The forum for District Attorney General candidates, held last week at St. Andrew’s AME Church in South Memphis, may well have signified everything worth knowing about the status and likely future arc of that race.
The event, sponsored by the Black Clergy Collaborative, turned out a large and animated African-American crowd, leavened along one side of the capacious church auditorium by a tightly packed and highly energized group of whites. Both contingents signaled early on that they intended to be vocal in support of their preferred candidates.
Black attendees were, in the aggregate, solidly for Democratic DA candidate Steve Mulroy, a fact which they made evident with some frequency — applauding his points and, upon occasion, rising from their seats.
This was countered at appropriate intervals by coordinated, equally high-decibel, applause on behalf of incumbent Republican DA Amy Weirich by the whites, who looked to be Republican activists in the main.
A series of well-prepared questions on topics relevant to the DA’s office were asked of the candidates by Commercial Appeal columnist Tonyaa Weathersbee, and both Weirich, who more often than not found herself in the position of having to answer first, and Mulroy, who contrived to be in the doubtless more comfortable role of responder, were on their game.
That word “game” is no accident. The event in many ways resembled an athletic contest, with the crowd divided as indicated into two discrete and robust rooting sections. There was a “prelim” of sorts, with Shelby County Election Commissioner Bennie Smith giving attendees some practical instruction on the county’s extensively transformed precinct structure.
Then, after giving extraordinarily well-researched biographies of the candidates, moderator Weathersbee had advised the contestants, sitting side by side at the same table, to “shake hands but don’t come out fighting.”
It was indeed a fight, however, grimly polite in presentation but containing several reminders of the two contestants’ highly combative TV commercials — ones in which Mulroy was portrayed as a dangerous radical intent on defunding the police and letting criminals loose and Weirich was depicted as a Trumpian incompetent incapable of dealing with the ever-mounting rise of violent crime under her tenure.
Both portraits were caricatures, of course. The two candidates each formulated well-considered positions.
Weirich, presenting herself as primarily concerned with victims of crime, boasted “alternative programs that we have created in the last 10 years — programs designed to keep people from getting into the criminal justice system to begin with and keep them from coming back to the system.” She defended her policy of remanding juveniles committing such crimes as murder and rape to Criminal Court, expressed satisfaction in the state legislature’s passage of a “truth-in-sentencing” law, and emphasized the threat of repeat offenders.
Mulroy made the case for bail reform, slammed “truth-in-sentencing” on grounds that it undermined rehabilitation efforts and scuttled the parole system, and advocated for post-conviction reviews, as well as for more extensive use of DNA evidence.
Both candidates were discreet when asked whether they would prosecute cases under the state’s new anti-abortion law, though Mulroy was willing to say such prosecutions would be matters of “low priority” while Weirich considered the issue, sans cases at hand, to be hypothetical.
Mulroy pressed Weirich on what he said were “racial disparities” in her office and countered one Weirich claim by saying, “The office never sees prison sentences for nonviolent offenders or for low-level offenders? Tell that to Pam Moses.”
This was the celebrated case which saw activist Moses briefly sentenced to a six-year prison term for registering to vote while still under probation for a felony conviction. Weirich responded that the sentence came not from her but from the presiding judge, that she had offered Moses a misdemeanor plea deal with no more time than she’d already served in jail, and that she’d ultimately declined to renew the case, once it was dismissed.
Moses herself was on hand and made a point of continually heckling Weirich.
All in all, the forum could be seen as a metaphor for an electoral contest, which has aroused intense passions on both sides of a divided community.
