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The Norfolk Commonwealth's Attorney, Ramin Fatehi, spoke at the Norfolk Safety Advocacy Group (NSAG) on October 24, 2023. He focused on what the Norfolk Commonwealth's Office does as well as his perspectives on crime and public safety in Norfolk. He also took questions.
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The Norfolk Commonwealth's Attorney, Ramin Fatehi, spoke at the Norfolk Safety Advocacy Group (NSAG) on October 24, 2023. He focused on what the Norfolk Commonwealth's Office does as well as his perspectives on crime and public safety in Norfolk. He also took questions.
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There are two upcoming meetings mentioned in the transcription. The first one is on Monday, October 30th, where the new Chief of Police, Chief Mark Talbot, will be speaking about safety in Norfolk. The second meeting is on Tuesday, November 21st, where Calvin Williams of the My2K Foundation will be discussing his group's work of safely escorting children from the bus stop to their homes. The speaker, Ramin Fathi, introduces himself as the Commonwealth Attorney and talks about his role in prosecuting felony offenses in the city of Norfolk. He also mentions the size and volume of cases handled by his office, as well as his background and experience as a prosecutor. And the next part is that I'm going to share a couple of upcoming meetings that we're having before Mr. Hussey starts. Our next meeting will be on Monday, October 30th from 6 to 7 p.m. at the Aviation Institute of Maintenance. And we're going to have the honor of having the new Chief of Police, Chief Mark Talbot, who's going to be speaking to us. I'm really excited and thankful. We get questions, we get comments, so you're all welcome to come. And then on Tuesday, November 21st from 6.30 p.m. to 7.30 p.m. at the Aviation Institute of Maintenance, we're going to have Calvin Williams of the My2K Foundation. He's going to speak about safety in Norfolk, and I arranged this with him maybe a month ago or so, and sadly it's very pertinent because he's going to be speaking about his group, which they work on getting children from the bus stop to their home. And that's, for some children, a dangerous time, a dangerous period of their day, because then that child who just passed away was arriving home from school, and other children were around, and that's when he was killed. So that's what his foundation does, is they escort children safely to and from the bus stop to home. So that's the end of my opening remarks, and now I want to formally introduce the Commonwealth Attorney, Ramin Fathi. He will be speaking about his office, his position from, like, 6.40 p.m. to 7.10, I don't know, maybe more like 7.15, and then he's going to answer questions around 7.10 or 7.15, and at 7.25 we're going to sort of pause, I'm going to stop the meeting, and we're going to close out. And if anyone has additional questions, just e-mail them to me, and I will forward them to his office as one, and maybe you could respond or your staff could respond, and we can send it to the group, because I know we're probably not going to get to everyone. So thank you so much. Here's what's recording. You can try to aim it toward that. Thank you. Good evening, everyone. Good evening. Great to be here. Thank you for taking time out of your evenings to think about public safety in Norfolk and what we can all do together to make our city a happier and safer place. I'm Ramin Fathi. I am the Commonwealth Attorney. I appreciate Jennifer's warm welcome. It's also nice to see familiar faces, both from the crowd, and I was pleasantly surprised to see both Susan, who's the Assistant Director of our Family Justice Center, and Xavier Lund, one of our senior staffers here, so two longtime colleagues of mine who are doing a lot of very victim-centered and cutting-edge work that we'll talk about in the course of my comments. Or if, like every other lawyer in the world, I've run long, hopefully Susan or Xavier can ask me a question about it and I made sure that I covered that. So I am the Commonwealth Attorney. How many of us grew up in Virginia and have lived most of our lives in Virginia? Okay, so we have a mix. Virginia has to call everything by a different name. For folks who grew up elsewhere, we're called district attorneys. The DA is what you see on television, and our functions are similar to but not exactly the same as what you might have seen on television. In Virginia, we tend to cover smaller areas than DAs do in other parts of the country, and our duties are defined a little bit differently. So I am one of 120 elected prosecutors for the 8.5 million people in Virginia. I am out of our 133 cities and counties. Nearly everyone elects their own prosecutor, with a few exceptions. That means that Fairfax County, with a population of 1.2 million people, and Land County, where my wife grew up, which I just came back