U.S. Attorney General Jeff Sessions recently called on federal prosecutors to impose maximum charges against people arrested for drug offenses, but in one Virginia city prosecutors are headed in the opposite direction. Sandy Hausman says neither man running for Commonwealth’s Attorney in Charlottesville would jail or fine people for possession of pot.
Jeff Fogel is a surprising candidate. The 72-year-old attorney who has represented many low-income people at no charge admits he never considered going into politics.
“I’m not a politician. I have no interest in being a politician. I’m not really a prosecutor. I have no interested in being a prosecutor," he says. " You know what happened to me? I’ll tell you. I woke up two nights after Donald Trump got elected and I said I have to do something more. I said there is an opportunity here, particularly since the current Commonwealth’s attorney was retiring, to actually do something!”
For starters, he’d like to understand why African-Americans in this state are so much more likely to end up behind bars. It’s not, he says, that they commit more crimes.
“Hundreds of thousands of times a year is a joint lit in Charlottesville," Fogel says. " Seventy people were charged with possession of marijuana last year, and most of them were African-Americans who were stopped on the street."
A long-time critic of the police department’s “stop and frisk” policy, Fogel says he’d stop prosecuting possession of small amounts of marijuana and other drugs.
“The question at least to me is what interest does society have in punishing somebody for something that doesn’t harm other people. When people start to talk about, ‘We need to get these people better!’ that’s when I’ve said, ‘Well why not have an obesity court? It’s very dangerous to people’s lives to be obese. Why not have a cigarette court? We know cigarettes kill 300,000 people a year.”
He argues those are public health problems, and should be treated that way. He also objects strongly to state laws that force judges to impose mandatory minimum sentences.
“I would not charge anyone with an offense that carried a mandatory minimum sentence. I think judges are entitled to have that discretion, and we can cut down on the length of sentences, because they’re much too long. There are always offenses that you can charge someone which are comparable to those that have a mandatory minimum but don't have a mandatory minimum," he explains.
Fogel’s opponent in the primary, 45-year-old Joe Platania, agrees with him on many issues. He began his career teaching inner city kids in Houston as part of a Jesuit program that aims to help the poor.
“And I learned a lot more from the students than I taught them," Platania recalls. " One of the central concepts of Jesuit Volunteer Corps is social justice, so I knew whatever I ended up doing with my life I wanted social justice to be a part of it.”
So he went to Washington and Lee’s law school, then joined a group committed to preventing executions in Virginia. After seven years as a public defender, he realized prosecutors could do more for defendants and the victims of crime, so he became an assistant Commonwealth’s Attorney in Charlottesville.
“When I started prosecuting a little over 13 years ago, there were a whole lot of things I didn’t know about prosecuting, and I think experience is something that’s incredibly important for the Commonwealth’s attorney to have. You need to know how to interact with victims. You need to know how to interact with police officers, defense attorneys, offenders, judges, probation officers," he says.
Like Fogel, Platania pledges not to prosecute people for possession of small amounts of marijuana and not to jail people for drug use. Instead, he’d divert them to a treatment program.
“The people who need to be incarcerated and held accountable are those who are violent and those that are exploiting the vulnerable amongst us . The vast majority of people, though, we can deal with otherwise and divert them to community service or probation. Also, if we’re not concerned about them getting re-arrested, we need to get them out of the system as soon as possible. We don’t need them on probation for 2 or 3 years, monitoring everything they do or bringing them back to court if they miss an appointment or they don’t hold down a job.”
Of course the election on June 13th is a primary, but in Charlottesville – a city with a large majority of Democrats, no Republican is running for Commonwealth’s Attorney.
Here's Sandy Hausman's interview with Joe Platania:
And here's the conversation with Jeff Fogel: