The District Attorney of Maine’s most populous county will no longer charge individuals, including illegal aliens, who are caught driving without a license, driving with a suspended registration, or driving an unregistered motor vehicle.
The new policy change, which will take effect on March 1, was announced in a memo distributed this week by Cumberland County District Attorney Jacqueline A. Sartoris.
Although the new non-charging policy will apply to all drivers in Cumberland County, the traffic violations in question are commonly associated with individuals who are present in the U.S. illegally and therefore cannot obtain Driver’s Licenses or vehicle registrations.
The policy change means that any individual pulled over in Cumberland County driving an unregistered vehicle, driving without a license, or driving with a suspended registration will face no criminal penalty if that is their only alleged violation.
Typically, non-charging memoranda have a trickle down effect that result in law enforcement stopping to even attempt enforcement of laws which they know will never apply.
According to the memo, a copy of which was obtained by the Maine Wire, Sartoris is making the change because the Cumberland County DA’s caseload is too high for the taxpayer-funded workers to efficiently process.
“The focus for us is on problem-solving (making people get legal) and focusing on genuine public safety cases, of which we have plenty,” Sartoris said in the memo.
“If you have other thoughts about resolving our 150% caseload, please feel free to share them,” she said. “At the moment, and for the foreseeable future, this step is prudent, responsive to real-world challenges, and a civil violation is the appropriate response when any of these are the only potential criminal charge.”
Sartoris won her DA gig after a DC-based political action committee funded by billionaire George Soros dumped $300,000 into her election campaign.
That effort was part of a broader campaign by Soros to install politically-aligned DAs who would generally avoid enforcing many laws for the purported purpose of advancing social justice.
Soros-backed DAs have been criticized nationwide for abetting lawlessness in America’s major cities through what’s known as prosecutor nullification.
By refusing to enforce laws against crimes like driving without a license or driving with a suspended license, DAs can effectively nullify laws placed on the books by state legislatures.
