January 9th, 2017
Dear President-Elect Trump:
Chelom and I graduated from law school in 1991 and moved to Fillmore, Utah, where I wanted to learn how to conduct a criminal case as a defense attorney. We remained there nearly four years before moving on. It was a town of wonderful, down to earth people. Fillmore, Utah is in Millard County and is both the county seat and the second largest community in the county. The last census, Millard County had roughly 12,000 people, spread through 17 different communities. Millard County’s 6,828 square miles make it a vast country with there being only two people for every square mile.
With so few people and such a large area, providing basic government service is challenging for such small communities. Often, the communities consolidate governmental service to conserve resources.
That was the Millard County community’s approach to police protection. Rather than having a county sheriff and a dozen or more local police forces, each municipality and the county agreed that the county sheriff would provide police protection for every town in addition to the unincorporated areas of the county.
Such an approach makes sense economically. And frankly, that’s all that most people cared about—that is, until they had a problem with the law. That’s because being so far removed from larger metropolitan areas; the county sheriff was the authoritarian voice for the county. A grizzly bear-sized man with a forceful personality, the county sheriff, was an imposing figure whose natural physical features intimidated most around him. Place a sheriff’s badge on his chest and make him the only law enforcement agency for the entire 6,828 square miles, and he was no one that anyone wanted to mess with.
He intimidated his only checks on power—the local justice of the peace and the local prosecutor.
As a green-behind-the-ears lawyer, just moving in to provide criminal defense, I learned quickly that how things work on paper isn’t necessarily the way things work in reality.
I had a public defense client I’ll refer to as Timothy Todd—though that’s not his real name. Timothy was the local do-no-gooder who lived with his mother. His mother was tired of his antics and called the sheriff, who lived in the same small town. She told the sheriff that her son had stolen something from the house that they both lived in. The sheriff said he’d take care of it.
The sheriff arrested Timothy and put him in jail on petty theft charges—charges too small to require an outside the county judge. The charges usually brought a citation and a promise to appear in court. But in this case, the sheriff put Timothy in jail.
Timothy was incensed—both because he was in jail and because he claimed ownership of what he had allegedly stolen. He told me that he wanted to beat the charges and move away.
I promised to do my best.
The only problem was that I couldn’t get the prosecutor or the justice of the peace to advance the case to trial. I requested a jury trial, and that’s where the case sat—for six weeks. The justice of the peace continued to say that he was having a tough time putting together a jury, all the while Timothy Todd remained in jail.
One Friday afternoon, about six week’s after Timothy’s arrest, I received a phone call from the justice of the peace, summoning me to his chambers. I hurried to the court, located on the edge of town in the sheriff’s state of the art jail facility.
Walking into the judge’s chambers, I was surprised to see not just the judge, but also the county prosecutor and the sheriff.
As I sat down, the sheriff told me that they had a deal for me in Timothy’s case.
“What deal?” I asked.
“We’re going to let Timothy out of jail this afternoon and give him until tonight to be out of the county. As long as he’s not in the county, we won’t prosecute him. But if he returns, we’ll go after him and put him back in jail.”
I was speechless. It felt like I had been transported to an 1840’s frontier town.
I was young and inexperienced and didn’t know what to do. Moreover, I also knew that Timothy desired to be out of jail and out of the county, anyway.
So I went along and agreed to the deal.
The meeting ended, and I went home. Timothy left jail and was out of the county by sundown.
And I gained an entirely new appreciation for transparency, for the diffusion of power, and the reality that justice and due process falters everywhere—even in America—when the rules aren’t respected and followed.
Yours truly,
David O. Leavitt
