Cumberland County District Attorney Jackie Sartoris joined Matt Gagnon on WGAN Morning News Monday to defend her recently adopted policy of encouraging law enforcement to issue civil instead than criminal summons for certain traffic violations, including operating without a license and with expired registration.
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Sartoris told Gagnon that the new policy was adopted due to her office having trouble getting through a backlog of cases, making it difficult to prosecute more serious crimes.
“Almost none of these cases [are] gonna go to trial when I have a trial backlog of assault, and domestic violence, and, you know, felony level theft,” Sartoris said. “[Traffic violations] are not high priorities — unless there’s something else that’s happening as part of that conduct.”
Some contributing factors that Sartoris mentioned may warrant a criminal summons when driving without a license or with an expired registration included speeding, reckless driving, and suspected OUI.
“We’re not telling law enforcement, ‘you can’t ever send us a criminal summons,’ what we’re saying is: please start using the civil violation more,” she explained. “That is meaningfully the way that most of these cases get resolved.”
Sartoris also pushed back on the notion that this policy would benefit so-called “new Mainers” and asylum-seeking migrants who drive vehicles in Maine without licenses.
“The last thing that I thought was that this somehow had anything to do with new Mainers and asylum seekers,” Sartoris said.
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Sartoris said the number of citations for operating without a license and expired registration for asylum seekers is “vanishingly small,” adding later in the interview that migrants without licenses are “really being preyed upon at times” by being told that their foreign credentials are valid in Maine.
“The vast majority of people who are operating without a license in Cumberland County are people born and raised and living in Maine all their lives,” she said. “This has nothing to do with trying to do special favors for new Mainers.”
The Cumberland County DA told Gagnon that the move to temporarily consider these traffic violations as civil offenses is actually in order to free up resources to issue more criminal summons for the “quality of life crimes that the community is really complaining about.”
The Office of the Maine Attorney General issued guidance in February 2022 urging prosecutors and law enforcement against enforcing disorderly conduct, indecent conduct, public urination, public drinking, and certain types drug possession and criminal trespass if the offender in question is homeless.
Sartoris said in a previous interview with Gagnon on WGAN that the Cumberland County Jail is understaffed, and that her office has not been able to use it to effectively arrest individuals and get them mental health evaluations.
“I need the resource of the Cumberland County Jail,” Sartoris said in October. “And I really need it to be up and running in a way it really hasn’t been in quite some time.”
Sartoris also spoke out in December against a proposed order to legalize encampments in the City of Portland over the presence of rampant drug use, sexual assault, violence and theft in the city’s homeless encampments.
The Cumberland DA said Monday that the intermittent closing of the jail due to COVID and staffing issues is now over, and that now law enforcement are able to issue summons and make arrests.
“They have somewhere to go now,” Sartoris said, applauding Cumberland County Sheriff Kevin Joyce for working to restore the “full operation of the jail.”
“So, we’re hoping for something that is more like a return to normal caseloads, we’re also hoping for something that is more like a return to normal accountability,” she said, pointing to the fact that the jail can now hold individuals with a “significant buildup” of prior criminal offenses that were previously let out on bail.
“We’re hoping that the judiciary will help us return to a place where people can be held briefly, deal with their stuff, not just released over and over again,” she added, explaining that her office is not being allowed to terminate certain probation agreements by the judiciary.
The judiciary, according to Sartoris, has been slow to return to normalcy since the pandemic, which has resulted in judges making bail decisions as if the still jail does not have the capacity for non-violent offenders.
Listen to the full interview with Cumberland County Jackie Sartoris on Newsradio WGAN with Matt Gagnon below:
