By The Vanguard
AUGUSTA, GA – In 2020, a Black lawyer named Jared Williams upset a conservative, pro-police candidate with just more than 50 percent of the vote—no African American had been elected district attorney in the district, a three-county district since 1870.
But, according to a story in the Guardian, the “historic win was short-lived. The day after his election, a lawyer and state lawmaker in the area proposed something unusual: that the circuit’s whitest county separate itself from the Augusta circuit, creating a new judicial circuit in Georgia for the first time in nearly 40 years.”
“Does the board of commissioners want to be there [sic] own judicial circuit,” Barry Fleming, a Republican state legislator from nearby Harlem, asked the Columbia County commission chair, Doug Duncan, and sure enough, “Duncan supported the plan, and in December 2020 issued a resolution asking the area’s lawmakers, including Fleming, to introduce legislation that would separate Columbia county from the judicial circuit it had been a part of for 150 years. Fleming’s bill passed with bipartisan support,” said the Guardian.
“The split caused the disenfranchisement of the old circuit’s Black voters, voting advocacy organization Black Voters Matter Fund contended in a lawsuit that was eventually dismissed by the state supreme court. Those voters had chosen Williams, who ran on a pledge to uphold criminal justice reforms such as not prosecuting low-level marijuana possession, a crime which disproportionately affects Black and minority communities
“Instead of Williams, Black voters in Columbia county got as their prosecutor Bobby Christine, a Trump-appointed US attorney who was appointed by the Republican governor, Brian Kemp. Christine then chose Williams’s opponent as his chief deputy,” said the Guardian.
“There was a time when as we started to win these elections, white people would leave,” said Cliff Albright, executive director of Black Voters Matter Fund. “But now they’ve figured out, we don’t actually have to leave, we can just change the jurisdiction. It is a way, even when the political minority is losing, to hold on to the mechanism of coercion through the courts and law enforcement.”
The Guardian story added, “Despite voting advocates’ opposition, the circuit split had bipartisan support and was welcomed by some Black Democrats in the legislature, who argued that a backlog of felony cases in Richmond county could be reduced if the circuit were smaller and didn’t include Columbia county.”
The Guardian noted, “The splitting of the Augusta judicial circuit and the resulting creation of the new Columbia judicial circuit is not the only split to have been proposed in recent years. Nor is it the only split to have involved Fleming, a hardline conservative lawyer who was the architect of Georgia’s 2021 sweeping voter suppression law.”
This wasn’t over. Later, two Republican lawmakers in Georgia proposed a circuit split in Oconee county after the election of a progressive prosecutor who ran on a platform of addressing systemic racism. Since then, Republican legislators statewide created a prosecutor oversight commission that holds the power to remove prosecutors for misconduct.
“The commission has been heavily criticized by Democratic prosecutors such as Fani Willis, who is investigating the Trump campaign’s meddling in the 2020 election in Georgia. Willis and others told lawmakers the commission was created so white Republicans could target minority prosecutors,” said the Guardian.
In Florida, Gov. Ron DeSantis fired a prosecutor who signed a pledge criticizing the criminalization of transgender people. In Mississippi, white Republican leaders have created a judicial district with hand-picked judges and law enforcement to oversee a majority-Black city.
“The Florida prosecutor who was removed by DeSantis has sued the governor, saying that by ‘challenging this illegal abuse of power, we make sure that no governor can toss out the results of an election because he doesn’t like the outcome.’
“‘Tossing out the outcome of an election is exactly what happened in Georgia when Republicans pushed for the creation of the new Columbia judicial circuit,’ Williams and others said.”
“Before Fleming spearheaded the Augusta split, others had proposed breaking up the circuit,” wrote the Guardian, noting in 2018, “state senator Harold Jones, who is Black, requested “the judicial council of Georgia conduct a workload study for courts in the three counties that comprise the old circuit – Columbia, Richmond and Burke…workloads were high for local judges, especially in the majority-Black county of Richmond, Jones said, so he argued that the 200,000 people there should have their own circuit.”
“As a Democrat, to do something that monumental, it’s next to impossible,” Jones said after he couldn’t make any headway.
“Behind the scenes, Columbia county leaders were coordinating to separate the county in response to Williams’s historic election win. Among those working to institute the split was Fleming…an attorney who works on behalf of nearly 40 state and county governments throughout Georgia (and) is a full-throated Trump supporter. He has been heavily involved in election matters through his former role as chair of the special committee on election integrity.”
“Held in the midst of widespread protests against police brutality following the murder of George Floyd, the 2020 race between Williams and Paine, who was appointed by Kemp in 2017 and ran unopposed in 2018, reflected national themes of conflict between so-called law-and-order conservatives and progressive reformers. Williams prevailed despite attacks calling him ‘soft on crime,’” wrote the Guardian.
“James Woodall, a public policy associate with the Southern Center for Human Rights, which advocates on behalf of indigent defense, told the Guardian circuit splitting allows lawmakers to hand-pick conservative prosecutors in a swing state.
“’They’re trying to find ways to maintain power,’ Woodall said. “And who’s going to choose those people? Not the voters.”
