Sahan Journal recently spoke with the Hennepin County Attorney primary candidates about their campaigns. Their answers to each question have been edited for length and clarity.
What should people, especially immigrants and people of color, know about the Hennepin County attorney and how the role impacts them? What about young people going through either the juvenile justice process or child protection cases?
Paul Ostrow:
People should know that the person that holds this position has a bigger impact on making sure that they are safe and making sure that their rights are protected than any other elected person in Hennepin County. It’s that important of a role.
The Hennepin County attorney sets policies in how cases are prosecuted, how rights are protected of people that are prosecuted by the office, and the office has an incredibly important leadership role to make sure that people’s safety is protected.
There’s also a whole wide range of things that the County Attorney’s office does that has an impact on people’s lives—everything from child protection to juvenile courts, to collection of child support, to representing the county in important civil cases. It’s a very broad range of obligations.
With our juvenile justice system, we really have to put in the resources to have safe, appropriate, and effective places to not just detain but provide services to violent juvenile offenders. Too often we’re releasing violent juvenile offenders back into the community without any kind of support services. That’s dangerous for the community and it’s not in their interest either.
Mary Moriarty:
The county attorney’s office is the most powerful office in the system–more powerful than the judge. They decide who to charge, who not to charge, what to charge them with, whether to ask for bail, whether to offer them diversion, what to offer them. Because those are subjective decisions and everybody has unconscious bias, there are going to be racial disparities. But to my knowledge, we don’t have those numbers, and I would keep those numbers on race data and gender and put in policies that would keep that from happening.
When I was at the public defender’s office, I made the decision to hire an immigration lawyer. I also wrote a policy requiring all of our lawyers to screen every client for potential immigration consequences. The county attorney’s office does not have a policy about immigration, so public defenders would approach individual county attorneys and ask for some type of resolution that would allow the person to stay in the country. And because there was no policy, it just depended on which county attorney you had, which is not okay.
Many of our clients at the public defender’s office were a parent of American-born children—their families were here, they hadn’t been to the country they might be deported to in years, or they were fleeing violence in that country.
Another part of the system that’s really important is child protection. We know that there’s just huge racial disparities in kids of color getting taken out of families. That’s something that we’ll be looking at. Youth are really important and we need to address their trauma. We also know that in youth that get diversion programs, there are high racial disparities, so we need to fix those.
In terms of addressing violent crime, one of the big things we have to do is do a much better job of working with youth. We are failing youth in the juvenile justice system, because we don’t approach it from an adolescent brain development perspective. In other words, anybody with kids knows that kids’ brains are not fully developed until they’re 25 or older. And that means that they make impulsive decisions, they’re really susceptible to peer pressure, and they engage in risk-taking behavior, and we don’t address that in the system at all.
We don’t have trauma-based programs, and we closed the county homeschool without really having any other options. We need to build out group homes where youth can get services, treatment, mental health therapy—all of that. Those group homes can be varying levels of supervision.
Let’s bring the services to them, that way they’re developing relationships with people in the community, and when they get back into the community, it’s not going to be as hard. We have to invest in the resources that will help youth not engage in that kind of behavior or, if they do, trying to make sure that they don’t continue to cycle in and out of the system.
Saraswati Singh:
I will be hiring people that are from all parts of Hennepin County—people that are of all races, sexuality, ability, class. I didn’t know that there were so many people of color that were victims of crime. I didn’t know there were so many immigrants that were victims of crime. A lot of people probably wouldn’t know this, but so many of the victims in my case are immigrants, and they’re scared.
I would tell immigrants to say if they need help, call 911. And if they’re worried that someone won’t speak English or the officers that arrive don’t speak English, we now have interpreter services, so that when they arrive officers can use their phones and have a translator translate. This is part of the reason why having police accountability is so important. We want people to feel comfortable calling the police.
I had a case where the victim was an Iraqi refugee and he only spoke Arabic. We had the whole trial translated for him. So those are things that we can do for immigrant communities. Just because you don’t speak English—just because you have an accent—doesn’t mean you don’t get to have justice.
In terms of the young people, I would say if you’re upset by the system, go to law school and then come join my office. I’ll need good people. The legal community isn’t very good. There are plenty of attorneys out there of the old type of mindset of “Let’s charge people with the most number of crimes and the most serious number of crimes” rather than looking at the equities of the case.
Martha Holton Dimick:
I worked in the Hennepin County Attorney’s Office for ten years, and during that period of time there were four or five other attorneys of color also working in the office. With the way we were trained, we were more or less the gatekeepers, because we knew more about what to look for in terms of how a person was treated upon arrest. I would like to see this process change.
If you get a case, and you know that the police officer didn’t conduct the stop in a constitutional way, you probably would charge the case depending on how serious the case is. Then, when you get into court, most likely the defense attorney will bring a motion to suppress–not allow the stop–which sometimes leads to dismissal of the charges.
