Hamilton County District Attorney Neal Pinkston owes the Chattanooga Times Free Press an apology. But mostly, he owes the community a bit more cooperation.
Pinkston spent about two hours on Chattanooga talk radio this week maligning the paper and claiming a story about his reluctance to zealously prosecute cases brought under the city's Violence Reduction Initiative was not accurate, taken out of context and even a fabrication.
The story was none of those things, and the newspaper stands by all aspects of the story that was reported and written by Shelly Bradbury and Zack Peterson.
The VRI is based on criminologist David Kennedy's anti-crime program - a program in which police partner with state and federal prosecutors to make sure the penalties are as stiff as possible for targeted gang members who continue to act violently. The key phrase here is "as stiff as possible," and that is usually accomplished by stacking charges against a perpetrator.
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For instance, John Doe robs a jewelry store after he pulls a gun from his pocket. On the way out, he smashes a window. When he is caught after a car chase, police will charge him with aggravated robbery (aggravated because he used a gun), possession of a stolen weapon (if appropriate), evading police, vandalism and anything else officers can tack on - possession of marijuana if they find it, or resisting arrest. There are plenty of possibilities. And if the robber had previous convictions, that's gravy.
The DA's part in the VRI verbal bargain is to prosecute as many of those cases as there is proof to support instead of taking the easy road of a guilty plea to just the aggravated robbery - or plea-bargaining the aggravated robbery charge down - and dropping the rest of the cases. That's the way penalties are usually stiffened against any perpetrator, not just those charged by Chattanooga officers targeting gang violence under the VRI.
But 19 months and 251 criminal cases after VRI was adopted here, Pinkston tried to hide behind terminology and rhetoric.
"We support VRI," Pinkston told our reporters last week. "[But] just because the city has a crime initiative, that doesn't change the way we prosecute cases. The rules are already set for us. We can't give anybody increased punishment just because they were arrested as part of the VRI. But if [police] bring that to our attention then yeah, we see that, but we can't add on to what they would serve or not."
No one expects him or anyone in his office to "add on" punishment just because charges are brought under VRI. And he knows this full well. After all, he was the assistant DA quoted in a 2008 sentencing hearing story about Michael "Mike Mike" Daniels, a 22-year-old convicted of orchestrating a gang retaliation killing here in 2006.
Daniels was convicted of first-degree murder and conspiracy to commit murder. He was sentenced to life for the murder conviction but could be paroled after 51 years. The prosecutor's office wanted the judge to make the 23-year-sentence for conspiracy to be served after the murder sentence, rather than concurrently.
"Mike Mike has an extensive prior record that can come into consideration," Pinkston said at the time. "The juvenile record comes into play as well. There was a federal gun conviction, a felony theft and between eight and nine prior misdemeanor convictions."
Pinkston was elected in August 2014 after his boss, Bill Cox, announced his retirement. But Pinkston knew as early as Feb. 20 that he would be Hamilton County's new DA. The unopposed Republican candidate was the only applicant for the seat as the noon filing deadline passed. Chattanooga began the VRI program on March 31, 2014, after weeks of discussion and a demonstration enforcement action that resulted in 25 arrests. Not until May did more arrests begin trickling in. If Pinkston had problems with the VRI strategy, he had plenty of time to talk to Mayor Andy Berke or police before the next seven enforcements and arrests built over a year and half to the 251 cases now pending.
Pinkston is completely right that prosecutors cannot act outside the law and "add on" punishment. But within the law they have ranges of punishment time they may ask a judge to impose, even for a single crime. Further, prosecutors have the latitude of deciding whether to take a case to the grand jury, and whether to pursue a case or just ask the judge for a dismissal, based on lack of evidence, for instance.
Chattanooga has had a growing gang problem since at least the late 1980s. When The Chattanooga Times wrote a series about youth gangs in the inner city, then-city officials scoffed and dismissed our gangs as "wannabes." In the following decade, those wannabes grew up. By 2006, another series of stories in the Times Free Press reported that federal officials had weighed in with more than $1 million in programs called Weed and Seed and Project Safe Neighborhoods. Most of the funding went to hire additional federal prosecutors and pay for police overtime.
Yet not until now has there been a local concentrated effort to deal both with gang violence and with the problems that feed gang culture. Andy Berke's initiative and Police Chief Fred Fletcher's leadership with the VRI is both laudable and long overdue.
Perhaps Pinkston and his office feel at risk with a program that seeks high accountability. On one hand, come his next election year in 2022, some in the community might see his part in VRI as targeting minorities. On the other hand, cases languishing and being dismissed might bring complaints of not being tough enough on crime. The last annual report of the Tennessee Judiciary shows that in fiscal 2014, 52 percent of Hamilton County criminal dispositions were dismissals and 5.6 percent were guilty pleas made to lesser charges. Another 3 percent resulted in pretrial or judicial diversion.
We need every tool in the box to combat crime - especially systemic gang violence. The Hamilton County District Attorney's office is one of those tools, and Pinkston might have spent his two hours on talk radio more productively.