Chatham district attorney candidates throw barbs over effectiveness

The traditional statistic voters use to assess a district attorney’s record is their office’s conviction rate — the number of people found guilty of a crime divided by the total closed cases handled by prosecutors.

But in Chatham County, Democratic District Attorney Shalena Cook Jones hasn’t tracked that number since taking office nearly four years ago. 

In the runup to November’s election, voters looking for an in-depth understanding of key public safety issues such as indictments, plea deals and prosecutions will have trouble finding reliable information on which to base their choice between the incumbent and Republican challenger Andre Pretorius.

That’s because the other data hubs for Chatham County’s criminal justice system — the jail and courthouse — do not provide information to tabulate or assess the total number of criminal prosecutions, The Current has found.

Haphazard statistical recordkeeping is among the many faults Cook Jones’ critics have about her work as Chatham’s top prosecutor since she took office in 2021. She has been sanctioned by a judge for conduct in a lawsuit brought by a former employee. Her management struggles led to the dissolution of the prosecution team that handles sexual assaults. Her opponent also argues that she has been soft on crime.

Cook Jones rejects that criticism, and dismisses the idea that a conviction rate is an equitable measuring stick of performance. 

She says that her focus as a “smart-on-crime” district attorney has been to put violent criminals in prison and divert non-violent offenders from incarceration. Her office has convicted 27 murder defendants since May 2023, she said.

Cook Jones says her commitment to compiling meaningful data has been stymied by antiquated software that requires her and her overworked prosecutors to calculate tallies by hand using a highlighter on spreadsheets. 

“If I’m going to state a statistic, I am going to have a receipt to back it up, or a report,” Cook Jones said. “I’ve hand-counted things … because our system is not intelligent. I would not give the public misinformation.”

In the vacuum of comprehensive statistics, however, criticism against her has bloomed. 

Pretorius, a former prosecutor who is on leave as an assistant attorney for Chatham County, says data he has collected shows a chaotic state of justice under the incumbent. That includes what he says are 35 instances since 2021 in which murder suspects in Savannah received bond while awaiting trial because the district attorney’s office did not file appropriate paperwork to keep them in jail. 

When asked by The Current to provide detailed information about those cases, Pretorius said he did not have notes about them to share.

Poor data quality in Chatham

The debate about effective data collection in Chatham County started well before the current election cycle.

Cook Jones came into office with a desire to focus on different metrics. She believes that standard conviction rates miss the complexities of the criminal justice system. After a hand-count tally last year, Cook Jones found that less than 1% of her office’s caseload were homicides. More than 80% involved drug, property or non-violent crimes. 

“It knocked my socks off,” she said. “Why are we paying so much money to resolve the 80% while the 1% of cases goes under investigated?

In 2022 she started a partnership with the Justice Innovation Lab, a New York-based organization that pores through statistics at prosecutors’ offices to find inequities and inefficiencies.  The group has previously worked with Charleston, S.C. and Saint Paul, Minn., which are similar in size to Chatham County, to assess performance with a goal of making the criminal justice system more fair. 

The project never progressed beyond an early stage. A 2023 email from the lab’s director, Jared Fishman, apparently sent to The Current by mistake, suggests that the “limited quality of data” played a role. 

The organization’s researchers said part of the record-keeping problems stemmed from the software system called Tracker, provided by the state’s Prosecuting Attorneys’ Council of Georgia. A lack of oversight within the DA’s office about how data was entered into the system complicated matters further, they said. Fishman declined to comment.

The district attorney whom Cook Jones unseated, Meg Heap, used the same software. She said she used to require her prosecutors to enter statistics into the software every December when court was in recess.

While the system was imperfect, Heap said that she consistently produced conviction rates because she tasked her administrative assistants and former chief assistant prosecutor with doing so. 

“We kept copious notes through Tracker so that when somebody, the press, anyone asked, we could say ‘Our statistics show we have an over 90% conviction rate for violent crimes’.” 

Pretorius said arguments by the incumbent that statistics can’t be tracked well don’t hold water. 

“That’s where we got all of our statistics from — from Tracker,” Pretorius said, “Because we put every single case that we had in our office into Tracker when we first started.” He said it doesn’t produce statistics but gives you all the tools to do so yourself.

Former prosecutors who worked for both Heap and Cook Jones said incomplete data entered into the system made it impossible to show efficacy. “Garbage in, garbage out,” two former assistant prosecutors told The Current.

Furthermore, those prosecutors say that the current software system can’t assess more wide-ranging conclusions about the demographics of defendants and their sentencing.

A more costly software platform that could tabulate these different metrics is something that Chatham County commissioners won’t spend money on, Cook Jones said.  

“When you hear me say that we need our local government to invest in a data culture, I’m saying that because without the data, any candidate can stand up and say, ‘Oh, we’ve done so great!’ but that’s just an anecdotal opinion,” Cook Jones said. “It’s not supported by data.”

Candidate gathers own statistics

Pretorius said his perception about Cook Jones’ poor conviction rates helped motivate him to run against her.

Since the summer, Pretorius — who is on leave from his job as the deputy attorney for the county while running for election — has spent weeks digging into law enforcement and court data trying to piece together facts for the voters he is seeking to woo. 

Pretorius’ search would be a difficult task for anyone not familiar with the legal system in the county, or without the insider access to the data banks kept by the jail and courts. 

He compiled information about people arrested for murder in Savannah from Savannah Police Department’s news releases, compared them to Chatham’s internal jail software called Phoenix and checked them against public court records. The jail software is not something accessible to the general public. 

He did not assess cases from other jurisdictions that are included in the Chatham district attorney’s mandate, such as unincorporated Chatham County, Pooler, Thunderbolt, Bloomingdale and Georgetown.

Yet what he found shocked him, he said.

In the last three years, 35 individuals charged with murder were allowed to post bond and leave jail, mainly because the DA failed to file an indictment within a 90-day window, according to Pretorius.

Many of the delays were due to the turnover that plagued Cook Jones’ administration during her first two years, Pretorius said. But he said he said the phenomenon is still occurring.

This summer and fall, Pretorius has routinely appeared at campaign events with a stack of statistics about his opponent’s alleged failings. 

One data point he uses shows what he says is Cook Jones’ lack of effectiveness prosecuting the backlog of criminal cases that she inherited when she took over the position. 

Cook Jones started her tenure during the Covid-19 crisis, when criminal courts were shut down by order of the state. Once courts reopened she faced more than 28,000 backlogged cases. In May 2022, she told the Savannah Morning News that they chipped away at around 4,200 of those cases.

But even Pretorius’ use of numbers can be confusing, and potentially misleading.

In a candidate forum earlier in September, Pretorius said that around 3,000 cases related to that backlog had been dismissed outright. That has become part of his argument that Cook Jones is unfit for her office. 

The Current asked for copies of Pretorius’ data to confirm the accuracy of his statistics. The Republican candidate said he did not have detailed notes to share. “​​It’s not a report,” he said of his research. “It’s very intricate the way I do it.”

Pretorius’ lack of source material makes it difficult to independently confirm the numbers or analyze what the impact of those defendants being free on bail had on the community.

In an interview Cook Jones called Pretorius’ statistics misleading.

“The only clearinghouse for accurate data is us,” Cook Jones said about the DA’s office. “And we still haven’t figured out a way to get our arms around this.”

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