Latest news with #Pishko
Yahoo
15-05-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
Norfolk attorneys in turf war over authority to prosecute shoplifting cases
A feud between Norfolk's city attorney and the city's top prosecutor over whose office should handle misdemeanor shoplifting cases has quickly escalated into a political turf war with both sides claiming chief authority. The Norfolk City Council unanimously approved a code change Tuesday that will let the City Attorney's Office prosecute misdemeanor shoplifting cases after Mayor Kenny Alexander complained Commonwealth's Attorney Ramin Fatehi wasn't bringing charges. Fatehi issued a swift rebuke the next day, saying he would revoke the city attorney's authority to prosecute any misdemeanors in Circuit Court and would implement additional oversight of charges pursued in District Court. He painted the move as power grab by city lawmakers that would disproportionately be used to target poor people. But Norfolk City Attorney Bernard Pishko is now arguing Fatehi lacks the legal power to forbid his office from prosecuting misdemeanor shoplifting cases in Circuit Court. 'You lack the resources to attend to many of the issues our citizens face on a daily basis, and your prosecutors could not replicate the relationship we have with our code enforcement officers,' Pishko wrote in a letter sent Thursday. Under Virginia law, commonwealth's attorneys — elected constitutional officers — must prosecute all felonies in their jurisdictions. But prosecutors have discretion on misdemeanor crimes, and Fatehi says the state does not provide funding for attorneys to handle misdemeanor case loads. Virginia state code says city attorney's offices in the commonwealth can prosecute misdemeanor cases, so long as the city council wants them to and the elected commonwealth's attorney signs off on it. The Code of Virginia section reads: 'City and town attorneys, if so authorized by their local governing bodies, and with the concurrence of the attorney for the commonwealth for the locality, may prosecute criminal cases charging either the violation of city or town ordinances, or the commission of misdemeanors within the city or town.' Fatehi said under that law, his office has the authority to permit the city attorney's office to prosecute state and city misdemeanors. As of 5 p.m. Friday, he said he will revoke the city attorney's permission to prosecute any offenses punishable by jail or fine in Circuit Court. Further, he plans to scrutinize all cases the city attorney's office pursues in District Court, requiring them to provide monthly reports about all criminal cases they staff. However, Pishko said in his letter city code directs the city attorney to prosecute all city code violations, and the Code of Virginia says municipal corporations shall have all powers granted to it by its charter. Thus, Pishko said Fatehi's referenced state code section was superseded by another state code section. The matter could see the two attorneys duke it out in court. In his letter, Pishko asked Fatehi to rescind his decision and said doing so would eliminate the need for a seeking a declaratory judgement. Fatehi said the two parties met in person Thursday but were unable to reach an agreement. 'I remain ready to have a serious discussion on how to avoid the criminalization of poverty, but until I see a meaningful change in the position of the City Attorney or his employer, my letter stands,' Fatehi said in an email. Norfolk prosecutor revokes city attorney authority on shoplifting charges following council vote Norfolk to vote on allowing city attorney to prosecute misdemeanor shoplifting Norfolk commonwealth's attorney faces challenge from former federal prosecutor Amanda Howie, administrator for the Virginia Association of Commonwealth's Attorneys, said she could not recall a top prosecutor in another Virginia locality ever attempting to forbid a city or county attorney from prosecuting cases. She did not know whether Fatehi's moves were legal. The feud kicked off when Alexander announced a plan for the City Attorney's Office to begin prosecuting misdemeanor shoplifting cases at his annual State of the City event. Fatehi said he lacked the state or city funding to staff the prosecution of misdemeanor shoplifting cases, and the city has ignored requests for more funding. He also called the move politically motivated — Fatehi is facing a June 17 Democratic primary challenge by John Butler, a former federal prosecutor. Butler has been endorsed by Alexander and City Council members Jeremy McGee, Tommy Smigiel and Courtney Doyle. Most prosecutor's offices in Hampton Roads take at least on some misdemeanor cases, such as DUIs, some domestic assaults and cases involving violence in schools. For many other misdemeanors, police officers organize the case against the defendants, just as they do with traffic cases. Though the officers are considered witnesses rather than prosecutors, they must