from yesterday, population 6,200, no stoplights, also one Commonwealth Attorney. I run, depending on the day and depending on whose city or county has supplemented them and given them more lawyers, I'm somewhere around the fourth or fifth largest prosecutor's office in Virginia. I currently am allotted between the city, the state, and grants 39 prosecutors, including myself, and then a staff of a number that fluctuates, roughly 50 when you count interns. An all-office email will include somewhere between 90 and 95 people. The staff will include victim-witness advocates who are available to help victims through the court process. We have one of the largest contingents of victim-witness assistants, victim advocates in Virginia. It also includes paralegal secretaries and, as I mentioned, interns, either college or law school interns. The portfolio that the Virginia Constitution and that our statutes give my colleagues and me is to prosecute felony offenses committed within our jurisdiction. So, for me, felony offenses that are committed within the city of Norfolk. And a felony in Virginia is a crime that carries a theoretical maximum punishment that is over one year. So, anything from life in prison without parole, since Virginia is the first state in the South to do away with the death penalty, something for which I campaigned. So, anything up to life without parole and going down to the potential of one year in prison or more. Misdemeanors carry a jail sentence of 12 months or less. The volume and variety of cases in Norfolk is pretty substantial compared to a lot of other cities. We handle a significant amount of violent crime compared to a lot of other places of similar size. And we handle a larger volume period. That's one of the things that draws people to work in this city, as prosecutors or as staff. And it means that, in addition to running one of the largest offices in Virginia, I run one where we have a lot of people getting a lot of experience very quickly. And if you reach out to any office in southeastern Virginia, there are alumni of the Norfolk office who are in senior positions, including elected Commonwealth's attorneys in central Virginia, the elected clerk of court in Albemarle County, and federal and state prosecutors around the country. I'm very proud of our office's legacy of being the big leagues where people learn how to do this work. I, myself, have been Commonwealth's attorney now for one year, ten months, and 26 days. One of the swag pieces you get as Commonwealth's attorney is you get a special license plate with a number on it. And it starts out at 120 for where we fell off the turnip truck the day before, and goes up to number one, which, up until last year, belonged to a fellow who had been elected in 1978. Now it belongs to a guy who was elected in 1904, so he's a young pup compared to the previous number one license plate holder. I'm currently number 112. I started out at 117, I was super excited to move up five places, but I am a young prosecutor in terms of elected officials. And my colleagues who've done it a lot longer than me said it takes about two and a half years to get your sea legs. I found that I was lucky in that, despite being newly elected, I had been doing the job for a long time. I was one of those kids who got lucky, picked the right parents. I grew up in the north end of Virginia Beach, in Prince Sam Hills and Bay Colony, if you all know those areas. When they gave out the parent card, I picked a dad who's a nurse surgeon, a mother who's a master's in nursing. So I grew up with the advantages that allowed me to go straight from high school to college, and straight from college to law school. So that means that even though I've been in office one year, ten months, and 24 days, I've been a lawyer for 20 years now. This is my 20th anniversary of coming out of law school, 23 in a year. And of those years, November the 24th will mark 17 years that I have prosecuted. I spent four years as a prosecutor in the city of Chesapeake, learning, by the way, from two Norfolk alumni. I then spent a year and a half in the United States Attorney's Office in Charlottesville, where I prosecuted everything from people digging ginseng out of the National Forest, to the tree murder, we called it as we were prosecuting, to extraditing a child pornographer who'd had a heart attack in Rome, and nobody in the office had seen an Interpol red notice, and he gave it to me because I'd just arrived, got him extradited, and he's now serving 40 years in prison, to indicting an armored car company in Danville for building MRAPs that they claimed were up-armored. And by up-armored, they meant they were the plastic shifter boot over the hole where the shifter came into the MRAP. So I did a little bit of everything in Charlottesville before moving back to Hampton Roads. I then had the privilege of working in the Norfolk Commonwealth's office since August the 23rd of 2012. And I've done a little bit of