Gotta tell you about this local court election

[jmowreader]

I know we're all tied up in control of Congress, but check out this Cumberland County District Court battle.

Normally no one in town, except for lawyers who have to practice before these people, care about judicial elections. This time's different. Two of our incumbent judges are John Hair and Ed Donaldson. Their opponents, George Franks and David Hasty, are running on a DWI Conviction Rate platform. That's all they talk about. Apparently Cumberland County, NC, is number 97 out of 100 counties in NC on DWI conviction rates. (The major problem here isn't the judges. It's that we have unbelievably high police officer turnover--people join the Fayetteville PD to get trained, work the road for a couple of years, then get scarfed up by Raleigh or Charlotte--both of which pay better than Fayetteville does. When a cop leaves the Fayetteville PD, it's almost a given that everyone they ticketed or arrested but didn't try before they left will walk. But if you do get in front of a judge, there's a 75-percent chance you'll be convicted no matter how good your lawyer is. That's a decent rate.)

Let's look at the Donaldson-Hasty race. Never mind the fact that David Hasty was pulled over for DWI when he was younger. Mind the fact that David Hasty specializes in defending DWI cases. Donaldson claims, and Hasty doesn't refute, that Hasty has often chided Donaldson for being "too hard" on his DWI cases and pressured him to find his high-Breathalyzer cases not guilty.

Which makes me wonder...if you're a major part of the problem, can you be the solution?

I wish I could send you some scans of Hasty's campaign mailings. They're all these scary things about how all the drunken drivers Ed Donaldson has acquitted are running around town killing children. I would REALLY love to have a few thousand dollars to send some mailings explaining that many of the acquitted drunks got off thanks to the work of David Hasty, pointing out that people who drive drunk once are likely to do it again--how many "arrested fourteen times for DWI" stories have we seen here?--and ask the very simple question: how many of David Hasty's clients have gone on to kill children while they're driving drunk again?

[sandnsea]

1. OTOH

The guy who knows the law well enough to get them off may well be the guy who knows the law well enough to enforce it. I don't buy the notion that just because a defense attorney does his job that he's responsible for the failings in our legal system. Maybe he knows how dumb this Judge Donaldson is and how easy it is to steamroll him in court, which is how he's able to steamroll him in the campaign.