essentially prosecute their own cases without a lawyer. It's a common practice when prosecutors are not available for whatever reason, said Rob Poggenklass, the executive director of Justice Forward Virginia, a state criminal justice reform group. In Norfolk, for example, the Norfolk Police Department can — and does — still make arrests in misdemeanor shoplifting cases, but must handle the cases on its own. When prosecutors in Hampton and Newport News backed away from handling misdemeanor marijuana possession cases in 2012, police began handling the cases on their own. But because drug possession could be difficult to prosecute, police were having difficulties handling such cases. The Hampton City Council in 2014 created a position within the City Attorney's Office to take on the marijuana cases, the Daily Press reported at the time. In 2016, the Newport News City Council granted their Commonwealth's Attorney two new positions in return for agreeing to prosecute the misdemeanor marijuana cases once again. Several Norfolk residents who spoke at the council's Tuesday meeting expressed concern the move to pursue more misdemeanor shoplifting charges would harm the city's most vulnerable people. Poggenklass said more prosecutions would only hurt marginalized Norfolk residents and would not deter the act of stealing. He said city officials should instead be investigating why residents are stealing and providing structural supports to eliminate the need for the crime. Trevor Metcalfe, 757-222-5345, Peter Dujardin, 757-897-2062, pdujardin@
Yahoo
12-05-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
Norfolk to vote on allowing city attorney to prosecute misdemeanor shoplifting
Norfolk City Council members plan to vote on an ordinance Tuesday that will allow the city attorney's office to prosecute misdemeanor shoplifting charges. The proposal comes after the city's mayor and commonwealth's attorney recently traded barbs over the handling of shoplifting cases. Council members plan to vote on changes to the city code which would make shoplifting a class 1 misdemeanor under a newly-written section. The change would allow City Attorney Bernard Pishko's office to prosecute the charges, Pishko said in an email. Pishko also said in an email that there is no limit to the dollar amount that could be prosecuted as a class-one misdemeanor under the proposed code section. 'Once this code section is adopted, we will ask the police to charge under the city code,' Pishko said. 'It is proposed as a class one misdemeanor with a fine of up to $2,500 and imprisonment of up to one year.' The ordinance would take effect immediately upon passage. Pishko said the cases would be handled by current city attorneys rather than new hires. He said the fines from the cases would pay for any additional costs incurred by the prosecutions. The code change was first proposed by Mayor Kenny Alexander at his annual State of the City address in April. Alexander said Commonwealth's Attorney Ramin Fatehi and his office were not doing enough to prosecute misdemeanor shoplifting cases. Fatehi has disputed the claims, saying his office prosecutes every felony shoplifting case. He said the issue is his office doesn't receive enough funding from the city or state to prosecute misdemeanor shoplifting cases. The argument comes as Fatehi is being challenged in a June 17 Democratic primary election by John Butler, a former federal prosecutor with the U.S. Attorney's Office in Norfolk. Butler has been endorsed by Alexander and City Council members Jeremy McGee, Tommy Smigiel and Courtney Doyle. In an email, Fatehi said the ordinance was a political stunt by the mayor and other allies who supported his primary opponent. The threshold for felony larceny has been raised in recent years and now stands at $1,000 or more in stolen goods. That was increased from $200 to $500 in 2018, and from $500 to $1,000 in 2020. The felony charge is punishable by up to 20 years in prison and a fine of up to $2,500, according to the Code of Virginia. Property crime, which includes burglaries and larcenies, has declined in Norfolk during the past few years. It declined about 25% from 2022 to 2024, from 11,488 to 8,588 incidents, according to Norfolk Police Department data. During the same time period, larcenies declined about 21%, from 9,094 to 7,188. Larcenies this year are down another 11% compared with 2024, Fatehi said in late April. Still, shoplifting can devastate small businesses with thefts of thousands of dollars of merchandise, Jenny Crittenden, president and CEO of the Retail Alliance trade group for local retailers, told the Pilot in late April. Trevor Metcalfe, 757-222-5345,
Yahoo
28-01-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
Rise of the 'Constitutional Sheriffs' (opinion)