everything. I've worked my way up through the ranks. I've been a financial crimes prosecutor, a DUI expert witness prosecutor, a sex crimes prosecutor, a drug prosecutor, a violent crime prosecutor, one of Virginia's first multi-jurisdictional insurance fraud prosecutors, where I've trained people in how to prosecute insurance fraud, and then ultimately ran for office and was elected. I ran on a little bit of a different platform. I am a progressive prosecutor. That puts the hair on the back of a lot of people's necks, because that is a term that has become very politically loaded over the last couple of years. And I hold the term. I don't let other people wrest control of that term away from me. What that means to me and what it means to the lawyers and staff who work in my office every day is that we recognize that the core job of prosecutors is to prosecute, secure the convictions of, and hold accountable people who commit violence. Our number one portfolio is violence. Identifying the people who are committing violence, working with the cards that we are dealt by the community and by the police department, playing them as best we can, and holding accountable and making the community safe by locking up the people who commit violence. It also means being driven by the data. One of the difficult things that I learned, perhaps I should have mentioned this, I didn't start out as a prosecutor. Those three years before, I worked for a Virginia Supreme Court justice. The first woman appointed to the Virginia Supreme Court was my first boss. I worked at a very large law firm in Washington. And then I took a nearly $100,000 pay cut and served as a public defender in the city of Richmond before I became a prosecutor. One of the things that I recognized over the course of my career on both sides of the aisle was that a lot of the decisions that we saw in the criminal justice system were based on the gut instead of based on the data. And that a lot of the very simple answers that people offered, especially people who were running for office, now whether that was to be a prosecutor or to be a legislator or to be a city counselor, were things that they could fit into 10 or 15 seconds. You know, we're going to get tough. We're going to hold people accountable. We're going to keep safe. All of those things sound great, but a lot of the solutions that fit into those sound bites either didn't work or were actually actively counterproductive. And that meant that we saw a lot of efforts, especially during the historic spike in crime that happened in the early 1990s, that led to a whole generation of people being put in jail on our dime, by the way, on our dime, for sentences that didn't actually promote public safety and that the professionals at places like the John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York that studied it actually made us less safe. So for me, as I ran as a progressive prosecutor, as someone who was looking at this, I promised that I would be guided by the data. I also promised that I wouldn't shy away from calling out the mistakes of the past. If you'll forgive me for falling back on sort of dinner table analogies, the things that a neurosurgeon like my dad would have thought were efficacious, medically efficacious 150 or 200 years ago, are things we consider totally barbaric. There was a time when leeches were considered a legitimate medical cure, and if people were sick, the humors were out of balance and you had to bleed them. Mercury was considered medicine. We're talking about things that actively killed people. James Garfield died not from getting shot, but because a bunch of doctors prodded around in him so bad they caught an infection and died. They didn't do that because they were trying to kill the guy. They did that because they didn't understand what actually worked and what didn't work. Actually, they used a metal detector too when he was on an iron bed. Correct. First use of a metal detector on bullets. Yes. Very tragic. If I remember correctly, my 19th century history is not great. Was he the fellow who could write Greek with one hand and Latin with the other at the same time? Oh, I'm not sure, but I think Teddy Roosevelt took over for him, who I think is one of the best presidents we've ever had in the United States. He was a phenomenal president. So what I promised when I ran for office was that I would follow his dad, and that even if that meant that I would take heat, that I would show my work, and I would demonstrate the things that I was doing would help make us safer instead of just offering us the illusion of feeling safe. To give you a couple of examples of how that works, one of the biggest myths in public safety is that the length of a given sentence makes a difference out in the community, that if you ask for a long sentence, it sends a message. The data doesn't back that up. What we see is that to the extent that you can deter any kind of crime, and I would argue that