Peter Schorsch
As COVID-19 spreads across Florida, elected officials at all levels are scrambling to take the steps necessary to flatten the curve and slow the spread.
As reported by Florida Politics, progressive Miami-Dade State Attorney candidate Melba Pearson released a policy proposal on Friday that calling for State Attorney Katherine Fernandez Rundle to reduce the Miami-Dade jail population to slow the spread of the coronavirus.
In response, a spokesperson for the Miami-Dade State Attorney’s Office said on Sunday that “prosecutors have no control over who’s arrested or released from jail.”
By Sunday evening, Rundle tweeted something very different. She said that she reached out to Public Defender Carlos Martinez, the Eleventh Judicial Circuit, and the Miami-Dade Corrections & Rehabilitation Department to “develop a process to release misdemeanor & nonviolent felons who are in custody but pose no threat to the public.”
While some might attribute this fast change in policy to Rundle’s leadership in a time of crisis, anyone following Miami-Dade politics would have reason to be suspicious.
That’s because, for the first time in her 27-years as State Attorney, Rundle faces a serious challenger. Pearson worked under Rundle as an Assistant State Attorney for fifteen years and spent the last three years as the ACLU of Florida’s Deputy Director, where she worked on the Voting Restoration Amendment and other criminal justice reforms.
Pearson’s recent policy proposal called for Rundle to help reduce the local jail population by creating “a virtual ‘rocket docket’ to review everyone currently incarcerated” to determine who can safely be released. She also called for Rundle to “place a moratorium on the use of cash bail for new cases where defendants do not pose a risk” to the community.
Rundle’s Sunday night tweets indicate that she is following Pearson’s recommendation to create a rocket docket to quickly determine who among Miami-Dade’s 3,704 unsentenced inmates can be released back into their communities during the COVID-19 crisis. However, Rundle did not announce any changes to her office’s use of cash bail in response to the coronavirus.
In her tweets, Rundle seemed to admit that her 27-year use of cash bail is not about public safety. Rundle said that her use of bail results in people who “pose no threat to the public” remaining locked up pretrial in Miami-Dade jails. She also admitted that Miami-Dade Pretrial Services has the “capacity to handle these individuals who might otherwise remain in custody just based on lack of resources.”
Why would Rundle keep using a system that results in low-level offenders needlessly being locked up and creates racial disparities? It might have something to do with Rundle’s donors.
As first noted in a Florida Politics op-ed, Rundle took ten donations totaling $3,200 from bail bonds companies and bail bond operators in November 2019. In December, Rundle’s reelection campaign was audited by the Division of Elections for several violations, including accepting a cash donation that was ten times the legal limit from a bail bond company.
Rundle has also taken criticism in the past for accepting money from the private prison operator, GEO Group.
Rundle has a pattern of implementing reforms in Miami-Dade that have already been implemented by other local leaders. For instance, Rundle started hosting record-sealing events in 2004, six years after Martinez began doing the same.
On Rundle’s website, she brags about “a career of firsts” and lists Miami-Dade’s civil citation program and drug court as examples. The only problem is that the civil citation program was Commissioner Sally Heyman‘s project and Miami-Dade’s last State Attorney, Janet Reno, created the drug court.
Based on how the race for Miami-Dade’s top law-enforcement position has gone so far, I have two predictions for the remainder of this race. First, this will not be the last time we see Rundle adopt one of Pearson’s reform-focused plans and call it her own. Second, for the first time in nearly three decades, Miami-Dade is about to have a competitive race for State Attorney.
Katherine Fernandez Rundle, Melba Pearson, Miami-Dade State Attorney Race, 2020 election, Miami-Dade State Attorney, 2020 State Attorney races
