District Attorney asks for full-time investigator

District Attorney Dee Peavy asked county commissioners for a budget bump in fiscal 2023 to hire a fulltime investigator to handle a rising number of complex cases that are going to trial, including child sex abuse cases and adult abuse cases, she said.

Ms. Peavy and Assistant District Attorney Phillip Gregory made the request to the commissioners during their July 11 budget workshop. The part-time investigator, Marshall Brown, will retire at the end of the year, and the 90th Judicial District is proposing that the two counties it serves, Young and Stephens, should share the cost of the investigator, Gregory said.

The $55,000 to $65,000 salary for a senior-level investigator would be offset by an expected drop in the county’s average jail population of 55 to 60 inmates per year as the new investigator helps resolve cases faster, he said. It costs the county about $35,000 to house one inmate for a year, he said.

“The reason we are asking for a full-time investigator is, for one thing, we are the only county that does not have a full-time investigator,” Mr. Gregory said. “A full-time investigator benefits us from intake and review of new cases, and trial preparation.”

Ms. Peavy said the lack of an investigator has cut into her time for processing cases, adding to taxpayers’ expenses for the defendants’ stays in Young County Jail.

“It is absolutely crucial for the DA’s office that we have an investigator that can go out,” she told the commissioners. “I spend half the time when I’m getting ready for trial … just to find witnesses myself rather than putting together legal arguments or being able to deal with other cases. It gets very time-consuming and that’s something that an investigator can do because they don’t have to do the actual trial prep.”

Mr. Gregory said the 90th Judicial District has been “blessed” at being able to resolve four recent murder cases without costly trials, including a capital murder case involving a team of investigators employed by defense attorneys to go over law enforcement’s case with a fine-tooth comb. That case also ended in a plea agreement.

“That (capital murder case) would have cost the county a lot of money and we were able to avoid the cost of that with a plea that dispensed justice, however, we are looking at more complex cases going on,” he said. “The defense had pretty much open access to investigators that we do not have access to and we are the prosecution. We are here to protect the county.”

Precinct 3 Commissioner Stacey Rogers asked Mr. Gregory and Ms. Peavy whether crime had increased in Young County.

“Crimes are different,” Mr. Gregory said. “In some ways, crime has decreased but the severity of the crimes has increased. By the grace of God, we have a lull in murders, but we still have a lot of sexual assaults and sexual assaults of children. We have our share of large cases coming and we need relief.”

Commissioners are considering departmental budget requests this month as they put together the county’s budget for the fiscal year starting in September.