I would like to get that done when we review the cases rather than wait until a later date to address those issues. County attorneys should be really scrutinizing the stops, really scrutinizing the warrants that were used to arrest someone. We are the gatekeepers, and we really have to pay more attention to how those cases and procedures are handled. That really will address some of the issues people have of the arrests that are made of people of color.
With regards to immigrants, I know there are people that are very concerned about immigrants being deported as a result of their criminal behavior. I need to get more information and talk to some immigration specialists. If there is a problem and it’s a minor problem, say a misdemeanor or even a low-level felony, if we sentence them to 364 days instead of 365 or higher, they’re not going to be deported. I don’t know if that’s likely to change, but that’s what we can do. But we’d have to do that for everybody. We can’t just single out immigrants, because we do want a system that’s fair to everyone.
When a defendant comes into my courtroom, I don’t know if they’re an immigrant. I don’t know anything unless they disclose it. We do have a warning that we give them that if you’re going to plead here you could be deported, so before you decide to plead, you should probably talk to an immigration attorney.
With the juvenile offenses, the carjackings have gotten out of control and they are also spreading into the suburban areas. The problem is that they closed down the county homeschool. This is just a tiny bit of the problem, but there’s no alternative for where to place these kids.
We’re closing all these places where these kids can be kept in their communities. I would like to see the office collaborate with the state and get another facility set up so that these kids have a place to go, where their issues—in terms of trauma, type of crimes that they committed, and the trajectory—should be rehabilitated.
I’m also a huge proponent of involving families, having them brought in and having services available to help them with their parenting issues. These individuals are seriously having problems within their own communities with their kids because they can’t control them and they’re looking for our help.
I want to see consequences. You have to have consequences when these kids come in. They need a time-out. And they need a time-out with services.
The Hennepin County attorney is responsible for felony prosecution in the county, child protection cases, and for a number of other important issues like child support enforcement, representing the county on environmental enforcement, addressing big thefts, and trafficking cases.
What immigrants, people of color, and young people should think about is that it is a large public law office with the resources to try and make the legal system help people be safe and have an opportunity to live a better life.
In the Somali community, because of the heavy investigation footprint of the FBI in the past, there’s a lot of suspicion about working with law enforcement to help clear cases. Finding trusted community partners is important to work with immigrant communities to make sure that when crimes are committed and people are harmed, that we have a system that the community trusts to follow up and investigate.
Also, the penalty for the same crime can vary drastically if you’re an immigrant because of the immigration consequences of felony charges. We have to be very careful about how we are charging cases based on the immigration effect that could happen on people’s families.
I believe people have a fundamental right to be safe on the streets, in their homes, churches, synagogues, and wherever else they practice their beliefs. At the same time we need to treat every individual in Hennepin County fairly and equally. There are some folks who say lock them up. That’s not the solution. Some people believe in spending more money. That’s not the solution.
My message to people of color is you deserve safe streets whether you live in Minneapolis, Brooklyn Park, St. Louis Park, or Edina. My office will treat you with dignity and respect. If you’re the one who commits a crime, you’re going to be held accountable. But you’re going to be treated with dignity, respect, and held accountable for your actions.
I grew up in inner city Chicago, so I understand what it means to have police officers who often feel like an occupying force in certain diverse communities. They don’t feel like they’re there to serve us. We often feel we’re all treated as suspects. The prosecutor should also be out there working to prevent and reduce crime in the community. I’m one of the few candidates who can identify and relate to many people in these diverse lenses.
I have specific initiatives that talk about working with immigrants. One of the platform’s positions is that punishment should fit the crime. For example, you have two people who commit a certain type of misdemeanor. One is an immigrant, one isn’t. The non-immigrant might get possibly six months in jail. The immigrant might get six months too, but they could also be deported. That is not punishment that fits the crime.
We’re not going to give anyone a leg up, but we’re not going to give anyone a leg down. I don’t believe in tearing apart families particularly for certain misdemeanors and felonies. It’s a case-by-case basis, but I do not believe in wholesale deportation.
We’ve given up on a lot of our young people, particularly from diverse neighborhoods. We have to take a systemic look at how our young people are being charged. I believe in holding people accountable, young or otherwise. However, I think we’re over-criminalizing young people for a lot of stuff—petty crimes, having a marijuana joint on them. Why are they in the criminal system?
Tad Jude:
The county job description is to carry out the constitution and the laws of our country and state in Hennepin County. It’s essential to do that in a very unbiased and independent fashion. It is to be color-blind, to not consider someone’s race, ethnicity, religion, sex, or their age. Any of those factors should not be considered.
Decisions by the Hennepin County attorney should be based upon the behavior of people in terms of enforcing criminal law and should be color blind, so to speak. That’s the ideal I would bring to the office, and I would hope county attorneys throughout the state would do that.