How 'Preempting Progress' Strategies Can Help States Taking Aim at Local Prosecutors

This paper is a brief update to our earlier white paper, “Preempting Progress: States Take Aim at Local Prosecutors,” cataloging attempts to curtail the discretion of local prosecutors. In this update, we also address successful efforts to push back against the efforts to strip power from local prosecutors and the communities that elected them. The table below lays out these efforts, including the type of effort — legislative, executive action, electoral process, judicial decision, or private action — and whether the attempt was enacted.

Efforts to strict or supersede the discretion of elected local prosecutors have continued to grow throughout 2023 and into the early months of 2024. As in previous years, these proposed laws have been concentrated, with states such as Georgia, Missouri, Pennsylvania, and Texas seeing particularly high numbers. These efforts often focus on prosecutors who have been perennial targets for state legislators because of their support for a wider range of solutions for public safety, such as Kim Gardner in St. Louis, Larry Krasner in Philadelphia, or Deborah Gonzalez in Athens, Georgia. This year has also seen a number of high-profile executive actions against prosecutors, such as Governor Ron DeSantis’ removal of Monique Worrell as state’s attorney in Orlando. The racial politics of preemption have continued to target Black prosecutors, such as Gardner or Worrell, and jurisdictions, such as Philadelphia, St. Louis, or Jackson, with an overwhelmingly Black electorate.

As statewide actors have undertaken new efforts to undermine prosecutorial discretion, local prosecutors and their communities fought back against these efforts. In some states, such as Missouri and Minnesota, bipartisan groups of local prosecutors have decried efforts at curtailing their discretion. Courts in Tennessee and Georgia halted efforts to undermine prosecutorial discretion, while individual prosecutors such as Jose Garcia of Texas and Andrew Warren of Florida prevailed in court.