South Florida Sun-Sentinel Palm Beach (Sunday)
Pick agent of change, not more of the same. Pick Pryor.
If you think there’s a stark contrast in the Nov. 3 presidential race, check out the Broward State Attorney’s contest.
Harold Pryor is a 33-year-old Black Democrat who promises significant reforms in the criminal justice system, which he says “has been traditionally stacked against people of color and poor people.”
Pryor wants to replace cash bail with a pre-trial risk-assessment program that would keep low-level defendants from being stuck in jail if they cannot afford to post bond. He wants to push the repeal of the “Stand Your Ground” law, which he calls “a license to kill for the privileged of this society.” And he wants to make the county’s drug and mental health courts less adversarial and more focused on getting defendants the help they need, “while not compromising the safety of our communities.”
Pryor also promises to prosecute anyone who preys on the elderly, the LGBTQ+ community and the Jewish community. The same goes for any police officer working outside the lines. And while he personally opposes the death penalty, Pryor says he would follow the law, though we expect he’d likely pursue fewer capital cases than his would-be predecessor, Mike Satz, who is retiring after 44 years.
As much as anything, Pryor wants to address the racial inequities in this majority-minority county. (About 30% of Broward’s population is Black; 29% is Hispanic; and 37% is non-Hispanic white.)
“I understand the criminal justice system from the perspective of not only a lawyer, but as a Black man who has seen from a young age how the criminal justice system has impacted my family and friends,” he said.
In August, Pryor won the eight-person Democratic primary race with 22% of the votes. Joe Kimok, whose proposals were far more radical, finished second with 20%. The voting indicated that many Democratic voters favor significant change in the criminal justice system — and Broward Democrats outnumber Broward Republicans twoto-one.
The Republican challenger
In the November general election, Pryor is squaring off against Gregg Rossman, a 55-year-old white Republican who didn’t face an August primary.
Rossman worked as a Broward Assistant State Attorney for 20 years, including stints in the office’s homicide, organized crime and career criminal units. He is a prosecutor’s prosecutor, someone who could handle and win the toughest cases. He left to start his own law practice six years ago.
Rossman urges voters to choose his “qualifications” over Pryor’s Democratic Party “affiliation.” He notes that Pryor is supported by County Mayor Dale Holness’ political machine. “Every voter should be concerned about political influence” in State Attorney decisions, he said.
Rossman’s top priority is elder abuse, which he says “is to South Florida what pill mills were 10 years ago.” When someone’s bank account has been emptied by their accountant or their condo has been deeded to someone else, he says police don’t know how to investigate such crimes. “We’re going to put a model together on how to best investigate those cases.”
Rossman also wants to “ensure that the justice system is balanced in a way that respects victims’ rights first and foremost.” He calls the narrative of racial injustice “too simplistic.” He notes that men represent 93% percent of the state’s prison population, yet only 49% of the general population. Does that mean the system is systemically sexist, he asks?
It’s a “common shared experience” to be unfairly pulled over by police, Rossman says. “Does it happen more to people of color? I believe it does. But you know what else happens to people of color? They’re victims of crime. In the homicides I prosecuted, 85% of the victims were people of color. And they cried out for justice. They came to court and told me, ‘I don’t care about the color of the offender. I don’t care that the offender is Black. My son is dead. Get justice for me.’”
Rossman says crime is “the result of many social problems, most of which cannot be addressed directly by the State Attorney.” Neither do police drive around looking for innocent people to arrest. “Almost all police calls, especially for violent crimes, all of them are reactive” to a victim’s call for help.
And one more thing. Defendants don’t get sentenced based on their race, he says. “Offenders get sentenced based on a multitude of factors.”
“If we actually look at the facts, and we look at those who are in Department of Corrections facilities, the average is five to six felony convictions,” Rossman says. “Somebody show me a first-time drug offender who was sentenced to prison that’s in prison right now in the state of Florida. You’re not going to find that person.”
“Overly simplistic” is overly simplistic
Pryor says the difference in this election is clear. “For anyone to say that there’s no racial inequities in the system, that the statistics are … overly simplistic, they’re defying all levels of reason and logic.”
Pryor points to the Sarasota HeraldTribune’s 2016 report, titled “Bias on the Bench.” The newspaper compiled a database of 84 million criminal records and found that judges in nearly half of Florida’s counties were giving Black defendants significantly longer sentences than whites for the same crime.
Pryor also notes that Black and brown youth make up 40% of the U.S. population, but 75% of Broward arrests. “You can deduce from the numbers that … Black and brown communities are, in fact, over-policed. And these children are, in fact, targeted.”
“My fundamental goal is to not prosecute low level nonviolent offenses,” Pryor said on an ACLU questionnaire. Rather, he would increase the scope of diversion programs that help people avoid a criminal record by joining a program of rehabilitation and supervision. He said the State Attorney can help society by limiting the number of people who “come into contact with the criminal justice system.”
The Cruz divide
The candidates also disagree on how to handle the prosecution of Nikolas Cruz, who is charged with killing 17 people and wounding 17 others at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland in 2018. As it stands, Satz is handling the case and most of the survivors like it that way.
Before the primary, Pryor told us that if he were elected, he would remove Satz from the case. “I felt that we needed to turn the page and move on.” Since then, he said he has spoken to the Parkland parents and has changed his mind, demonstrating flexibility.