outside of white collar crime, it's actually pretty difficult, because when you're dealing with young people who are mad and shooting at each other, which is the bulk of our violent crime here in Norfolk, or intimate partners who are abusing and killing their supposed loved ones, you're not dealing with people who are flipping through the code book and calculating the Virginia sentencing guidelines as they decide whether they're going to commit their crime. They're not thinking about that. It just doesn't work that way. It's just like they're not sitting there going, well, if I crack my enemy's skull with a pipe, that does not carry a mandatory sentence, but if I shoot them, that carries a three-year mandatory sentence. Which, by the way, you know what crime carries no mandatory sentence? Murder. Yes, there's no mandatory sentence. Well, the idea is that in theory we've got prosecutors, but more than that, we've got judges who should have the presence of mind not to need a mandatory. It's just like, yeah, you kill somebody with a gun, you shouldn't be getting, if it's a murder, you're not supposed to be getting three years. Come on, you should be getting a significantly longer sentence than that. And that will lead me to a different conversation about mandatories, which is mandatories are irrelevant when the person's done something more serious, so all they do is put everybody else in handcuffs when the person actually deserves less time than that. And at that point, you're actually spending a whole bunch of money to lock somebody up for an amount of time that a judge who was appointed by the General Assembly and is theoretically light, smart, and has the experience would say, I would not give you this sentence because it is more than you deserve. But that sort of philosophy, and if you go on my website, I took a page out of the federal government's book, I mean, radical transparency guy. Jennifer and I first got to know each other because Jennifer had a query about how I was handling a certain class of case. And I sat down, and it actually took a little bit of time, but I managed to put together basically sort of muzzling through the data to be able to present her with some information about the work that I was doing. And what that means is if you want to go and see what kind of plea offers we make in any given case, you have to read my mind. You can go on my website, the Commonwealth Attorney's Office website, and you can pull up an 11-page document, single-spaced, that talks about what our overall policies are. But I can boil it down to the price is right. In the price is right, or if you play blackjack, you want to get as close to the correct number as possible. The minute you go over that number, you lose. And this wasn't just my idea or Bob Parker's idea. It's the United States Congress's idea, because that is the instructions that federal judges get out of the federal code, that they're supposed to impose a sentence sufficient but no greater than necessary to vindicate the public interest and to protect public safety. So the price is right. And that's a basic philosophical thing. If you commit a crime, you should serve every day, every month, or every year of what you serve. The minute that you go over that, then you haven't just cost us money. We've wasted human capital and we've committed an injustice. In achieving that idea and working also to make sure that we have only one system of justice, and it's been very interesting, I think all of us from all sides of the political spectrum are starting to hear people talk in the same language. We're hearing people complaining about a two-tiered system of justice, or about you have one kind of treatment if you're one kind of person and another kind if you're another. And that was radical talk from either side of the aisle as little as ten years ago. But that is a perception that has existed in a lot of our communities, especially communities where violence is the most concentrated, for a long time. So in my effort to make sure that we hit the right number and not bust over, in my interest in trying to make sure that people think that I can work as hard as I can to make one system of justice, so whether you pick your parents right, or whether you grew up in the right neighborhood, or whether your uncle knows somebody, doesn't play a part in changing what your sentence is. That's all in that playground of policy. One of the other things that progressives like me do is we believe in looking at people as individuals. We don't reduce them to numbers, we don't reduce them to race, sex, income. We look at them as individuals. And that is everybody, that means everybody in the entire equation. That means the defendant, that means the victim, if the crime carried a victim, that means the community. And trying to center everybody's experience, recognizing that a victim of a crime, whatever that crime is, is probably the worst thing that's ever happened in their whole