Mandatory prison time for gun violence, says Maricopa County Attorney
The Maricopa County Attorney’s Office changed its policies starting Sept. 2, that will make prison time mandatory to plea agreements on violent gun crimes.
“Violent crime in Maricopa is soaring,” Maricopa County Attorney Rachel Mitchell said in a press release.
Mitchell said her office believes that this change will curb the rising violent crime rate while changing the way these cases are prosecuted and defended. She is the Republican candidate on the November ballot for the county attorney’s seat.
Between Aug. 19 and Aug. 29, 16 homicides had come in for prosecution; 15 involved using a gun, according to the office.
“We had 16 homicides in ten days,” Mitchell said, “If you expand that out over a 365 day year, that’s 584 homicides.”
“Now, we haven’t kept that pace throughout the year,” Mitchell said, “but (16) is just an absolutely, unacceptably high number.”
Gun-related homicides nationwide have increased 35% from 2019 to 2021 according to data collected by the Gun Violence Archive.
Making an extrapolation on such a short amount of time is flimsy, said ASU Criminology and Criminal Justice Professor Dustin Pardini. Looking at gun violence data over time allows for a better understanding of the impacts.
Here’s what this new policy means.
How do plea agreements work in criminal cases?
Criminal case plea agreements, where a defendant pleads guilty to charges before or while a trial takes place, are essentially a contract between the state and the defendant, negotiated by each side’s lawyers.
The state wants to avoid an expensive and resource-consuming trial, according to MCAO director of communications, Jennifer Liewer. On the other side, the defense wants to relate concerns of the defendant and get the least punishing consequences to their life after the case, said president of Arizona Attorneys for Criminal Justice Armando Nava.
The U.S. Bureau of Justice Assistance estimates that about 90 to 95% of federal and state cases end in plea agreements.
“A lot of times, the miscount involving weapons charge is used as a way to kind of cudgel a defendant into taking a higher offer flee, because those are easier charges to prove,” said Nava.
The new policy’s effect on plea agreements
The reworked policy, which went into effect Sept. 2, is found in the office’s Prosecution Policies and Procedures, specifically in Prosecution Policy 7.3.
The provision explains this new rule applies to the use of a gun, or brandishing of a gun, in the following list of crimes:
- First degree murder;
- Second degree murder;
- Manslaughter;
- Aggravated assaults that are a Class 2 or 3 felony;
- Arson of an occupied structure;
- Armed robbery;
- Burglary in the first degree;
- Kidnapping;
- Drive-by shooting;
- Discharge of a weapon at an occupied structure;
- Prisoners who assault with intent to incite a riot; and
- Sex Trafficking and Trafficking for Forced Labor and Services.
Nava explained that even without the prison mandate, “a lot of those are usually going to come with prison term as part of plea offers.”
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Mitchell said she seldom found cases end in no prison time, but she wanted “any such deviation to be reviewed at a higher level of supervisor.”
One of the changes makes it so that if a prosecutor wants to drop prison time, they would have to get approval from a bureau chief.
This potentially means that more cases will go to trial, Nava said.
“Not having the kind of discretion for line attorneys in the situation, I think is the real issue,” he said. “There’s a lot of good prosecutors out there who are hamstrung, because the orders coming down from on high that they can’t be compassionate.”
Facing a mandated prison time plea, defendants may be more inclined to go to trial with their case, Nava said.
“For example, if someone gets a nine-year offer and they’re looking at 15 years after trial, some clients will say ‘You know what, that’s about the same to me, I don’t really care. So let’s go to trial.'” Nava said.
Will the policy change rising gun violence?
Mitchell intends to curb the rise in violent gun crime with these changes. She points to her own experience with these kinds of actions capping certain kinds of crime.
“When I was a line prosecutor under Rick Romley,” she said, “when we were having a lot of gun violence, there was a similar policy, not completely the same, but similar policy imposed, and it cut back on the gun violence.”
Pardini said changing plea bargaining rules to deter people from committing gun violence is “completely unfounded.”
“it’s dealing with the problem after it already happened,” Pardini said.
The Republic previously reported on the effect prison sentences had on the state: increased the prison population, upped the amount spent on prisons into the billions and had minimal effect on actual crime rates.
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The research arm of the Department of Justice, the National Institute of Justice, published a briefing in 2016 on deterrence. That publication said increasing the threat of punishment has little effect on deterring crime compared to increasing the certainty of being caught in the crime.
“Effective policing that leads to swift and certain (but not necessarily severe) sanctions is a better deterrent than the threat of incarceration,” the report reads. There is no evidence, according to the report, that people avoid committing a crime “when the likelihood of imprisonment increases.”
Reach crime reporter Miguel Torres at [email protected] or on Twitter @TheMiguelTorres.
https://www.azcentral.com/story/news/local/phoenix/2022/09/03/prison-time-gun-violence-mandatory-maricopa-county-attorney/7965181001/