The parents were “overwhelming in their response to keep Mike Satz on the case,” he said. He believes Satz has the skill and background needed to properly handle the complexities.
By contrast, Rossman said that if elected, he would personally prosecute the case, but would ask Satz to consult. He said he wants to be “held accountable” for the result and victims don’t get to “pick the prosecutor.”
“Mr. Pryor, quite frankly, would have to keep Mike on because Mr. Pryor couldn’t try the case,” Rossman said during a joint candidate interview with the Sun Sentinel Editorial Board.
“I could try the case. And I would try the case.”
Given the focus and intensity the Cruz case demands, we question the wisdom of a newly elected State Attorney playing first chair at the same time that he is taking over a 560-employee, $40-million enterprise that’s about to have its budget whacked because of the pandemic. There’s nothing wrong with a state attorney assigning his best prosecutor to the case and supervising closely.
Who is better qualified?
Pryor and Rossman also have significantly different opinions about the qualifications that a candidate should possess.
In his Sun Sentinel candidate questionnaire, Rossman said people have told him that Pryor is “a very nice kid.” But “that does not make him qualified to run an office as consequential as the State Attorney’s Office where decisions can involve life and death.”
Rossman notes that Pryor has been an attorney for just seven years and that becoming State Attorney would be his sixth legal job. “I mean, is that persevering?”
Pryor said he left the State Attorney’s Office because a good opportunity presented itself and he needed the money to care for his family. In retrospect, he said, he’s a better candidate because of his experiences with the Marshall, Dennehey law firm and Hotwire Communications.
“I went into the business realm and I got a diverse outlook,” he said. “I was able to prove that I have the legal acumen and the business acumen to do that job.”
Pryor left Hotwire this year and is now a partner with his wife running the Pryor Law Group.
Rossman’s law firm, Rossman Legal, has three lawyers. He said he resigned from the State Attorney’s Office in 2014 because he “saw an office decay from the inside out based on hostility to internal accountability and innovation.”
He grew frustrated that essential staff members were poorly paid and performance evaluations were deemed
“too subjective” to be conducted. He plans to implement metrics “that are not subjective, like, do you show up for work? There’s one. Do you show up on time? There’s two. Do you do your job? I mean, you know, these things have happened in the office.”
Our take
Rossman makes a good case that he has the better resume, but it’s 2020 in America and there’s no question but that minorities are arrested and imprisoned in numbers disproportionate to their percentage of the population. Yes, the reasons are complex, but we find it troubling that Rossman disputes the existence of systemic racism in the criminal justice system. One need only visit the courthouse to see the system affects Blacks more than whites.
During our interview, we also were bothered that he repeatedly stumbled on the word melanin, the pigment that creates Black and brown skin. He called it melatonin, which can put you to sleep. The slip suggested a certain lack of awareness, as did the “kid” comment.
In an era where police abuses are captured on video for all to see, it’s time for voters to support someone who wants to do more than tweak the system on the margins. Even Florida’s Republicans want to address mass incarceration, given its cost.
Mike Satz has served Broward citizens well these past four decades with his unapologetic law-and-order approach. But the times we live in argue for some long-awaited and muchneeded diversity — and reform — in the State Attorney’s Office.
Therefore, the Sun Sentinel endorses Harold Pryor for State Attorney.
Pryor may lack Rossman’s experience as a prosecutor, but he sees the big picture. A tough-on-crime approach may have helped lower the crime rate since the late 1980s, but the strategy has created a dispirited, trapped and often angry underclass.
Pryor also is a savvy, likable politician who sprinkles his rhetoric with pledges to work closely with police and to keep all of Broward’s communities — the affluent and the poor — safe from criminals.
The personal side
Rossman says the race is a job interview and that the voters are the employer.
Both men tout their work ethic and working-class backgrounds. Rossman has been married for 31 years and has two adult children. “I have worked since I was 14 years old,” he said.
He attended Broward College for two years and then got his bachelor’s degree from Florida State University. He earned his law degree from Nova Southeastern in 1994.
“I took on significant debt in law school,” he said. “We paid it off by 2002 on an assistant state attorney’s and a teacher’s salary.”
Pryor came from modest beginnings, too.
“I’m a country boy. I grew up in Dade City,” Pryor said. His father was a state corrections officer and his mother an assistant city clerk. “I was the only kid on the block that had both my mom and my father in the household.”
He said he learned early that if he wanted to effect change, “it would be best for me to work to change the system from within.” He said he has a 2-year-old son and that he wants to make sure “we have a safer world for him to grow up and thrive in.”
Pryor got his bachelor’s degree from the University of Florida and his law degree from Nova Southeastern University in 2012.
The politics
Broward is the most Democratic county in Florida, so Pryor is favored in the race. Rossman notes that Democrats only account for half the county’s voters; independents and Republicans comprise the other half.
Besides Holness, Pryor has the backing of a slew of Black leaders and Black civic and legal organizations. He said he has raised about $162,000.
Rossman has endorsements from police unions and has raised about $60,000.
The State Attorney gets paid $169,554 a year.
Pryor’s campaign website is https:// www.haroldpryor.com
Rossman’s campaign website is https://www.voteforgregg2020.com
Editorials are the opinion of the Sun Sentinel Editorial Board and written by one of its members or a designee. The Editorial Board consists of Editorial Page Editor Rosemary O’Hara, Dan Sweeney, Steve Bousquet and Editor-in-Chief Julie Anderson.