lives. And that it is extremely difficult for them to have gone through that experience and try and be there to do the work that Xavier and Susan do every day, which is to say, we hear you, we see you, and we want to take care of you. But also recognizing that the defendant has probably done the worst thing he has ever done, or at least in the top three or five, depending on what it is. But that at the same time, we cannot lose sight of the fact that that crime very rarely emerges out of somebody just being evil. It is almost always the last or latest step in a series of events that has put them in that position. And that we hate the sin, but that we don't reflexively hate the sinner because of it. Because when we do, at least as prosecutors with the power of the state, we lose our ability to be objective and be fair. And to strike what Justice Berger on the U.S. Supreme Court called hard blows but fair. And in an effort to make sure that we treat everybody in an individual way, I actually, it wasn't just all high-minded rhetoric. I completely fundamentally changed the way our office worked. So if you'll allow me to go out of the theoretical and into the real, I'll talk a little bit about what our office does and what it doesn't do, and then I'll get to what you can do to help make us safer. And I've got, what, about 15 minutes? Is that right? What did you say, 10? 10. That's totally fine. Professor Briscoe and Slash Regina was at my last Civic League meeting where I think they were going to demolish the building around us because we stayed so late. But not me, I'm the one who keeps talking. Oh, I know. I appreciate your help. Other people are like, oh, please make it stop. That's what you pay lawyers to do, is make them stop talking. So, in my effort to be a progressive prosecutor, one of the first things that I did, and it's amazing I still, that I didn't wind up with sugar in my gas tank, was that basically on day one of taking office, out of our 80-some people who were in the office, I made 60 of them move offices, like physically pick up and move. I see Susan started to break out in a cold sweat. Xavier, you were immune from this because you were at the family justice center. That's right, now I was too. It wasn't out of sheer power tripping. It was because I fundamentally restructured the way our office worked. Again, based on data and based on borrowing from no less a radical, wild-eyed radical than the commonwealth's attorney at Virginia Beach. Our office had been set up with lawyers working in different practice groups. So we had domestic violence prosecutors and drug prosecutors and profit crop prosecutors, violence prosecutors, and what we had was an incredibly siloed and frankly ineffective group of prosecutors when it came to strategy. Again, I know we have at least one military veteran in here. Anybody else who are veterans? We were doing a good job on tactics and an absolutely horrible job on strategy. We were incredibly siloed. I'll give you a short for instance. I was running the drug team in the interregnum between when I won the election and when I took office. I had a prosecutor come in and say, we have this guy who's charged with a drug offense. He was out and he was dealing again, so he's in for a second offense and his lawyer's giving me a hard time for this offer. I said, okay, so what? He said, well, he's giving me a hard time because his client's in a wheelchair. I said, okay, well, why is he in a wheelchair? He said, well, when they arrested him for the second drug offense, it's because a bunch of guys kicked in his door and held him up at gunpoint and he and his dad drew guns on them and they killed one of the guys who was holding him up at gunpoint and then they killed his dad and then they put him in a wheelchair and then the other guy got away. And I said, okay, can we pause the conversation about the drug dealing for a moment and let's deal with the fact that there was a murder, a home invasion murder, and I called up my counterpart on the violent crime team and I said, do you happen to have any, like, do you know anything about this? He said, no, never heard anything about it. Don't know anything about it. So that was completely unacceptable to me. My office is now set up to mirror the Norfolk Police Department's command structure. So we're sitting in the second police precinct. I have a deputy Commonwealth's attorney in charge of the second police precinct. I have a deputy in charge of the first police precinct and I have a deputy in charge of juvenile court because kids are different. And, you know, again, you'll hear different things about progressive prosecutors. I leveraged my nine at that point years in Norfolk when I came into office and I completely tightened my relationship with the Norfolk Police Department. I was able to, we weren't getting access to their overnight one sheet detective summaries for their arrests. We now get them, all of them, every morning and the