Barksdale reflects on first year as Lake Area’s top prosecutor
Summary
Wright Barksdale knew his first year as the District Attorney for the Ocmulgee Judicial Circuit would be challenging. In a wide-ranging interview with Lake Country Today, Barksdale said his office faced short-staffing compounded with COVID-related backlogs, but in the end, […]
Wright Barksdale knew his first year as the District Attorney for the Ocmulgee Judicial Circuit would be challenging.
In a wide-ranging interview with Lake Country Today, Barksdale said his office faced short-staffing compounded with COVID-related backlogs, but in the end, he feels they largely rose to the occasion.
He took the oath at the end of December 2020. A year that saw all of life in America grind to a halt, and the judicial system was no exception.
Georgia Supreme Court Chief Justice Harold Melton suspended jury trials and in-person court proceedings in March of 2020. Melton lifted the suspension seven months later, only to reinstate it due to rising coronavirus cases in December 2020. Jury trials would resume again in March of 2021, and the statewide judicial emergency declaration expired in June of 2021.
‘One of our biggest struggles is the lack of resources’
Like many businesses around the country, law enforcement is coping with staffing issues. According to Barksdale, this extends to the DA’s office.
“Some would think that my job would be purely administrative in nature,” he said. “But we’re so short-staffed that I’m having to hop in the trenches and try these cases.”
Barksdale personally led the prosecution of five homicide cases in 2021. Which is an unusually high number for the District Attorney, but, he says, the need was there.
“[2022] is going to be much the same…it’s going to be at a higher rate, just because COVID shut everything down.”
District Attorney Wright Barksdale
“Covering an eight-county area with essentially 11 attorneys to handle that casework…we were ultimately able to resolve now 11 homicide cases either by plea or trial,” Barksdale stated.
He believed this number of resolved cases to be the highest per capita in the state.
His office will try five murder cases during the first two months of 2022. Barksdale will lead the prosecution in at least three of those.
| COUNTY | CASE NAME |
| Hancock | State v. Bernard Hall |
| Baldwin | State v. William Weaver |
| Putnam | State v. Michael Seth Perrault |
‘We certainly fell short’
The highest-profile case of his first year was the trial of Donnie Rowe, one of two inmates charged with killing two corrections officers on a prison transport bus in 2017.
Even though the jury found Rowe guilty for his role in killing the officers, they could not come to a unanimous decision on a sentence. Barksdale was seeking the death penalty.
“The biggest disappointment of my career is having to look at Denise Monica and the Billue family and tell them that we didn’t get a death sentence on Donnie Rowe’s case,” he said.
Barksdale believes the pandemic affected the outcome of the trial.
“I think that case ultimately was lost during jury selection. I think that COVID presented some challenges to us,” he told Lake Country Today. “How we picked that jury and what we were left with and people’s attitudes towards the death penalty as a whole.”
The trial for the second defendant, Ricky Dubose, is slated to begin in April.
‘A very complex problem that’s going to take every facet of our community to address’
Following a trend across the country, the Lake Area has seen an upswing in violent crimes, and Barksdale is concerned.
“People are pounding on places like Atlanta and Bibb County for the number of murder cases they have, but if you look even in rural communities, you are seeing just eyepopping percentage increases in homicides and violent crime,” he said.
According to Barksdale, in 2019, only 12 homicide cases were pending across the eight-county circuit; currently, there are 39 pending murder cases.
He stressed not all of those happened over the past year, but it does mark a more than 200% increase.
He feels community partnerships will be vital in helping to make areas safer.
‘Keep our foot on the gas’
Barksdale knows the new year will bring a whole new set of challenges, but this Washington County native is ready for another year as the Lake Area’s top prosecutor.
“I still have quite a bit of a learning curve ahead of me on certain things,” Barksdale said. “But we’ve been able to push out a really great service my first year in office.”