Atlanta Repeat Offender Commission
Chairman, Dave Wilkinson, president and CEO Atlanta Police Foundation
Georgia Turner, Atlanta police chief
Ted Jackson, Fulton County sheriff
Paul Howard, Fulton County district attorney
Veronica Cox, chief probation officer, Atlanta Court Services
Cory Beggs, chief probation officer, Atlanta Judicial Circuit
Amanda Jordan, master chief parole officer
Mary Norwood, Atlanta City Council member
Keisha Lance Bottoms, Atlanta City Council member
Rob Pitts, Fulton County commissioner
Gail Tusan, Fulton Superior Court chief judge
John Mather, Fulton State Court chief judge
Yolanda Lewis, Fulton County court administrator
Tina Robinson, clerk of superior court
A.J. Robinson, president of Central Atlanta Progress
What’s next?
Atlanta Mayor Kasim Reed will release the draft report.
A final report is expected in early 2015.
The commission will continue to work, looking at other aspects of the judicial system and monitoring any changes adopted as a result of its first report.
Verdarrius Epps was arrested 16 times in seven years, six of those after he was charged with murder.
Each time he was sentenced to probation and has yet to get any prison time.
Today, however, he is in the Fulton County Jail, where he was taken after he was arrested in October for not showing up for a court hearing on charges he killed a man in 2011.
Looking at repeat offenders already being tracked by a special unit at the Atlanta Police Department, the commission found that 461 accounted for 14,421 charges brought in Atlanta between April 2011 and last December. Only 16 of those 461 repeat offenders were sent to prison.
“The repeat offender issue really is a complex issue and we’re focusing on what to do with the repeat offender … with limited resources,” said Fulton County Superior Court Judge Gail Tusan, a member of the Atlanta Repeat Offender Commission.
Some of the recommendations in the commission‘s draft report include:
• Develop a plan to update criminal records missing from the statewide data base and then set up a system so that arrests and convictions are added as they occur.
• Send repeat offenders, including those who are charged with non-violent crimes, to the judges assigned to handle more serious, violent cases,
• Publish judge’s sentencing statistics and publicize the cases that the District Attorney’s Office drops.
• The DA will ask that probation be revoked, and the offender sent to prison for the remainder of that sentence, when there is an arrest for a new crime.
• Make warrants for arrest for repeat offenders on probation a priority.
• Publicize the number of cases against repeat offenders.
“These are the people our citizens are leaving town to get away from, these are the entering the auto people, these are the people harassing them on the streets,” said Fulton District Attorney Paul Howard, a commission member.
Those 461 alone have been arrested at least 15 times over years.
“This is a troublesome number,” Howard said.
The commission, appointed by the mayor, looked for reasons so many benefit from revolving door justice in Atlanta and then suggested changes to address the chronic problem of criminals who released back to the streets even though they been arrested dozens of times – some hundreds.
Based on interviews with key players in the justice system for Atlanta and Fulton County, some have already adopted different approaches or will be putting them in place in the coming days and weeks.
Much of the criticism in the report – which was written by the Atlanta Police Foundation, was directed at the courts.
Already, judges faced with revoking probation will look deeper into a criminal’s past rather than only consider the most recent offense, Tusan said.
The District Attorney’s Office has started flagging cases when they first come into the office if the defendant has had multiple arrests.
Howard said his office will begin on Dec. 1 asking that the original sentencing judge to revoke probation. Currently, probation revocations are usually handled by one of two magistrates, and not by the judge who issued the probation sentence in the beginning.
Mayor Kasim Reed said in his inaugural in January that addressing crime would be a priority for his second term. He tapped judges, prosecutors and elected officials to take a deep dive into Atlanta’s crime problem and he put the Atlanta Police Foundation in charge of the work.
The panel started with those 461 who committed crimes over a 20-month period but then tracked their criminal histories as far back as they would go.
Most of the 14,421 charges filed against those 461 were for crimes that touch almost everyone at some time – burglary, larceny, street robbery or car theft. Only about 1,500 charges were for violent crimes such as murder, armed robbery, aggravated assaults, and 3,500 were brought for drug crimes.
Consider:
• Epps, 26, was arrested 16 times between 2007 and 2014, mostly on drug charges. Epps was charged in March 2011 with shooting and killing a man in southwest Atlanta but he was freed on bail three months later. Within six weeks of getting out of jail, Epps was locked up for criminal trespassing. He was arrested and taken to jail six times more on drug charges until he was jailed Oct. 15 for not showing up for a court hearing on the 2011 murder charge.
• Derrico Lamar Thomas 31, has been in the Fulton County Jail since December, when he was arrested on a murder charge for the Aug. 29, 2013, death of Olando Young. It was his fifth arrest since he was released from prison in February 2012, his second time in the state system. In total, Thomas has been arrested 22 times on 48 different charges since 2002 yet 93 percent of charges are not in the state crime data base.
• Larry Love who vwas born in 1949 was most recently released from the Fulton County Jail on Sept. 10. Love – who also goes by Lovelace and Collins — was arrested 108 times between 1969 and the beginning of 2014; 52 of those times have been since 2000. Out of the 183 charges filed in those arrests, 85 of them were for felonies yet Love has been in prison only once. He was released in September 2006 after serving three months of a one-year sentence that was to be followed by nine years on probation. Fulton County Jail records show he has been locked up multiple times in years since but his probation has never been revoked.
Court records show Love was sentenced in 2007 to five years on probation for possession of cocaine. Love shoplifted booster cables and heavy-duty straps from a truck stop on Dec. 21, 2012, because, his public defender explained, he had been homeless for 15 years and was trying to get things to sell. He was sentenced to 10 years. He was given credit for six months he had already spent in jail but was ordered to spend another six locked up; the remaining nine years of his sentence was suspended.
Last July Love was arrested on charges of possession of marijuana and cocaine with intent to distribute but he pleaded guilty to criminal and was given a one-year sentence, which was immediately commuted to time served and he was freed.
There was no record of the disposition of more than 8,700 cases the commission reviewed, or 60 percent of the arrests that were studied.
“This was found to be a widespread issue and contributes to a variety of problems, including the inability to identify repeat offenders upon arrest and the inability to provide all parties throughout the criminal justice system with an offender’s complete history,” the draft report said.
Clerk of Superior Court Tina Robinson said sometimes the information is just slow getting into the system but prosecutors can provide that same accounting when they are before a judge. She said a new computer system is also making it easier for prosecutors and the courts to share information.
“We’re addressing the problems daily,” she said.
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