deputies read them. We were going to homicide scenes. I now personally go to every homicide scene in Norfolk. I was there last week. I did my son's parent-teacher conference by telephone because I was out there at the scene of the homicide of that 15-year-old boy. That was not done in Norfolk. We have regular meetings. We now have an open invitation that we accept to go to the police's intelligence-driven planning meetings and their shooting review meetings. At the last one that I attended, they said, what happened in this particular case? And everybody in the room said, I don't know. And I raised my hand and I said, I do know. I was able to pull up my case management software and another parenthetical. Nobody was putting data into our case management software until I started hitting people over the head with it. And they were starting to do it. And I was able to go back to my office and tell that prosecutor, thank you very much. I was able to tell the police chief something he didn't know. All of that is in the service of building institutional knowledge. Those deputies hand-assign cases to prosecutors. They read the ebbs and flows of what's going on. They spot when Al Capone gets arrested for tax evasion. And then they make sure that if we have bad actors who are not getting touched in other ways, that we touch them. Because, again, to be driven by the data, does that mean, Regina, you're not allowed to answer. Look, what do you think the percentage of people is who are arrested for homicide in the United States? Remembering that the standard for an arrest is probable cause, 50-50, not proof beyond reasonable doubt. So by percentage, you mean the amount of people murdered to the amount of people arrested? Yes. Well, not amount of people murdered. Number of murders, you know. Okay, so that's maybe 30 at the most. I'd say probably 15. More than those. The arrest rate, the homicide clearance rate, is somewhere between 60 and 70 percent. Now, you're correct on non-fatal shootings. Non-fatal shootings, the rate of people being arrested nationally, is somewhere between 10 and 20 percent. So what is the difference between arrested, prosecuted, and found guilty? So you have 70 percent of the homicides you identify in person, but how many of those are actually prosecuted and found guilty? A million miles different. I can't give you exact numbers for me. And the conviction rate is another one of those sort of very seductive measures that I think become ultimately misleading. But let me put it this way. Let's say that 70 percent are arrested on probable cause and nothing more. Zero percent of those people would be convicted because probable cause, by definition, is an insufficient measure. You can't get the proof beyond a reasonable doubt. Proof beyond a reasonable doubt, the jury instruction is excluding every reasonable theory of innocence. What if they get to the grand jury? Probable cause will get you to the grand jury, but a judge will strike the evidence as probable cause in most juries. And if they let it go to the jury and the jury follows their instructions, they're going to acquit. But that means that we have a lot better idea of who's done things than we have of crimes that we can prove. But the system that I put in place, like I said, if we have a name of a known shooter and either there hasn't been an arrest or there's been an arrest and people get cold feet and we have to drop the case because the Constitution says we need live witnesses, and then that guy gets caught boosting something from the Walmart on Military Highway, he doesn't get the typical shoplifter disposition. He gets a different disposition based on who he is as an individual. So the ratchet goes both ways. The individuals who deserve diversion, mercy, and the like, and who can therefore save us money and go out and be productive by getting their sanction and moving on, they get it. But the flip side is we don't treat the folks who, the Al Capones of the world, with the same disposition of the people who can't get out of their own way. I could talk a little bit. I know I'm running short of time, but if you give me two minutes, I'll tell you things that I don't have power over and that should upset you. One of them is, you remember I said felony prosecutions? The state's mandate for us to do felony prosecutions, and you may find this interesting given your recent campaign. What that means is that since the state says that we're supposed to, and by prosecute that means staff, evaluate, look, see if the right person was arrested. That's another problem with conviction rates. Let's say the police arrest ten people for a crime and it turns out that three of them are innocent and we drop the charges. Is our conviction rate 100% or 70%? It all depends on the management. We certainly wouldn't want it to be 10 out of 10 in that situation because we would be putting three innocent people in jail. That mandate to staff felonies and at our discretion to be