The Northern Judicial District, which includes Oglethorpe, Elbert, Franklin, Hart and Madison counties, features two Republicans running for district attorney: incumbent Parks White and challenger David Jordan.
There are no Democratic challengers, so the winner will be decided in the general primary on May 21.
The Oglethorpe Echo spoke with Jordan about the position and plans, if elected. White returned The Echo’s initial email, but didn’t reply to follow up calls and emails.
Comments have been edited for length and clarity.
Q: What do you see as the district attorney’s role?
Jordan: There are many responsibilities as a district attorney. Of course, the most obvious is to prosecute crime to get criminals off the street. However, given that, there are a lot of other major responsibilities that you have to take care of. This is a state agency that works off of state and local taxpayer dollars. And so there is a responsibility to manage this agency and manage cases and manage personnel, manage victim advocates, manage attorneys. This is a major leadership responsibility in multiple areas. Prosecution, fiscal management, human resources, victim advocacy also trying to get money get state and federal dollars into the county that help fight corruption.
Q: What experience do you bring to this position?
Jordan: I’m an attorney. I’m coming up on seven years practicing law. I’ve worked in every area of law. I’m not just a criminal defense attorney. I have experience of being a leader in local government. I was elected for 21 years in Royston. The last 12 years, I was the mayor. I’m experienced in looking at getting grants. And I’ve worked with hiring and had to deal with getting employees, managers in, had to deal with terminating employees, the whole aspect of HR and local government. So, I know what it means to run an office of local government — to manage the office. I have leadership experience. I have a background in fraud detection and in accounting forensics. I have been hired by many attorneys to work for them in complex criminal cases.
Q: What specific cases or issues do you believe to be the key to address for the district?
Jordan: There are 5,300 cases. There are murder cases that are outstanding. There are assault cases outstanding. There are a lot of DUI cases that are outstanding. There are terroristic threat cases. And when they’re out three or five years, the evidence goes bad. There’s hundreds of them that are going to need to be addressed.
Q: How would you address any backlog in cases?
Jordan: It’s going to take a little time to review 5,300 cases. But, you know, I intend to work with the existing staff to review these cases and prioritize these cases on a number of dimensions, but one is the severity. The next thing I’m gonna do is grade the cases from A through F and determine which one of these has hierarchy and priority. It means as a DA, I’m gonna have to show up to court.
Q: What do you know about the needs of Oglethorpe County?
Jordan: I know there’s drug asset forfeitures. I understand Oglethorpe County, like every small small county, does not want to raise taxes, does not want to have to look at all these expenditures. They’re experiencing growth and growth requires money. Regardless, if someone’s building houses and someone’s building commercial property, the taxpayer winds up dealing with the burden of that at times. Growth is expensive. Oglethorpe is growing. Oglethorpe has to look at ways to keep their taxes low. I am sensitive to that because of my experience in local government. I’m sensitive to what it takes to run a community on limited tax money. I see that the crime that’s coming from the Athens area is creeping into Madison County and to Oglethorpe County and feeding the crime there. Drug related crime, gang related crime — these are crimes that I’m concerned about.