The Highest Law in the Land: How the Unchecked Power of Sheriffs Threatens Democracy, by Jessica Pishko, Dutton, 480 pages, $32 The Power of the Badge: Sheriffs and Inequality in the United States, by Emily M. Farris and Mirya R. Holman, The University of Chicago Press, 304 pages, $25 In the home stretch of the presidential race, an Ohio sheriff was stripped of his role providing election security after he compared immigrants to swarms of locusts and asked residents to write down the addresses of yards with signs for Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris. Two new books—The Highest Law in the Land, by reporter Jessica Pishko, and The Power of the Badge, by political scientists Emily M. Farris and Mirya R. Holman—argue that such behavior isn't unusual. The American sheriff, they say, is a particularly dangerous vector for a right-wing project to take over the country. Sheriffs, Pishko writes, "enable and legitimize the far right's ideas, tactics, and political goals." Likewise, Farris and Holman "suggest that the design of the office—and the individuals who serve in it—challenge the central tenets of democracy." Both books make some welcome additions to the literature on policing. Sheriffs have been understudied compared to major police departments, despite employing a quarter of all sworn law enforcement officers and handling 9 million to 10 million jail admissions a year. Pishko, Farris, and Holman make a convincing case that sheriffs frequently abuse their office without meaningful consequences. But gauging the threat that sheriffs' politics pose to democracy is a trickier book focuses heavily on the "constitutional sheriffs" movement—an effort to recruit sheriffs to nullify laws they consider unconstitutional, such as gun controls and COVID-19 restrictions. The alleged authority to do this lies in the peculiar nature of the office. In the flowchart of federalism, sheriffs are islands unto themselves. They're not typically under the direct control of mayors, county boards, or governors. They set and pursue their own policies. The "constitutional sheriff" movement claims that, because of this, sheriffs are the highest authority within their jurisdictions when it comes to enforcing the Constitution, higher than any federal agent or even the president—hence Pishko's title. This is all a result of the office's history. Sheriffs proudly trace their roots back to pre-Norman England's "shire-reeves." British colonists brought the English office of sheriff with them to America, where our ideals and geography transformed it. The colonists' democratic instincts led them to make sheriffs elected positions rather than appointed. As America expanded westward, sheriffs were often the only law enforcement on the frontier, where they earned a spot in the national mythos. Today sheriffs wear many hats besides Stetsons. They run county jails and provide courthouse security. They perform evictions. They often issue concealed carry licenses and confiscate guns pursuant to judges' orders. In some counties, the office of coroner is folded into the sheriff's department. Many sheriffs never miss an opportunity to explain ruefully that, as jail administrators, they're also their county's de facto largest mental health provider. The constitutional sheriff movement developed in the 1990s and has ebbed and flowed depending on when fears of federal tyranny flare up on the right, picking up momentum after the standoffs at Waco, Texas, and Ruby Ridge, Idaho, during gun control fights, during the Obama administration, and during the COVID-19 lockdowns. It mingles freely with the militia movement, sovereign citizens, Christian nationalists, and others. Just as there are conservative "sanctuary counties" for Second Amendment rights, there are liberal sanctuaries from federal immigration enforcement. But Pishko believes this sort of discretion is fundamentally different from right-wing nullification efforts, which she associates with John C. Calhoun and segregationists. "I do not want to both-sides the issue," Pishko argues. "The threat is coming from the right." I have to concede the danger of a Marxist takeover of county sheriffs seems remote. Farris and Holman report that sheriffs are statistically more conservative and Republican than the counties they represent, even in places that lean liberal. It's tempting to attribute this to the fact that no one wants a pacifist sheriff, but other factors are at play. One of sheriffs' biggest selling points is they're local boys—and Farris and Holman's survey confirms this. The majority of sheriffs graduate from high school in the same county they eventually serve. They're often the most well-recognized local officials. They have one of the strongest incumbent advantages in U.S. politics too, usually running unopposed or winning handily until they retire. Sheriffs say that they don't answer to anyone but the voters of their county, and that if voters don't like them, there's a simple solution. Pishko, Farris, and Holman argue elections fail as an accountability mechanism. Sheriffs typically rise up through their departments, which means the incumbent sheriff