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April 26th, 2016
As I have been going door-to-door over the past few weeks, people have been asking me the same question: “What will be your number one priority as our judge?” I’ve answered that question on multiple occasions in speeches and in private conversation, but for those who are still wondering, I thought it might be helpful for me to answer in this column.
I believe that the primary responsibility of a circuit court judge is to protect the communities in which he/she lives and serves. Sure, there are many, many other responsibilities that go along with the office, such as applying the law as it was written, working hard to make sure cases move toward a conclusion quickly and fairly, making sure that litigants are treated with courtesy and respect, etc., etc.. However, everything else takes a back seat to making sure our streets and our homes remain safe places to live and raise a family. When parents send their kids off to school, they should not have to worry about whether their sons and daughters will return home safely.
I don’t think anyone would argue that the number one threat to our safety today is the epidemic of illegal drugs that have flooded into our communities over the past several years. Our state leads the nation in the rate of drug overdose deaths, and we lead by a very, very wide margin. With the increase in drug use comes an associated increase in violent crime and deadly diseases transmitted by addicts who share needles to inject themselves. As I have said on many occasions on the campaign trail, our society is under attack. We have to fight back. We have to take a stand together, as a community, to rid ourselves of this evil plague.
As a judge, I believe it is my responsibility to do whatever I can to help eliminate this threat to the safety of our communities. The way to do that is to reduce, and ultimately eliminate, the supply of and demand for illegal drugs in our area. To eliminate demand, we must work to educate our young people about the dangers of drug use, and to treat those who are already caught in the web. Experience has proven that simply locking drug addicts in jail will do little to reduce the problem, because once they are released they are still addicted. We need to utilize and expand the Drug Court program, and we need more treatment facilities for addicts.
I take the opposite approach in dealing with those who sell drugs. I believe the way to eliminate those people, and thus the supply of drugs, is to create an atmosphere where they are afraid to bring their drugs into our communities. We do that by supporting law enforcement in their efforts to catch the dealers, and by making sure that once they are caught and convicted, they are given the maximum possible sentence for their crimes. If they know they will face the most severe possible penalties if they are caught and convicted, they will go elsewhere to peddle their poison.
There may have been a time when lesser sentences were appropriate for those convicted of selling drugs, depending upon the particular circumstances of their cases. However, desperate times call for desperate measures, and the last few years have shown us that we are truly caught in desperate times. Our people, our children, are dying every week. Our response needs to be equal to the threat we are facing, and I don’t ever recall our communities being confronted with a greater threat than we currently face. We have all heard the saying that says you don’t bring a knife to a gun fight. The drug dealers have been firing their guns at us for several years now. It’s time for us to respond in kind.
