Shelby County ousts Amy Weirich, elects progressive prosecutor in Steve Mulroy

The Office of the Shelby County District Attorney General is poised for what could be a dramatic change after voters decided to replace incumbent Amy Weirich, a Republican, with Democratic challenger Steve Mulroy.

Promising reform in the district attorney's office, Mulroy ran on a progressive platform, often targeting Weirich for past prosecutorial misconduct and for her failure to lower crime rates in Shelby County.

While campaigning earlier Thursday, Mulroy said his first priorities if elected would include diversifying the office, beginning a conviction review unit and taking a second look at bail policies.

“I think people need to understand that I’m not anti-police, I don’t want to defund anything," Mulroy said, responding to some of Weirich's advertisements during the campaign. "In fact I want to spend more on police, hire more police, train them better, pay them better and refocus on violent crime, because it’s got to be our number one priority.”

Unofficial vote totals, including early voting and all 142 precincts, gave Mulroy 56.12% of the vote (74,752 votes) to Weirich's 43.79% (58,328 votes). Absentee votes had not yet been tabulated.

A law professor at the University of Memphis since 2000, Mulroy, 58, is also a former civil rights lawyer for the U.S. Justice Department and a former federal prosecutor. It was his job at the university that brought him to Memphis, where he became known for voting rights activism and for working to save the beloved Libertyland amusement park. From 2006-2011, he was a Shelby County Commissioner.

Weirich has held the role of Shelby County District Attorney General since 2011, when she was named to the role by then-Gov. Bill Haslam. She joined the district attorney’s office in 1991 as a courtroom prosecutor, working her way up the ranks until she became deputy district attorney, the first woman to hold that job.

Now 57, Weirich easily won reelection in 2012 and election to a full eight-year term in 2014. Her supporters portray her as being tough on crime, praising her for her advocacy for “truth in sentencing” laws that do away with parole, causing people convicted of certain crimes to spend the entirety of their sentences behind bars.

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During her campaign, she aired radio ads from Deborah Marion, mother of slain former Memphis basketball star Lorenzen Wright, and Andy Rainer, the father of Andrew “Drew” Rainer, a Rhodes college student slain during a home invasion. Both parents voiced their support for Weirich in the advertisements.

Mulroy, in contrast, drew support from high-profile national figures, including EGOT winner John Legend, rapper and actor Common and civil rights attorney Ben Crump. And, he was joined at a luncheon by family members of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor and Jacob Blake, Black men and women whose stories spread nationwide after they were killed or severely injured by police.

In his campaign against Weirich, Mulroy advocated for sharp changes in policies, from instating a conviction review unit to decreasing the use of juvenile transfers to adult court to advocating for bail reform.

Weirich has continued to tout her advocacy for “truth in sentencing” legislation, which cleared the General Assembly in April.

She’s spoken proudly of the community prosecution model she established with three prosecutors working from police precincts, of how her office in 2018 stopped prosecuting people driving on licenses that were revoked for solely financial reasons, and how in 2019 she implemented a vertical prosecution model, allowing for one prosecutor and team to work with a case from start to finish.

But her past 11 years in office have been marred with controversy. She received a private reprimand regarding the prosecution of Noura Jackson, and Jackson’s second-degree murder conviction was thrown out, with Jackson entering an Alford plea on a reduced charge of voluntary manslaughter in 2015.

Shelby County also transfers more youth to adult court than any other county in Tennessee, and a disproportionate amount of them are Black, something a federal probe called “toxic for African-American youth.”

And there have been issues regarding disclosure of evidence and witness reimbursement in the cases of Vern Braswell, Andrew Thomas and Pamela Moses.

Katherine Burgess covers county government and religion. She can be reached at katherine.burgess@commercialappeal.com or followed on Twitter @kathsburgess.

This article originally appeared on Memphis Commercial Appeal: Shelby County elects progressive prosecutor in Steve Mulroy