involved in misdemeanors means that the state doesn't fund us to be involved in misdemeanors. That means that they'll fund us to be involved in possessing $10 of your cousin's Adderall without a prescription because that's a felony that will permanently deprive you of your rights in Virginia. But they don't think it's important enough to fund offices like mine to prosecute stalking, brandishing a firearm, domestic assault, sexual battery, DUI, DUI second, carrying a concealed firearm, all of which, by the way, are way more serious than crimes that are considered to be felonies. This isn't just a Norfolk problem. Until about 10 years ago, maybe 11 years ago, Virginia Beach generated the most DUIs in Virginia by number, by raw number, not per capita, raw number. They didn't have prosecutors on those cases. The poor cop had to go in there and put the evidence in front of a judge on his own. Here in Norfolk, I find the resources. 35% of my money comes from the state, 40% from the city, 25% from grants. So my two domestic violence prosecutors, grants. My DUI prosecutor, city money. The brandishing cases and stalking cases that I tried, partly city money and partly not wasting my time jamming up people for triple their sentences on low-level felonies so that I can be involved in misdemeanors that actually are far more dangerous than some of the felony conduct of a deal. You mentioned DUIs as a misdemeanor, but you just said you have DUI prosecutors. Yes, I have a dedicated DUI prosecutor. But that's a misdemeanor. Yes, I have money from the city. The city gave me the money to have that prosecutor. So out of my 39, to give you an idea, 30 of my prosecutors have some funding from the state. Five more are solely city funding. And by the way, those other 30, their salaries are supplemented by the state to keep me even remotely competitive. Don't get me started. It's a weird 11 o'clock at night. But people can move to Virginia Beach or Chesapeake, $25,000, $30,000, $30,000 plus raises. So five of those, 31 through 35, are city-funded only positions, $35,000 through $39,000. So if that seems kind of messed up to you, that's because it is. In most other states, there is a government entity that is involved in assessing cases, which is important both if you happen to be, like if a neighbor happens to take out charges against you that you were innocent of, for you to have a prosecutor to look at the case instead of just having to let it go to trial. Or if your neighbor punched you in the face and like really hurt you, but not hurt you bad enough for it to be a felony, you should probably have a prosecutor there to help you. But in Virginia, our state legislators don't think it's that important. And this conversation I've had with both Andy Pidman, who clerked for Justice Keenan the year I clerked for Justice Lacey, and with Andy's opponent, Phil Hernandez, who's a Berkeley-educated lawyer, and have said that this should be a nonpartisan issue. Where does the people that you take to the court, I can't think of people's names now, before they get to you, the police bring them to the magistrate? Oh, the magistrate. Where does they fall in? They don't work for me either, unfortunately. If they were in New York or California, they would. In a lot of other states, the DA controls what the magistrates do. For folks who aren't familiar with the magistrates, magistrates are employees of the Virginia Supreme Court. It used to be that they could become magistrates with a high school diploma, nothing more. We've now moved into the modern world, they now have to have a bachelor's degree, but they're not required to be lawyers. And they consider whether there's probable cause for an offense, and whether they're the ones who make the initial bail decision. One of the dirty secrets of Virginia prosecution, I make zero bail decisions. That was my next question, because I read a lot of the news about people who commit a felony, they're out on bail, and they create a second felony. Right. And sometimes even a third. Yes. If you hear someone say, this guy got arrested in Norfolk, and within 24 hours he was back out on the street, I literally didn't even know about that person, let alone let them out. Because the magistrates make those decisions. They do not consult us. They are designed to be independent by design. And there are times when it's absolutely blown my hair back that they let people out. You may know this. Yes. But everybody's blaming you. Oh, I know. I know. It's all your fault. Your wife is only five minutes to go. Oh, at home it's always my fault. But you're absolutely correct, and that's part of the reason it's one of the things that I was, that was actually my next topic, about things that you should be upset about and that nobody tells you. Yeah, the first is, like, you get punched in the nose and there's no prosecutor there. It's not because I'm, like, sipping coffee and we're all, and we don't, like, don't give a whit about