THE ISSUE: Solicitor David Pascoe
David Pascoe made headlines in his successful bid to win the post of 1st Circuit solicitor. He made promises to reduce caseloads, vigorously prosecute violent offenders and create alternatives such as drug courts and a worthless check program.
In just more than a year in office, the St. Matthews resident has delivered.
Notably, he inherited 53 pending murder cases in the three-county circuit, 37 of them in Orangeburg County. During 2005, he took 34 of those cases to court, getting convictions or guilty pleas in 32 cases.
Reducing the caseload also meant getting people out of the Orangeburg-Calhoun Detention Center, where many had languished for months, even years, awaiting their day in court. While all such cases were not pending because of lack of action by prosecutors, the fact remains that keeping people jailed locally was and is expensive.
Pascoe told Orangeburg Rotarians this past week he remains determined to keep the caseload in check, even though his office is handling 2,000 cases a year with a staff of five prosecutors.
The detention center is not designed to handle prisoners on a long-term basis. That is the job of a prison, Pascoe said.
Reducing the jail population saves taxpayers money and eases the burden on the detention center personnel in managing the population. There also is the reduced risk of having someone jailed who ultimately is found not guilty — or for whom the case is dismissed for lack of evidence. And cases don’t get easier to try with time, Pascoe said.
Even as he has addressed violent crime, the solicitor also delivered on his commitment to do something about people writing bad checks. His Worthless Check Program has resulted in the recovery for businesses of $44,000 and up to $30,000 in fees paid to magistrate’s court. The program should have a deterrent effect with offenders being made to pay.
The solicitor also has been on the cutting edge of addressing a problem that is epidemic in Orangeburg and termed by the state attorney general one of the worst in the state. By assigning a prosecutor to pursue domestic violence cases in magistrate’s court, the solicitor can boast of a 75 percent conviction rate.
It’s the type of effort Attorney General Henry McMaster — he has a volunteer program aimed at getting attorneys to sign on to prosecute magistrate court cases of domestic violence — is glad to see and doesn’t get from every circuit. It’s necessary here.
Yet it is the problem of juvenile crime that Pascoe terms the root of problems. “The vast majority of violent felons started off as juvenile offenders,” he said.
He has two approaches. One is the pending creation of what he calls a church diversion program. It is an effort through which juveniles committing certain types of offenses are given a choice of going to the Department of Juvenile Justice or being required to attend church or other special mentoring programs.
Pascoe says the effort is a way to achieve rehabilitation. He’s seen in work in his previous prosecutor’s role in Richland County and says it can work here.
The other side of dealing with juvenile crime comes in prosecuting and punishing those who commit more serious offenses. He cited a recent decision to prosecute a 14-year-old in Orangeburg as an adult. The teenager is accused of being part of a group that committed armed robberies, and with being the triggerman in shooting a man in the face.
The solicitor says leaving the case in Family Court would have limited the scope of any sentence and seen the teen’s record expunged as he got older.
He said a teenager committing such violent acts must be dealt with outside the bounds of rehabilitation. Protection of the community from predators is a primary mission, he said.
Pascoe is right: While supporting programs to keep people away from crime and rehabilitating where possible, there must be the willingness to remove from the community’s midst those who would plague the people with violence.
And that’s exactly what he’s been doing.