Q&A: Chatham County DA Shalena Cook Jones explains why she is running for re-election

Chatham County District Attorney Shalena Cook Jones is running for re-election. Jones faces two challengers for the job.

Her first contest will come on May 21, during the party primaries. Jones is running against Jenny Parker in the Democratic primary. Parker is a former Chatham County Chief Assistant District Attorney (ADA), who most recently served as an assistant district attorney in the Ogeechee Judicial Circuit.

The winner of that race will face Andre Pretorius, a Republican and a former Deputy Chief Assistant for the Chatham County State Court. He works now on a part-time basis as an assistant Chatham County attorney.

As a third-year law student, Jones began her career in the DeKalb County District Attorney’s office. She later practiced with two prominent insurance defense firms in Atlanta then as a federal prosecutor in the U.S. District Attorney’s office for the Western District of Texas.

From 2010 to 2014, Jones worked as an ADA in the Chatham County DA's office under Meg Heap before leaving to open her own law firm. In November 2020 she challenged heap, and Jones won with 68,944 votes for a total vote share of 52.83%.

In an interview last week, Jones touted her track record, including the implementation of the conviction integrity and cold case units and tackling of the case backlog, which ballooned to nearly 30,000 cases after her first year in office, primarily because of COVID restrictions.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

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Why are you running for re-election?

"To put it plainly, I’m running for re-election to complete the work of change that we promised citizens in 2020. We won the 2020 election by a margin of 8,000 people, and what that suggests to me is that our voters are looking for the type of change that we were offering. So, I'm running to complete the work.

Four years is not enough time to make the criminal justice system run efficiently and make it effective and make sure that it's equitable and put all those quality controls in place. So, I'm running because I think I'm proud of the work that our office did, and we need to continue to move the office in the direction of change."

What do you feel like you’ve accomplished as Chatham County DA?

"Well, a lot of people don’t understand that pre-COVID, the DA coming into office had to re-engineer a new system. Because when I came into office, of course, my office wasn’t doing grand jury, and criminal jury trials had been suspended for almost a year and a half.

I think we have to continue that work. And I think that, even in that shrunken period, we were able to prosecute or resolve more serious violent felonies, with fewer staff, and in a shorter time period than in the three years before with more prosecutors and more staff. But that's because we had to redesign the system. Of course, we all wait for more staff to come, but you have to work with the system you have, and you have to find a way to do more with less.

We've created more programs. We've gotten more grant-funded programs. We started our conviction integrity unit. We established our cold case unit and brought several cases to resolution. We have hired a more diverse staff than any other DA that we've had before. We have established and instituted our first Community Resource Fair. We do that for the citizens because a lot of times they don't know what the DA’s office does, or about the varied services that we offer. So, we took our department, instead of making it internal facing, we've made it more external facing over the three years that I've been here, and I'm really proud of that.

[The Conviction Integrity Unit] is in the screening stage. What that means is that we have one paralegal who's reviewing hundreds of thousands of previous convictions in this jurisdiction to create a screening tool. Every office, depending on its staffing and its resources, has a different bandwidth of the number of conviction integrity cases that can take, but before you do that, the best practice is that you create a screening tool that helps you move through those cases and assess them more quickly. And so that's a lot of work. And right now, it's being done by one person through a grant. And so, you know, we look at cases that are brought to our attention on a case-by-case basis. But as far as when a case is formally brought to that unit, we're still in the really infant stages of building that program."

When you were elected in 2020, you centered your platform on effectiveness and equality, and said one of your first issues would be tackling the backlog of cases, which would involve tackling inventory of pending cases and looking at all charged cases. What kind of progress have you made in terms of tackling the backlog?

"Through the backlog efforts, and the [distribution] of [American Rescue Plan Act of 2021] funds, we've been able to reduce our overall caseload by, like, 10,000 cases, which I feel is phenomenal. And that's 10,000 cases across the office ― Juvenile Court, Superior Court and State Court. That saves taxpayers a lot of resources. I think that's been a great help to us.

One of the other things that we did that did not exist before was that we created an intake division. This particular division of lawyers is specifically devoted to screening cases that come into the system and understanding which cases we can resolve by diversion, in which cases we actually need to charge, in which cases deserve prosecutorial attention. And by doing that, at the very beginning, or at the front door of the court system, we're able to whittle down that caseload and make sure that what we spend our time and attention on the ones that most deserve it."