it yet. It's because Republican and Democratic legislators didn't fund it. The other thing is about bail and initial charging decisions because of the magistrates. Fifteen years ago, you could go to a magistrate, and, you know, I could go to the magistrate and say, Regina Briscoe helped me up at gunpoint and took my wallet. And if the magistrate looked at me and was like, all right, that's fine. He seems credible. They would issue robbery and use of a firearm warrants against Regina. And she'd be held without bail because there were presumptions against bail. And it would all be done on a citizen complaint. It's absolute madness. That power disappeared in about 2008. Now they have to call the police, or theoretically thus, but 100 times out of 100, they'll call the police for the investigation for felons. But if I go today to the magistrate at 811 East City Hall Avenue and say, Regina Briscoe pulled a gun on me, pointed it at me, and then took a knife out and cut the tire on my car, they would issue a misdemeanor branching warrant and a misdemeanor destruction of property warrant on my word of loan. In other places, such as, believe it or not, California and New York, you would have to go to a prosecutor, whether you're a cop or a civilian. And the prosecutors, who are the ones who have to take ownership of what happens in court, would have to pass on whether the case was any good. And in a lot of those other states, they would make the bail decisions that I get blamed for here in Virginia. But the magistrates make those decisions. Sometimes they get it right. Sometimes they get it wrong. But it's a lot harder to put the toothpaste into the tube than it is to get it out of it. When they bail somebody, the probability of us getting them locked back up is about zero, except in the most extreme situations, because the defense argument is always, well, I mean, they've been out. They didn't comply. And what are you complaining about? So they are the ones who issue the initial charges, even in felonies. One of the reasons that I've worked much more closely with the police department is so that if it's a closed case, maybe they'll call me. Oh, they're not required to call me. They can take out the charges. And I'm very respectful of their sphere of influence, just like I'm respectful of the judge's sphere of influence, even when the judges aren't necessarily always, even when it's not always reciprocated. But it is to have that conversation about, maybe we need a little bit more before we charge. Because otherwise, you see what happened on Grammy Street last year, where there were charges. There was a probable cause. But the perception is that I made the charging decision. And then I'm backing off of my own charging decision. And there were things that changed. Things happened. But yeah, the magistrates are totally out of my control. And even once it gets to court, the judge makes the decision. I can oppose bail. They can grant it. I can oppose it. They can oppose it. I can advocate for bail. They can grant it or oppose it. I can not bail a single person in Virginia. Can you take a minute just to talk about your relationship with the Public Defender's Office? Sure. How does that work? It's a totally different office, totally different facility in charge, different funding? Yes. Yes. They are a totally different, separate entity. I've known the head public defender. Her dad was a Marine. She's tough but knows one of the secrets of being a good lawyer is knowing what to fight over and what not to fight over. And she reserves the gunfire for when it's appropriate. So we talk about overall systems level things, like what can we do to make the system more efficient? Like how can I make sure that the process of obeying the Constitution and turning over the materials that I'm required to by law can go smoothly for her and her lawyers and that we don't have to tie people up in court arguing motions. But she doesn't work for me. She works for another state entity. As far as funding, the big role that I had with them was very shortly after I came into office, they're paid even less than we are. And Sherry, the public defender, asked if I would support her request for a salary supplement. Not to get them paid up to what we would get paid, but to enable her not to have a revolving door. And I said yes. And again, I took that page out of radical commonwealth attorney Colin Stolle of Virginia Beach, who had done that a few months before. Because it's not political, it's simple good sense. So we fight over the things we need to fight over, but we have a very good, very close working relationship in places where their ethical duties to their clients permit. All right. We can pause for a little bit, right? Yes, absolutely. I know I'm totally wrong. It's okay. Okay, perfect. I'm going to pause the recording. I'm going to make a new recording for the question in case people don't want.
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