the people on this list.
“That’s a fair way to look at it. Offenders do not have a right to a plea bargain; they do not have a right to take advantage of failures in the system or gaps in the system,” Boone said. “We are making sure that some people have intense prosecutorial supervision if you will.”
The court system traditionally focuses on individual cases, meaning it treats a misdemeanor offense heard in district court separately from felonies in superior court.
Community threat offenders fall into one or more of three categories, according to a release Boone posted on his district attorney’s office Facebook page, “violent chronic offenders, street group offenders, and emerging threat offenders.”
The first group is based on criminal records, and 55% of these offenders have felony records. The second relies more on the assessment of law enforcement agencies of who is known or believed to be part of gangs and includes 80% of the community threat offenders.
Emerging threats, Boone said, are generally younger than 25 and have not necessarily been convicted of serious crimes but demonstrate a combination of factors like being charged with a serious but low-level crime like carrying a concealed firearm, which is a misdemeanor, having gang affiliations and a pattern of increasingly more serious offenses like graduating from property crimes to something like misdemeanor assault. 75% of these offenders have gun-related “contacts or convictions,” according to Boone.
“It’s not a scientific test, obviously, but it was something that allowed us to identify the threat level of the individuals,” Boone said.
Boone’s office assigned assistant district attorneys to track each of these community threat offenders and handle their cases in every aspect of the legal system from traffic court to probation hearings. That will make sure offenses don’t fall through the cracks, and prosecutors know enough about offenders to argue for maximum penalties.
As an example, Boone uses a hypothetical of someone charged with misdemeanor shoplifting while on probation for felony larceny. A prosecutor in district court with 300 cases on the calendar wouldn’t necessarily know that and could easily dismiss the case if the defendant returned the property.
“If that case is handled by the same prosecutor, they would understand that that shoplifting case could revoke the probation,” Boone said.
Offenders will either learn to avoid court, Boone said, or end up in prison.
This seems to be a fairly new approach. Boone could not name any other jurisdictions doing it, nor could defense lawyers the Times-News spoke to.
One reason Boone said he adopted the policy is bail reform.
The American Civil Liberties Union and Civil Rights Corps filed a class-action suit against Alamance County in 2019 alleging its bond policy, unchanged since 1995, violated defendants’ constitutional rights. In 2020, the county’s judicial district entered an agreement requiring judges to consider a defendant’s ability to pay when setting bond.
Since that went into effect a little more than two years ago, according to Boone, the number of people charged with a second felony while on pretrial release increased 77% over the average for the three previous years, and the number charged with a new felony while awaiting trial for two or more felonies increased 120%.
Other research on bail reform shows different results, according to Irena Cuomo, a lawyer with ACLU of North Carolina leading the bail-reform suit against the county. A 2018 report from New Jersey showed about 75% of people on pretrial release stayed out of trouble and made their court dates before and after bail reform. Another study showed longer detention was actually linked to a higher incidence of crime when released.
The number of criminal charges filed in Alamance County actually declined by 13% since 2019, and violent felonies declined by 45%, according to the Measuring Justice Dashboard of the Criminal Justice Innovation Lab of the UNC School of Government.
Boone said he did not expect pushback on the policy since it was not tied to demographic factors but which individuals are committing crime and where it is happening, and that the majority of people working and abiding by the law should not have to suffer for a few bent on committing crimes.
“If we can focus on 60 people and improve the lives of thousands,” Boone said, “we’re going to do it.”
This article originally appeared on Times-News: Prosecutors go after repeat offenders, gang members and emerging threats in Alamance County
