Incumbent Chatham County District Attorney Shalena Cook Jones overcame her first challenge on the road to reelection: winning the Democratic primary. On Tuesday night, she came out on top in a contested race against her former top deputy prosecutor, Jenny Parker.
With 86 of 86 precincts reporting, Cook Jones captured 73.10% of votes while Parker received 26.90%.
With the nomination secured, Cook Jones will face off against Andre Pretorius, Republican candidate and former prosecutor, in the November general election. Pretorius was recruited by the local GOP as a strong challenge to Cook Jones, who herself unseated an incumbent Republican DA in 2020.
In a phone interview on Tuesday night, Cook Jones said the wide margin in voter support was indicative that supporters understood the challenges her office faced.
“They still had an appetite for the kind of change and reform that we were proposing and trying to put into place,” Cook Jones said.
In her first term as a reform-minded DA, Cook Jones said she pushed for more diversionary programs while changing the culture of overzealous prosecution. Early in her tenure, however, she attracted criticism from legal circles as prosecutor turnover hamstrung the office and slowed progress in cases. She was also the subject of judicial sanctions for allegedly slow-rolling responses in a federal lawsuit.
Parker cited lack of trained staff and transparency problems as reasons she decided to run against her former boss. Expect more of the same arguments in November with Pretorius.
To combat understaffing, Cook Jones said she trained more paralegals to fill in the staffing gaps and reorganized the agency, so that prosecutors no longer specialize and can handle different types of crimes, she said.
Cook Jones said reforms to the complex criminal justice system take time and is asking for a second term to continue putting those changes into place. Cook Jones said Tuesday’s results speaks to the hard work her office has been putting in and that voters want to see her succeed.
“I think it puts us in an even stronger position to make the charge toward November,” she said. “I’m looking forward to it and looking forward to another term.”