Beaufort Co.’s top prosecutor accuses sheriff of lying in criminal case backlog dispute
Beaufort County’s top prosecutor is accusing the county’s sheriff of lying and unfairly maligning his efforts to reduce the criminal case backlog worsened by COVID, the latest salvo in the long-running feud between the two top officials.
In an op-ed published Wednesday in The Island Packet and Beaufort Gazette newspapers, 14th Circuit Solicitor Duffie Stone said Beaufort County Sheriff P.J. Tanner told a “remarkably ignorant” lie to the newspapers in a May 17 article on the backlog.
In the story, Tanner had said Stone was using the ballooning number of pending criminal cases “to show there’s a backlog to get more money” from the Beaufort County Council.
“Tanner either does not understand the process or, worse, is perfectly comfortable misrepresenting it if he thinks it bolsters his argument,” Stone wrote in the Wednesday op-ed.
Battle over backlog
The prosecutor and sheriff disagree on who bears responsibility for the growing backlog of criminal cases as well as how to resolve it.
That dispute is the most recent flare-up between the two. In 2016, Tanner accused Stone of sitting on a negative story during his re-election campaign in 2016.
Three years after an employee of Stone’s office was suspected of theft and fired for it, no charges had been filed and there had been no public accounting of the missing money. Stone acknowledged he waited 10 months before filing the investigative report with the state.
At the time, Tanner’s wife was running against Stone to be solicitor.
Now, the two dispute the handling of the COVID backlog. For over a year during the pandemic, South Carolina courts were mostly shuttered, while police continued to arrest and charge people with crimes. This added to the number of pending cases.
The prosecutor’s office must see those cases through the court system: through plea agreements, trials or dismissals. Pending cases rose from around 3,800 in January 2020 to around 5,600 in May 2021, according to the Solicitor’s Office.
Solicitor Stone told the Beaufort County Council in March that the agency was short-staffed and that it would take 4 1/2 years for his prosecutors to bring the backlog to pre-COVID numbers.
At that meeting, he said he was seeking an additional $225,000 in the budget to hire three more lawyers.
Then at a news conference this month, Stone said disposing of the backlog would take six years and that he already had hired five new lawyers (three still must take the bar exam) before the budget was approved.
Tanner questioned Stone’s sense of urgency. Before any case can move forward, the Solicitor’s Office must bring the evidence to a grand jury for an indictment. Tanner said Stone had brought only a few dozen of the nearly 500 cases the Sheriff’s Office had in 2021 to a grand jury, which resumed operation in recent months.
But Stone disagreed, in his op-ed.
“Indictments do not change the number of pending cases and thus have no bearing on the size of the present backlog,” he said.
On Monday, Tanner was asked about comments made in Stone’s op-ed. The sheriff said there’s been little communication between his office and prosecutors. All of the county’s law enforcement leaders learned about Stone’s plans to dispose of cases when they watched his Facebook live news conference, Tanner said.
“If [the Solicitor] wants our help, we’re here to help,” he said. “But I can tell you ... it appears an attempt to get more funding from the county council. I’m not wrong about that.”
‘How does that change anything?’
After the Solicitor’s Office released its plan to reduce the backlog, Tanner criticized parts of it as out of touch with reality.
The plan to end plea deals is one example, he said.
That means prosecutors will no longer negotiate reduced sentences with defendants as an incentive to plead guilty and forgo a trial.
“Solicitors, law enforcement: we all want to be tough on crime. We are tough on crime,” Tanner said. “But we also have to be realistic.”
Nationwide, 97% of all state and federal cases are handled by plea agreements, as a procedural necessity.
There’s only about 12 trials per year in Beaufort County. Taking away plea agreements means the only options prosecutors have are to dismiss the case or go to trial.
“Whether they plead guilty or go to trial, the recommendation will stay the same,” Stone said at the news conference. He said it will help “eliminate the pressure that was built up by the COVID backlog.”
Tanner said the decision will have the opposite effect.
He also said it paints every person charged with a crime with the same brush. Tanner said there’s a difference between someone who regularly robs convenience stores and someone who may have been down on their luck and made a mistake.
“You can’t throw the book at everybody and expect everybody to receive the same punishment,” he said.
Jared Newman, a Port Royal criminal defense attorney, described the Solicitor’s Office decision as “untenable” and “unsustainable.”
“I don’t understand the motivation for that,” he said. “How does that change anything?”
Newman, who used to work for the Solicitor’s Office for Stone’s predecessor, said the rule will instead trip up prosecutors.
“Prosecutors have burden of proof,” he said. “[As more time passes,] witnesses come up missing, that happens. Police officers quit, get fired. Evidence … can get lost.”
Lack of communication
In Wednesday’s op-ed, Stone said Sheriff Tanner shouldn’t talk about budget money when he runs one of the most expensive Sheriff’s Offices in the state.
“Perhaps to do his job well, Tanner needs to be one of the most expensive sheriffs in South Carolina. I do not know,” Stone wrote. “I have never been a sheriff and am not in the habit of dispensing armchair criticism on unfamiliar topics.”
Stone said Beaufort County spends more per capita on law enforcement than Horry or Charleston counties.
But missing from his analysis is that Horry and Charleston have larger budgets, more people, and both sheriff’s offices run jails, while Beaufort County does not.
Also it’s not clear whether the statistic takes into account the other law enforcement agencies within Beaufort County.
“Am I the highest paid sheriff in the state? Absolutely not,” Sheriff Tanner said Monday. “He’s trying to compare apples to oranges.”
The biggest barrier to tackling this growing backlog is the lack of communication between the two agencies, he said.
“If you’ve got a backlog...share that with us, explain that to us. Let us know what we can do to help,” Tanner said. “Your law enforcement leaders are the front lines. We’re in the ditch everyday.”
