by Santana Deberry is the district attorney for Durham County, North Carolina. The county and the 16th Prosecutorial District are co-terminus. Deberrry first took office in 2019 and was re-elected in 2022.
According to the Law Enforcement Legal Defense Fund, Deberry was backed to the tune of over $260,000 by George Soros through monies funneled through organizations such as Fair and Just Prosecution and the Forward Justice Action Fund.
Thus, it should come as no surprise that the conviction rate for murder in her district is lower than adjoining districts as well as the state average. According to WRAL, in Deberry’s first four years as DA, her office only had a 24% murder conviction rate comparted to 67% in adjoining Wake County and 45% for the state as a whole. Her initial campaign for office said she was going to concentrate on the prosecution of violent crime while minimizing petty crime prosecution.
A more recent investigation by WRAL of Deberry’s office found that they have a policy dictated by Deberry of not prosecuting “felon in possession of a firearm” charges if there was no violence or threats of violence. Adjoining prosecutorial districts take a very different approach. In Wake County, now the state’s largest county, if there is sufficient evidence to prove that felon was in possession of a firearm, they refuse to drop the charges. Likewise, DA Jeff Nieman whose district includes Chatham and Orange Counties says his office “prosecutes all possession of a firearm by a felon charges” so long as they have sufficient evidence.
Durham County’s Gang Violence Reduction Manager conducted a study in 2022 of inmates in the Durham County Detention Center and asked why they carried firearms.
The response?
“It was very interesting,” he said. “I asked them why they carried a firearm. And some of them said they saw no consequences for carrying a firearm.”
While many inmates so no consequences to carrying a firearm, both the police and the community are seeing the consequences with the crime rate in Durham. As Mary Long, the sister of a 2019 murder victim notes:
You can’t just allow the crime to happen without accountability, and that seems to be where we’re faltering — the accountability end…
It’s disheartening to hear the stories, the amount of violence that’s in the front page of the news, and then not to see remedies being taken. To just dismiss it and allow them to walk out the door, without any accountability? That’s scary.
Sarah Krueger, an investigative reporter with WRAL, goes more in-depth on this story and how she found the internal memos detailing the no prosecution policy in this audio podcast.
Durham County is the bluest of the blue. In the 2024 election, Democrat candidates including VP Kamala Harris averaged about 80% (if not more) of the vote while Republican candidates got about 18% of the vote. In 2022, the breakdown was the same. Deberry was unopposed for re-election that year though she did receive fewer votes than other candidates in contested races.
The moral of the story is you get what you vote for.
