State’s attorney hopefuls debate

While all of the candidates for the three Fayette County offices up for election next month touted their qualifications and abilities, those in one of the races also challenged each other’s ability.

The candidates’ forum at Vandalia Elementary School last Thursday night featured the candidates for circuit clerk, coroner and state’s attorney.
In the circuit clerk’s race, incumbent Republican Kathy Emerick is challenged by Democrat Ashley Towler. The incumbent coroner, Republican Bruce Bowen, is opposed by Democrat Lori Carter. Republican Joshua Morrison, the incumbent state’s attorney, is squaring off with Democrat Stephen Friedel, who held the office for three terms before deciding not to seek re-election in 2012.
And, it was the state’s attorney candidates who talked about both their ability and that of their opponent.
The first to speak, Friedel said, “This is a lot less about electing a politician than it is hiring a county’s lawyer … who is the one responsible for charging and enforcing every criminal law violation in the county.”
Prior to being elected to his first term, Friedel said, he tried at least 20 jury trials in about 4½ years as an assistant state’s attorney, and while in office here, he took 120 cases to a jury.
Friedel said he chose not to run in 2012, to “try something different,” but quickly learned that he again wanted to be a prosecutor.
“When I am working for the good of society as opposed to a person, that is really where my calling and motivation is,” he said.
After he left office, Friedel said, “I paid close attention to how the office had been run.”
He said that Morrison hired a “young skilled attorney (Amanda Ade-Harlow)” who “was, frankly, running the office.” During her time with Morrison, he said, the office held five jury trials and won two of them, with Ade-Harlow getting the guilty verdicts.
“Amanda was keeping the office together,” Friedel said. “When she left … the wheels came off the bus.”
In his opening remarks, Morrison said that when he took office, Friedel showed him a table stacked with “police reports dating back 2½ years.
“I brought technology (to the office) and, no, everything was not done by Amanda, as Mr. Friedel would have you believe. I have done a lot of trials, I have brought technology into the courtroom.
“You need to have a state’s attorney who is dedicated and committed to Fayette County; I have been the one to take the 3  o’clock (a.m.) phone calls.
“My job is to be a public servant – that is what I have been,” Morrison said. Citing his involvement in community organizations, he said, “I have done everything I can possibly think of to help Fayette County.”
On the question of their greatest accomplishment, Friedel said it is easy to point to his successful prosecution of a double homicide case. But, Friedel said, admitting that he was initially not doing juvenile cases “very well,” that he learned a lot after being a foster parent.
“I understood what it meant to be a foster parent,” and understood what the children and parents went through, he said.
“Then I became an attorney who understood and was able to handle juvenile cases, and I handled every juvenile case for 12 years. Any one of those cases is my best accomplishment,” he said.
Morrison said that his greatest accomplishment was “bringing the office back to the people,” saying that he has upheld his promise to hold open office hours for anyone who wanted to come in and speak with him.
“My greatest accomplishment is being a public servant and helping people, and not just in the courtroom,” he said.
Asked about the factors they consider from start to finish in a case, Morrison said that he, as state’s attorney, has “to be the filter,” in studying cases and determining what needs to be done, including asking officers to put more work into obtaining evidence.
Friedel said that he has to consider whether a person should even be charged, and if charges are filed, “Then, the question is, what is a just result; then, I seek the just result.”
For a person to be held over for trial, he said, probable cause has to be shown in a preliminary hearing. “In the last four years, 12 felony cases have not made a probable cause result at or before a preliminary hearing.
“Either the state chose to file a felony and did not have probable cause or did have the evidence but could not meet that small burden of probable cause.
“You can say … that sometimes you are going to fail in the state’s attorney’s office, but quite frankly, there is no excuse for losing a preliminary hearing – it is, at its core, a failure in the state’s attorney’s office,” Friedel said.
Morrison countered by saying that he presents the evidence that he has at the time of the hearing. “There are always things that come up, things that happen, witnesses disappear … whatever.”
In rebuttal, Friedel said that that “is just simply a bad answer speaking to non-attorneys. You need to be thorough and confident, and make sure you have your ducks in a row before you take that drastic step of charging a person with a felony offense; that is clearly the state’s attorney not putting together the case.”
Asked about the issue of drugs in Fayette County, Friedel said that meth “as at its infancy” when he became state’s attorney and “with the cooperation of law enforcement, we took down scores of meth labs.
“I will never be able to say to you that there will never be anymore drugs … but that Fayette County is not the place you want to do it,” he said.
Friedel said it is his belief that “meth is creeping back in, plus heroin is coming and it’s taking root.”
A state’s attorney, he said, takes care of that “with tough prosecution, and I have a record of accomplishing that.”
Morrison then took exception with Friedel’s claims, using Illinois State Police statistics to show that from 2005-14, the largest number of arrests was in 2012, 819, the highest rate in 10 years. In the next two years, he said, there were 767 and 705, respectively.
“So his ‘tough on crime, tough on drugs’ did not scare offenders off’; they were actually increasing as he was leaving,” Morrison said.
“I’m not afraid to prosecute anybody, I’m not afraid to go to trial,” he said.
“I have no idea how many jury trials I’ve tried, I won some, lost some. It’s a fact, you try cases, you lose cases,” he said.
Morrison said that in 2014, his office sent 71 people to prison, that being the highest number in 10 years.
“I am doing the job. Plea bargain or not, people are going to prison, and that saves taxpayers money,” he said.
But Friedel said that when Morrison ran for the office in 2012 against Friedel’s assistant, he complained about the office pleading out too many cases.
He also said that there were 131 felony probation cases in 2012 and 73 in 2014. “What you saw was a net loss of 50 felony convictions,” Friedel said
“What I am telling you is it is his assistant who is prosecuting all of the cases, and when his most qualified assistant left, that is when we saw preliminary hearings lost, that is when we started seeing jury trials lost,” he said.
On Morrison’s jury trials, “I would like to see some numbers on that.”
In Morrison’s first trial in Fayette County, Friedel said, a judge ruled for a mistrial because of a statement Morrison made to the jury during his opening statement.
“I submit to you, that’s a rookie mistake, a mistake of a person who has not tried a lot of jury trials or at least done it well,” Friedel said.
Morrison said he would be guessing at a number of trials he has held, then countered Friedel’s claim on probation cases with the argument that the number of probation cases has been almost level over the years, except in 2013, “when I took over, because of lot of cases were stale. I had to take what I could get (in sentences),” he said.
Asked what they would say when asked why they should be elected to the office, Morrison said that he offers “balance,” considering the victim, the defendant and the public.
He said that the mother of a defendant hugged him after he had gotten a prison sentence for her son. “I sent him to prison, I wasn’t mean to him, but I did save his life, because he’s not doing drugs anymore. That’s justice.”
Friedel said that a state’s attorney needs to have ability and exercise judgment and discretion.
“But if you can’t get onto the field and carry out what you are desiring, you can have all of the discretion, all of the compassion in the world, but if you can’t bring it home for the victim, what good is it?”
Talking about recent jury trial losses and the mistrial mentioned earlier, Friedel said, “The catastrophic failures I’ve been talking about, you don’t have those in my administration.”