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Posted by on Sep 10, 2017 in Featured

Tell D.A. Soares: END PREDATORY PROSECUTIONS!

Tell D.A. Soares: END PREDATORY PROSECUTIONS!

Go to: https://actionnetwork.org/petitions/end-predatory-prosecutions to sign the petition today!

 

To Albany District Attorney David Soares:

While you publicize yourself as a merciful prosecutor with a focus on prevention rather than retribution, your actions and policies tell otherwise.  Under your leadership, the District Attorney’s office has continued to use the power of the state abusively to discriminate and to feed the bloated and racist mass incarceration system.

WHAT YOU RAN ON AND WE VOTED FOR:

  • Times Union 6/9/04: “Mr. Soares makes the point that there has to be a better way to fight crime than incarceration at all costs.”
  • Metroland 5/13/04: “He [Soares] says . . . that ‘we cannot arrest and prosecute our way out of a social crisis.’”
  • David Soares Campaign Literature 2004: “[L]ocking up the neighborhood kid is just going to turn him into a criminal. . . . We can stop creating criminals and start creating hope.”

WHAT YOU HAVE ACTUALLY DONE:

  • Defended an excessive 9-year sentence for a 16-year-old Black youth, Marquis Dixon, for stealing a pair of sneakers
  • Aggressively prosecuted Ben VanZandt, a 17-year-old  with a documented mental illness  who later committed suicide in an adult prison
  • Failed to prosecute the police officers who  racially profiled and killed Donald (Dontay) Ivy, an unarmed Black man, in 2015
  • Harmed the lives of three young Black university women for reporting a racist incident as they experienced it

These cases, and numerous others, demonstrate your continued reliance on long prison sentences as a “solution” to social problems and your lack of community accountability.

THEREFORE, WE THE UNDERSIGNED DEMAND THAT YOU USE THE POWER OF THE DA’S OFFICE TO:

  • Change bail practices that lock up people just for inability to pay
  • Reform plea bargaining processes that force defendants to plead guilty and punish those who exercise their right to trial
  • Treat children as children, not adults, in the criminal justice system
  • Indict law enforcement officers who abuse and kill
  • Stop the criminalization of mental illness

 

DA SOARES: END PREDATORY PROSECUTIONS!

 

Go to: https://actionnetwork.org/petitions/end-predatory-prosecutions to sign the petition today!