Small in number but frequent in infractions, repeat offenders are responsible for much of the nation's crime, and most recently for the deaths of two local college students.
Following the deaths of Duke graduate student Abhijit Mahato and University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill senior Eve Carson, Durham Mayor Bill Bell called Monday night for a formal investigation into the January release from custody of a Durham teenager, Laurence Lovette, who has been charged in both murders.
City Manager Patrick Baker will lead the investigation, and a report will be presented at the Durham County Courthouse April 8.
"I want to know what the judge's role was, what the district attorney's role was, what the police department's role was, what the bail was under which he was released," Bell said.
The murders garnered local and, in Carson's case, national attention in recent weeks.
Mahato, a 29 year old from India studying computational mechanics, was killed after being shot point-blank in the head in his home in The Anderson Apartments Jan. 18. Carson, the 22-year-old student body president at UNC, was found dead a short distance from the school's North Campus March 5 after being shot in the head.
With Lovette's indictment Monday, many, including Bell, are questioning whether or not the murders could have been prevented.
Falling through the cracks
The 17-year-old Durham resident's upcoming hearings will not be his first time facing the courts.
Lovette was charged with breaking and entering in November and remained in jail until January, when he pled guilty to a lesser crime. He then received a 24-month suspended sentence and was released.
He is now being charged with murdering Mahato and Carson between his release and subsequent arrest for Carson's murder.
City Council member Eugene Brown said one reason for Lovette's multiple releases from jail is a major miscommunication between the juvenile and adult court systems.
"You've got judges there with juveniles before them for the first time and they don't know what's the background on this kid," he said.
"The fact that both of these guys were on probation, that tells us something about how Durham should not operate. This system is not protecting the public," Brown added in an interview with The (Raleigh) News & Observer.
Stephen Oates, 19, was also arrested Jan. 25 for Mahato's murder, and Demario Atwater, 21, of Durham is being held in Carson's death.
Oates was convicted for breaking and entering in May 2007 and was on probation when he was arrested following the graduate student's killing. He now faces a long list of charges for crimes committed between November and his arrest in January.
Charges include 15 additional counts of robbery with a dangerous weapon, one count of assault with a deadly weapon with intent to kill while inflicting serious injury and nine other miscellaneous offenses, according to a Durham Police Department release.
Lovette and Atwater were also on probation when they were arrested for murdering Carson.
After being convicted of breaking and entering and larceny, Lovette was put on probation Jan. 16. During his probationary period, he was arrested and charged with nine different crimes, but was released each time.
Atwater, originally convicted of breaking and entering in 2005, violated his probation in June when found guilty of possession of a firearm by a felon. But a clerical error postponed his hearing for the crime, scheduled March 3, two days before Carson's death.
Atwater could have been put back behind bars in the hearing.
"They slipped through the judicial court system, and they also slipped through the social net system," Brown said of Lovette and Atwater.
Slowing the revolving door
Brown said the problem with repeat offenders starts with the state and then filters down into the counties.
"A lot of people don't realize that [North Carolina has] one of the lowest funded criminal justice systems in the country," he said. "For some reason it just doesn't seem to be a main priority in the state house, regardless of what party is in control. I don't understand it---I'm flabbergasted by it."
Brown isn't alone in his frustration with Durham's handling of repeat offenders.
"I suspect we have more repeat offenders than most communities do," said Barker French, chair of Durham Roundtable, a citizen's group that tracks violent offenders from their arrest to their court date and also examines repeat offenders in Durham.
According to the largest and most recent study of recidivism by the U.S. Bureau of Justice Statistics, 67.5 percent of prisoners released in 1994 were arrested again within three years. Statistics for Durham were not immediately available.
French said one of the causes of Durham's revolving-door problem is inappropriately low bonds, especially for violent crimes.
"No one who lives here likes to have repeat violent offenders released onto the streets continuously because they are a threat to the community," French said. "I was certainly personally not happy reading that the person who murdered [Mahato] was a repeat offender."
French said Durham County Pretrial Services, established in 2006, has helped judges set more appropriate bonds for criminals. "Since [Pretrial Services] has been in place, the jails have had more people in them, rather than fewer," he said. "The presumption is that the judges are setting higher bonds for people than they were prior to Pretrial Services."
French added that new guidelines proposed by interim Durham District Attorney David Saacks to the district's superior court justices may slow down the revolving door.
Under his recommendations, any offense involving a gun would automatically induce a higher bond, and Saacks said he has also recommended higher bonds for violent crimes in general.
"What we're doing now is trying to recognize the fact that a firearm, specifically, is a more dangerous weapon out in the public than other types of deadly weapons," Saacks said. "Therefore, there should be an extra bond amount increase in there because you put extra people in the public at risk when you use a firearm."
Though Saacks said he hopes his proposal will help, he added that he doesn't believe Durham has an unusually large problem with repeat offenders, as some have suggested.
"I'm not sure Durham's the only one with a revolving-door problem," he said. "If you actually look at the numbers, the vast majority aren't revolving-door people."
Saacks did note, however, that certain offenders commit the majority of the crimes. "You get more bang for your buck if you concentrate on repeat offenders," he said.
The new bond guidelines are not the only way Durham is fighting back against repeat offenders. In 2000, DPD began Strategies to Abate and Reduce Senseless Violence, a program designed to reduce gun-related crime by identifying repeat violent offenders. Offenders are notified that if they continue to commit crimes, they may be transferred to the federal court system, where there is no plea bargaining and sentencing is generally more harsh.
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