Rick Reed top choice in Travis County DA's race

As primary day approaches, I wanted to tell readers in Austin and Travis County - especially since several people have asked me, including three today! - that I'm voting for Rick Reed to replace Ronnie Earle as the Travis County District Attorney. (I meant to post this last weekend, but came down ill; I apologize to Reed for my tardiness.) If you haven't seen it, here's his TV spot, or you can watch a candidate forum online.

There are four candidates in the Democratic primary for Travis DA, and the winner will get the job since there's no Republican candidate. Of the four, to me, the choice came quickly down to Reed and Rosemary Lehmberg, Earle's long-time first assistant.

Odds are, the race is really for second, to see who winds up going head to head against Rosemary in the runoff. She's got a big TV buy running and the endorsement of the incumbent, with whom locals including this writer have been fairly happy over the years. After all, Austin has the lowest crime rate of any big city in Texas, and you have to give the DA at least some credit for that, not to mention his chief of operations, which is essentially Lehmberg's job.

The problem to me is that by electing Lehmberg, voters would be sending a message that endorses the status quo. I think we can do better than we're doing, but she's been calling the shots on a day to day basis as long as I've been aware of local criminal justice politics.

I respect Rosemary a lot, and she's a terrific candidate; I'll be proud to have her as DA if she wins. But there are things Travis County is not doing well on her watch. Black Austinites are incarcerated for drug crimes at 31 times the rate of whites, though drug use is roughly the same among the two groups. Ronnie Earle and his first assistant, charged to "seek justice," shouldn't need a study from D.C. to learn that Dallas has a 9-1 ratio, by comparison, or that in Denton County it's 3-1. That's an embarrassing statistic, and I think it's a result of choices by police and prosecutors, not a real representation of crime trends.

Blacks are imprisoned disproportionately for drugs everywhere, but there's no good reason it should be three times as bad in Austin as in Dallas. Among the candidates, only Reed had a partial solution: Eliminating "consent searches" for Class C misdemeanors, an idea I've long supported.

Similarly, Travis County has the highest percentage of low-level pretrial detainees of any large Texas county, but the jail is overstuffed. That can only be the fault of the prosecutors and judges handling the cases, another reason I hesitate to endorse the status quo. While all four candidates say they're committed to pretrial diversion, it's fair to say that Rosemary has been in charge for a while, and could have done a lot more than she has before now.

Reed wants to institute an "open file" policy, allowing defendants and their counsel full access to prosecution files, even putting the information password-protected online, following the model in Tarrant County - to let both prosecutors and defense attorneys access it paper free with less hassle. That's been needed for years, and other counties have done it already: I'd like for that change to be made.

Finally, Reed's most prominent stance has been against the death penalty; he's said that if elected he won't implement it as DA, either in ongoing cases (Travis has five people on death row) or in new murders. I had a chance to talk to Reed face to face about this, and he said that he might believe in the death penalty theoretically, but because we know sometimes Travis prosecutors make mistakes in extremely serious cases, and just as importantly, because it diverts so many dollars and office resources from pretrial diversion, drug courts, and other prosecutorial strategies the community supports, he decided to simply oppose capital punishment altogether and let the chips fall where they may.

I basically agree with that stance; as I've written in the past: "It's not that I don't think there are bad folks out there who 'need killin', I just don't trust the government's ability to distinguish between them and the rest of us."

A commenter earlier declared that Reed's death penalty stance might make him a "one-term wonder." I don't know why that would be true if he did his job well, but even if it is, the switch to an open file policy likely couldn't and wouldn't be reversed. That alone to me would be worth the vote.

Otherwise, Reed is perfectly competent to run the agency, which IMO is the minimum threshold for the job; I certainly hope that if he doesn't get it, Rosemary does. Of the other two candidates, Gary Cobb still seemed a little green to me in his answers to questions at two candidate forums; I'd like to see him try again with just a little more seasoning.

Mindy Montford is the only natural politician in the group (her father's a former state senator, her ex-husband a city councilmember), while the other three are "lawyer's lawyers." But for DA, I WANT a lawyer's lawyer. The political skills she brings to the table are important, but she might be running for the wrong job. (I'd have voted for her, as I plan to for Brian Thompson, against Dawnna Dukes, for example - though I don't know all her positions, she'd probably be better in the Lege than running the DA's office.)

Of these four candidates, in this time and place, Reed is the right choice and I'm voting for him. I said earlier Austin is lucky (particularly by comparison with Harris County) to have such a fine crop of DA candidates. It's true, but Rick Reed is the best choice of the lot.