Deborah Gonzalez

Gonzalez has responded to a 2023 article in Classic City News about the shortage of prosecutors in her office:

“Though budgeted for 17 assistant district attorneys, the DA’s office that is responsible for prosecuting criminal cases in Athens-Clarke and Oconee counties reportedly is currently down to operating with as few as three prosecutors.”

DA’s response: This is incorrect information, the DA’s Office has never fallen to three prosecutors. We currently have five prosecutors and three Assistant District Attorney Apprentices.

“In an apparent move to shore up the staffing shortage, Gonzalez recently brought aboard five unpaid apprentice prosecutors, but all of them reportedly failed the bar exam.”

DA’s response: This is almost entirely false. The only truth in it is that the position of apprentice prosecutors does exist. Our office has three Assistant District Attorney (prosecutor) Apprentices, all of whom are currently studying for the bar exam and will be taking it in the coming months. All three of these Assistant District Attorney Apprentices are paid positions.

It is a common practice in District Attorney Offices to hire recent graduates who are pending bar results to begin training them to be excellent prosecutors, and it is not a practice unique to our circuit. These apprentice ADA positions were created with ARPA funds for the Case Analysis and Pretrial Evaluation (CAPE) Unit, which is tasked with addressing the case backlog created from the pandemic court shut down. This unit does not practice in front of the judges.

The DAs office does currently have a class of interns, ranging from undergraduate students to masters students to law students, these internships are unpaid-perhaps this is where the confusion arose. This is not a new practice in the Western Judicial Circuit DAs Office, nor is it unique to our circuit.

“Two veteran ADAs resigned over the past week.”

DA’s response: Two resignations did take place in the last two weeks (these prosecutors are not included in the staffing numbers provided above.)  Neither of these resignations were from veteran ADAs, both had under two years of prosecution experience.

These corrections were also sent to Classic City News, which they published as a “letter to the editor” rather than correction of the original story.

Our office acknowledges that we are in a staffing crisis, we wrote candidly about it in our most recent monthly newsletter, saying the following:

“It is no secret that our office has been facing a serious shortage of Assistant District Attorneys (ADAs). While all other departments in our office, Investigators, Victim Services, External Relations, and Administration are fully staffed, hiring attorneys has been a challenge that we continue to face.

There is a statewide and nationwide prosecutor shortage, making the hiring process extremely competitive. This shortage has been discussed heavily by the National District Attorney’s Association, the American Bar Association, and Fair and Just Prosecution, all with the same conclusion- there are more vacancies than there are attorneys. All 50 judicial circuits in Georgia have vacancies, and small our circuit happens to have noncompetitive pay in an extremely competitive market. We have recently hired two attorneys, and have a few more in process, but we are still in a severe ADA deficit.

DA Gonzalez spoke in front of the Mayor and Commission earlier this month about our difficulty hiring due to the comparative ADA salaries of nearby counties. We have been candid about the fact that attorneys can go 30 minutes down the road and make tens of thousands of dollars more than what our county allows us to offer. This has led to an unsustainable situation.

Without competitive salaries, we are unable to recruit and retain highly qualified ADAs, ADAs with experience evaluating complex evidence and prosecuting serious crimes, ADAs with specialized knowledge, and ADAs who are able to fairly, justly, and humanely carry out this important and often difficult work. The work of these ADAs is essential to the overall goal of the office: keeping the community safe.”