The Tide: Chatham DA, Savannah mayor spar over dismissed cases

Chatham County’s district attorney, long under fire for the way she has managed criminal prosecutions during the previous four years, received a new broadside this week from a powerful member of her own party: Savannah Mayor Van Johnson.

The two Democrats exchanged barbs about DA Shalena Cook Jones’ decision last week to dismiss murder cases against six defendants compromised by Savannah police misconduct. The dispute shows how central the issue of victims rights will be in a heated race pitting Cook Jones against a Republican challenger in November.

Johnson and Cook Jones accused each other this week of using the unsolved murder cases for political purposes.

Mayor Johnson, a former police department employee, said Tuesday that the city and Savannah Police Department were left in the dark about the DA’s decision last week to dismiss the cases. Cook Jones explained that the cases had been tainted by the misconduct of two former Savannah Police Department officers Ashley Wood and Darryl Repress. Both disgraced officers have been indicted for lying on the stand, on search warrants and to their superiors.

He also claimed that the DA was playing politics and failing victims.

“The fact of the matter is, one detective doth not a case make,” he said. “If you have two bad apples, then you deal with the bad apples. But the case is still the case.”

Cook Jones refuted these assertions, saying in a Wednesday statement that the mayor’s “baseless, ill-informed ramblings about politics” were false.

The document includes screenshots of text messages and emails, which Cook Jones says show the city and SPD were informed ahead of time of the dismissals.

“It is my hope that we do not allow political chatter to overshadow the hard  work and good reputation of the officers and prosecutors who are charged  with making the tough decisions that justice requires,” she wrote.

After beating back a Democratic primary challenge in May, Cook Jones now faces former prosecutor and Republican, Andre Pretorius, in the November election. The furor around the DA’s decision to dismiss charges in murder cases previews a central election issue in the charged DA race: the rights of crime victims.

The relationship between Cook Jones’ administration and victims of serious crimes has been a sore spot since she took over in 2021 and was the subject of an investigation by The Current earlier this year.

The report found that the dissolution of a special unit for prosecuting sex crimes and the demise of collaborative meetings between police and prosecutors raised major concerns among advocates, attorneys and victims.

Cook Jones, a former elder abuse prosecutor, ran in 2020 on a platform of smart prosecution and criminal justice reform. Her first three years in office were marked by tumult in staffing and her attempt to handle the thousands of backlogged cases she inherited after the Covid-19 pandemic shut down the court system in Georgia.

She says that her agency experienced some victories in the form of reform efforts, like a diversion program for first time gun offenders and directing the efforts of prosecutors away from nonviolent and victimless crimes towards more serious felony cases.

Democratic leaders around the city have also put a distance between themselves and the DA. Two Democratic city council members, Detric Leggett and Linda Wilder Bryan, as well as nonpartisan and Republican allies of Johnson spoke at a fundraiser for Pretorius last month.

The League of Women Voters of Coastal Georgia is hosting a candidate forum with Cook Jones and Pretorius on Sept. 16 at 301 Fahm Street at 6:30 p.m.