has hiring and firing power over potential competitors. Even when sheriffs commit gross misconduct, they often cruise to reelection. Where the authors run into trouble is trying to untangle fairly mundane opinions on limited government and the Second Amendment from the noxious, conspiratorial strands of the fringe. Pishko settles on the term "far right" to describe the militia members, antivaxxers, and Christian nationalists she encounters at rallies around the country. "What 'far-right' groups have in common includes an ideology that seeks to return to an imagined state that values Christianity, traditional gender roles, American nativism, and a 'color-blind' form of white supremacy that fails to acknowledge the harms of the past and inequities of the present," Pishko writes. "These adherents also generally believe in libertarian principles: free market capitalism, deregulation, private property and individual liberty without regard to the common good." Government-skeptical readers will sometimes find themselves gritting their teeth. For example, we learn from Pishko that "support for constitutional sheriffs and hatred for the federal government is especially strong in the rural Pacific Northwest," but the brief descriptions of the Sagebrush Rebellion, environmental wars of the 1990s, and the Bundy standoffs don't capture why there is such deep bitterness over federal land management policies in the West. Likewise, Pishko describes sheriffs' refusal to enforce gun laws they consider unconstitutional as "engaging in political protest bordering on insurrection by vowing not to enforce democratically passed gun laws." In the same chapter, she notes Republican sheriffs' opposition to the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives' rules banning accessories like bump stocks and wrist braces. But those regulations, which were not enacted through any democratic process, were blocked by federal courts that agreed the agency had exceeded its authority. Are we to feel worse about the nullification cowboys being right than the alphabet soup federales getting it wrong? To be sure, one tactic of fringe movements is to co-opt a reasonable position and use it to smuggle in more extreme ideas. Sheriffs' increasingly common embrace of bogus election fraud claims, anti-immigrant hysteria, and culture war vigilantism does represent a real threat to regular political order. At the very least, hyperpartisan sheriffs are a menace to constituents who aren't part of a desirable voting bloc. In 2017 I traveled to Madison County, Mississippi, to report on allegations that the sheriff's department was running unconstitutional roadblocks only in black neighborhoods. I found that generations of black residents in Madison County had felt under siege from the department. I talked to a mother who said her 5-year-old son had started habitually locking doors in the house after watching sheriff's deputies barge into their living room without a warrant and rough up his father. Sheriffs' culture war grandstanding also distracts them from their job duties. At least 1,000 people a year die in U.S. jails, many of them in barbaric conditions. In Tarrant County, Texas, Sheriff Bill Waybourn won reelection despite 65 people dying in his jail since 2017 and two of his correctional officers being indicted for felony murder. But while the authors amply document how sheriffs violate the civil rights of residents, that generally occurs because of excessive enforcement, not nullification. For all their bluster about arresting federal agents, constitutional sheriffs have been the dog that didn't bark—so far. The nonenforcement of a law is almost always less of a threat to individual liberty than its dogmatic application. This is an unresolved tension that runs throughout both books. (The authors' most potent counterargument is that conservative sheriffs selectively enforce laws based on a myopic and partisan view of the "good guys" who keep them in office, and thus, say, refuse to confiscate guns in domestic violence cases.) What to do about sheriffs then? Pishko writes that she is, in essence, a police abolitionist and concludes the best solution is to eliminate the office entirely. (Here we see that tension again—it's hard to argue both that police should be abolished and that sheriffs are committing borderline insurrection by not enforcing federal laws.) Farris and Holman decline to endorse a solution but put abolition on the table as an option, along with reform measures. Abolishing sheriffs and unpackaging the services they provide would be a tall order, especially since many small towns contract with them for policing. But if The Highest Law in the Land and The Power of the Badge don't fully convince nonlefty readers that sheriffs are the tip of the spear in a far-right power grab, they at least provide a corrective to the myth of the white-hatted American sheriff. The post Rise of the 'Constitutional Sheriffs' appeared first on
