While the Yolo County District Attorney’s Office might be considered a small piece of the American criminal justice system, it still has a seat reserved at the head table and continues to lead in the conversation of progressive prosecution.
District Attorney Jeff Reisig and Chief Deputy District Attorney Jonathan Raven attended the 10th National Prosecution Summit on Community Prosecution for Safer Communities over three days in Washington, D.C. last week, where the two of them sat on separate panels to discuss innovative practices their office has implemented, while picking up on new ideas as well.
“I think we brought back a lot of good information and tools to drive better decisions in Yolo County,” Reisig said, adding that a breakout session on reducing implicit bias in prosecution was one particular area he wanted to make a part of his office’s regular curriculum. “The whole point of that panel was to show how this could affect choices subconsciously … We need to take a leadership role in addressing that.”
Invited by officials from the Association of Prosecuting Attorneys — who hosted the summit in partnership with the Bureau of Justice Assistance, a subset of the U.S. Department of Justice — Reisig and Raven presented on their office’s Neighborhood Court program and its paperless initiative.
Raven said his office was the first in California to do away with paper-driven casework almost five years ago, opting instead to use a customized computer system called LawSuite that was built in-house for their staff. Although there was initially pushback from some of the “35-plussers,” Raven explained, it was Reisig’s support and dedication to the project that eventually made everyone get onboard.
“It comes from the top,” Raven said of new programs getting rolled out and adopted office-wide, adding that going paperless was Reisig’s personal project. “If they’re not comfortable, or if they don’t have a chief deputy that’s comfortable, (it won’t happen) … For me it’s got to come from the D.A.”
The California District Attorneys Association’s chief executive officer, Mark Zahner, said there was no way of knowing if Yolo County was in fact the very first to go paperless, but that it was absolutely a leader in the state footrace at the time. Nonetheless, he continued, a number of jurisdictions have visited the Yolo County office to “see how they’ve been doing business” on a paperless system and that they’ve served as model among California’s prosecutors.
Neighborhood Court, too, Raven said, was another initiative that the Yolo County D.A.’s office was a trailblazer in a few years ago, when San Francisco rolled first rolled out the community-based solution program for low-level offenders. Now, he added, the city attorney of Los Angeles had also begun a neighborhood court program, as had Santa Clara’s district attorney’s office.
Raven went on to say that the point of the summit was for district attorneys to come together and proactively explore smarter ways to prosecute for long-term, beneficial results.
“How can we be effective and productive and use the resources that we’re allocated in the best way possible to get the best results?” Raven asked aloud. “How can we be forward thinkers and sort of try, in doing what we do, think about the big picture — like reducing recidivism?”
That sentiment was echoed by an open letter President Barack Obama penned for attendees of last week’s summit, where he encouraged prosecutors to take the policies outlined in his Task Force on 21st Century Policing into consideration in their roles of administering justice.
“The agenda for this event focuses on new ways prosectors can obtain better outcomes and make better use of resources while enhancing trust in our legal system,” Obama wrote. “I hope that you will give serious consideration to the Task Force’s report and that it will inform your work in the days ahead … Thank you for your commitment to upholding the rule of law and securing progress in our time. You have my best wishes for a productive summit.
Contact Fabian Garcia at 530-406-6232.