We have talked about getting cases more ready through conversations with the police. Is that something that's improved? And, along the same lines, are you going to change anything with that process?

"We've implemented a triage system that we work with SPD early and often to make sure that the best evidence is cultivated at the outset of the case, as opposed to closer to trial. And that's something that was happening in, you know previously, in our cases don't get better with time. So, we have an internal triage unit... investigators and our ADAs actually look at our murder cases and our most serious cases to make sure, not only that they're properly charged to prevent multiple charging of indictments down the line, but also to make sure that we actually have the evidence and that the evidence is still viable enough to go to trial.

I have to really give a lot of credit to [SPD Chief Lenny Gunther] and [Chatham County Police Chief Jeff Hadley] as well as the other chiefs of the all the other municipalities. They have been absolutely instrumental in opening the dialogue early. We have cross meetings and training with each other. They come over to our office, we have an open-door policy, where they can come in and talk about their cases at any time. We go over there to answer whatever questions they have and to meet with their detectives on a regular basis. I think that making sure that building those relationships and reinforcing them is really important.

I would still like to see a lot more cross-training, where our ADA is out in the field with our officers observing how they develop their cases and how they develop their evidence. And then detectives coming into our office and getting a better understanding of how a DA and prosecutors both charge and make good cases.

Like anywhere else, time is a limited resource. Not just my office, but the police are short on staff. And that's true, not just here locally, but that's true around the nation."

Why is the DA’s office still short-staffed?

"While we have lost staff, and I'm concerned about it, one of the things that I've learned in doing this job is that you have to not only learn how to do more with less, but what this means is that we have to put even greater emphasis on the cases that are most important.

That's why I emphasize not just how many people are in the office, I think that's important, but we have to make sure that we have enough people to cover the important cases at the right time. And that's what we've been committed to doing. That's what we're going to continue to do until the market improves and turns around.

I think it's also important to note that we've taken some really creative strides in bringing talent into the office. We were the first office to advertise remote ADA positions, to have to seek lawyers that do things like draft appellate motions and briefs, just so that they could alleviate the burden on our trial teams. We have hired a recruiter... We've offered reciprocity to lawyers who are licensed in other states and have experience, and can wave if their state has reciprocity with our state. So, while it's a concern that people leave, they leave for a number of reasons. I think it's just the nature of the market. But what's even more important than that, is how we fill that gap. And good leaders find ways to fill the gap."

We're still getting convictions on important cases. I think that's important. We're still doing the work of the office. In short time, I'll probably release a list of cases that we have prosecuted well during my tenure that maybe the community doesn't know about. But, here's the thing as public servants, we have a duty to be transparent to our constituents. And, you know, saying that people are leaving the office is only half the story without telling what we have done to make up for those losses. And sometimes, you have to be inventive and creative, and I'm proud that we've done that."

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Part of the platform you also ran on in 2020 was transparency. How will you improve transparency, particularly around officer-involved shootings, if you're elected?

"I'm as transparent as the law requires me to be, as it relates to those issues. As you can imagine, I know that they're sensitive, and the community wants to know. However, there are a lot of things a DA has to consider when they publicize a statement.

Part of the reason why some cases might get published and others don't, is because you know, a DA has to be concerned about the threat of unrest. And when you have a community that is agitated, you have to be especially even more careful about how you publicize that. I'm not the type of DA that's going to be a glory hog to step in front of the cameras, every time I get a chance. The community sent me to the courthouse to do my job. And the best thing for the community is a quiet DA’s office. When you don't hear from me, I'm working. I do not sensationalize the work of the office. I call balls and strikes and do what needs to be done.

I don't expect that the community is going to be happy with every decision that I make as it relates to an officer-involved shooting. But it's my job to make sure that I preserve the public interest. And so, if I feel like a lot of the community is misinformed around what has happened, and I think that might create an additional threat to public safety or to law enforcement, it's incumbent upon me to come out and speak about that and say, yes, let's be clear.

The other cases did not have as much civil unrest around them. My practice is really driven by community interest, and the risk to public safety."

Drew Favakeh is the public safety and courts reporter for the Savannah Morning News. You can reach him at AFavakeh@savannahnow.com.

This article originally appeared on Savannah Morning News: Why is Chatham County DA Shalena Cook Jones running for re-election?