Before Polk County Attorney Kimberly Graham was elected in 2022, opponents called progressive policies like hers a threat to public safety. Would a victim eventually be hurt or murdered because she let go somebody who should have been behind bars? the argument went. A senseless April 10 killing in a Des Moines apartment complex appears ― at first blush ― to be exactly that scenario.
State lawmakers from both parties are running with that narrative by hurriedly drafting and advancing a law to take away Graham’s discretion.
The law would be a mistake. And by tying the proposal to the facts of this case, those legislators are implicitly advocating an untenable system of mass incarceration. After the killing, Graham has not helped her cause by misrepresenting the murder suspect’s background. But the county attorney should not apologize for her and her staff’s correct decision to allow the woman to participate in the clinic and go free.
For the umpteenth time, Iowa lawmakers should leave local elected officials alone and let local voters handle accountability.
What happened with Polk County’s warrant resolution clinic?
At any given time, thousands of people in Polk County are subject to arrest warrants, often for violating probation terms, often for not keeping in contact with a probation officer. That was the case for Sharneeka Evans, a 46-year-old Des Moines resident. In 2023, Evans received a suspended prison sentence and was ordered to serve probation after she admitted to trying to cash a forged check for somebody who had promised her a chunk of the money. As part of that case, Graham’s office agreed to dismiss a domestic assault charge in a case in which Evans was accused of hitting a man’s hand with a pole.
Evans never made initial contact with a probation officer, as Polk County District Court Judge Jeffrey Farrell had ordered her to do. An arrest warrant was issued. Nothing happened for 27 months.
That’s when the Polk County Attorney’s Office held a “warrant resolution clinic.” The idea was to allow people with long-standing warrants related to non-violent offenses to move toward resolving court cases without the threat of arrest when they first met with prosecutors and judges. Evans, along with about 40 other people, attended the April 3 event. She was interviewed on television about “trying to turn over a new leaf” in her life. Polk County District Judge Sarah Crane signed an order commanding Evans to appear in court April 21. There is no indication Evans would have been in custody if the clinic hadn’t happened.
A week later, prosecutors allege, Evans shot Ashley Hall to death while the two of them were inside another woman’s northwest-side apartment. State Reps. Charley Thomson and Steve Holt led discussion of a new bill April 23 to outlaw warrant resolution clinics, savaging Graham’s office for its poor judgment. They said Hall’s slaying would have been easily preventable. The full Iowa House approved the bill 71-20 on April 29.
Iowa cannot and should not imprison everybody who violates probation or commits a violent act
The crux of Thomson and Holt’s arguments, that a rational person would not have allowed Evans to avoid jail for her probation violation, is not specious. In a lengthy written statement about the bill, Graham omitted mention of Evans’ domestic violence case (and, to be clear, Evans was not convicted of anything). She did not acknowledge Evans’ 30-day jail sentence in 2022 for pushing a woman down two flights of stairs and a 2020 conviction for breaking a glass bottle on a man’s head.
Holt, R-Denison, read from a statement April 29 that he said the victim’s mother emailed to him: “How dare this happen with the people we are supposed to trust to make our state safe. … I live every day knowing that my granddaughters will grow up without their mother.”
“It’s just unbelievable to me that they dismissed the warrant on somebody with this kind of criminal history,” Holt added.
If the argument is that immediately shirking probation on top of that specific history should have taken “warrant resolution” off the table for Evans, that’s at least debatable.
But that does not seem to be the principle behind House File 2787. Instead, the bill and its supporters’ comments seem to characterize jail or prison as the only acceptable outcome for every probation violation, or for every encounter with law enforcement after a handful of violent incidents.
“When you treat a warrant as a problem, you’re treating the justice system as a problem,” said Rep. Charley Thomson, R-Charles City. Lawmakers who reduced the issue to that platitude are ignoring reality in multiple ways.
Most plainly, they ignore the capacity of jails and prisons and the cost to productivity of reflexive imprisonments. They also ignore the difficulty ― impossibility might be a better word ― of identifying in advance which offenders will commit horrible new crimes and which will be rehabilitated.
These are the same principles tossed around earlier this year regarding Holt’s proposal for a new “three-strikes law.” It sounds reasonable to give people notice that unrelenting lawbreaking will be severely punished. But a closer look at the practical effects shows that a hindsight-driven approach is not workable. The criminal justice system is full of tradeoffs, as Polk prosecutors and corrections officials described to lawmakers at the April 23 hearing.
Critics of the warrant resolution clinic said it will teach scofflaws to ignore court debts and wait for a future clinic. But prosecutors and judges are capable of detecting that sort of cynicism and declining to reward it.
The warrant clinic itself is a recognition that the government can’t round up thousands of people eligible for arrest. Elevating pragmatism is laudable. And pragmatism means sometimes accepting the risk of releasing a person into the public, while putting in place guardrails to mitigate those risks.
Is it possible those guardrails need bolstering? Certainly. Is the solution to end a potentially fruitful program? No.
Republicans and Democrats misinterpret what happened
Pragmatism has been the hallmark of Graham’s three-plus years in office. She has taken steps to keep some marijuana-possession defendants from having to occupy jail cells. Her office made it easier for people to keep their driver’s licenses while they pay down court debt.
Some Democrats said during debate on April 29 that Graham and her office had not set up proper safeguards.
“We’ve heard directly from members of the judiciary about the level of concern they had about the program in its totality,” said Rep. Larry McBurney, D-Urbandale. Eight Democrats ultimately voted to ban warrant resolution clinics; McBurney voted no, saying it was the wrong solution. He had supported Rep. Angel Ramirez’s amendment to add new rules for future clinics.
Graham got the idea right in her written statement: “We don’t get rid of probation entirely because a few people on probation commit new crimes.”
Both to uphold local control and to encourage innovations that promote justice and public safety, Iowa should not prohibit warrant resolution clinics. Nevertheless, the Iowa Senate, with bipartisan support, sent the bill to Gov. Kim Reynolds on May 3 with a 31-12 vote. Reynolds should veto it.
Lucas Grundmeier, on behalf of the Register’s editorial board
This editorial is the opinion of the Des Moines Register’s editorial board: Rachel Stassen-Berger, executive editor; Lucas Grundmeier, opinion editor; and Richard Doak and Rox Laird, editorial board members.
This article originally appeared on Des Moines Register: Murder case doesn’t mean Iowa’s progressive prosecutor erred | Opinion
Reporting by The Register’s editorial, Des Moines Register / Des Moines Register
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