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Published in partnership with INDYWeek.
When Satana Deberry was cut open for an emergency C-section, she felt the searing hole where the air of the operating room came right up against her insides.
The regional anesthetic failed, so she still had full sensation in her abdomen.
“You’re laying down on the table,” Deberry recalls. “It’s almost like you’ve been crucified.”
She’s talking about the moment nearly 20 years later from her office in the Durham County Courthouse. Her voice has dropped to a whisper. Her eyes, typically locked in contact, are somewhere else.
Memoir is a strong suit of Deberry’s. The 54-year-old district attorney secured her seat in 2018 and held on to it four years later in large part by baring her soul to voters, delivering calls for prosecutorial reform and racial justice alongside her own stories about vomiting after being pulled over by the police and clerking at overwhelmingly white law firms where the partners didn’t speak to her.
Now, as she runs for the Democratic nomination for North Carolina attorney general, her lived experience has come back into play. In a state that ranks poorly on reproductive rights and health care costs, in a country where maternal and infant mortality rates are horrifically high for Black women, Deberry wants you to know that she knows the stakes. She fought for her and her baby’s life in the operating room. In the attorney general’s office, she says she’ll fight for yours.
Her primary opponent, U.S. representative Jeff Jackson, wants you to know that he, too, knows the stakes—he fought in Afghanistan, after all—and while Deberry’s anecdote is being quietly conferred to a reporter who will write about it two months later, Jackson’s is being spliced with boxing ring footage and disseminated instantaneously to 3.5 million TikTok followers who already want him to run for president.
As far as name recognition goes, Jackson is about as formidable a candidate as one could encounter in a state primary.
He considered a bid for the most recent U.S. Senate race, and did a 100-county tour before ultimately deciding not to. And over the past few years, the 41-year-old has amassed a staggering social media following by posting videos about what’s going on in politics, effectively captivating a zoomer generation bereft of institutional trust.
“He is, if nothing else, a master communicator,” says Chris Cooper, a political science professor at Western Carolina University. “And elections are really about communication.” Deberry and Jackson are running to succeed Josh Stein, who’s making a gubernatorial bid. The winner will likely go on to face U.S. representative Dan Bishop, an attorney and Freedom Caucus member best known for authoring the so-called bathroom bill during his time in the North Carolina House.
The Democratic establishment has thrown its support behind Jackson. The entire Democratic North Carolina congressional delegation and more than 30 state representatives have endorsed him, as well as a handful of prominent labor unions and PACs. The most recent campaign filings show that Jackson has received upward of $2 million in contributions total and has $1.8 million on hand.
Deberry, who is Black and queer, has the support of the Durham PACs Committee on the Affairs of Black People and People’s Alliance, but outside county lines, she’s only been endorsed by Orange County–based state senator Graig Meyer, the LGBTQ+ Victory Fund, and a handful of other progressive political groups. She was trailing Jackson dramatically in campaign contributions at the end of January, reporting $43,000 raised and $30,000 on hand. Also running in the Democratic primary is Tim Dunn, a former U.S. Marine Corps prosecutor who now practices law in Fayetteville. Dunn has raised just over $11,000 but is in the hole by $21.
Both Jackson and Deberry have credentials. Jackson worked as an assistant district attorney in Gaston County and spent eight years as a state senator. He’s also a major in the Judge Advocate General’s Corps, the legal branch of the U.S. Army. Deberry is in her sixth year as district attorney and has a legal background that includes working as a criminal defense attorney, serving as general counsel for the state health department, and leading a statewide coalition that fights for affordable housing.
“They both have the kind of résumé where it makes sense to run,” says Cooper.
But elections are about more than résumés, money, and name recognition, he says. Voters cast ballots for people they identify with. And Black voters make up 43 percent of registered Democrats in North Carolina, more than any other demographic. There are more women than men in the state, too.
North Carolina has never had an attorney general who isn’t white and male.
Deberry was born in Hamlet, North Carolina, a railroad town in the Sandhills.
Her parents were college-educated teachers. When she was 16, she spent a summer at North Carolina Governor’s School, a residential program for gifted students, where she met a Princeton admissions officer who encouraged her to apply. She landed not only an acceptance but a robust financial aid package.
After Princeton, Deberry went on to Duke Law School. Then she returned to her hometown to open a criminal defense practice.
Deberry was raised during a local economic crisis—Seaboard, the railroad line that Hamlet was built on, had consolidated and left half the town unemployed—and when she returned to practice law, she saw the fallout. Most of her clients were people she’d grown up around. She knew how tenuous their upbringings had been, and representing them rocked her perception of what it meant for someone to be a “quote-unquote criminal,” she says.
“It made it really clear to me how all these systems had failed them. The explosion of the carceral state in the ’90s just put so many of them at risk,” she says. “These were folks who didn’t have the educational means to get out of town, or who had mental health issues, or substance abuse issues, or families who were really poor.”
After a few years, she became demoralized.
“I was only pushing them back a little bit from the precipice,” Deberry says. “Their lives were so challenging. They were going to be back, as a defendant or as a victim. There wasn’t much I could do.”
She left Hamlet for Durham in 2000 and spent the next phase of her career in positions that straddled law and housing, including a stint as general counsel for the state Department of Health and Human Services. She also raised three daughters on her own and earned an MBA in health sector management from Duke.
In 2017, while working as executive director for the North Carolina Housing Coalition, she was approached by Nia Wilson, the executive director of the Black women–led Durham nonprofit SpiritHouse, who wanted her to run for DA.
“I thought it was a horrible idea,” Deberry says. “I had not had great experiences with prosecutors. They never seemed to care about the challenges my clients were facing. I did not want to become that person.”
“They both have the kind of resume where it makes sense to run.”
Chris Cooper, political scientist
Wilson told her to open her eyes. Around the country, self-described “progressive prosecutors” who campaigned on criminal justice reform were getting elected left and right. In Chicago, Kim Foxx had been voted into the top prosecutor’s seat after advocating for police accountability and reduced incarceration. In Philadelphia, Larry Krasner, who also has a criminal defense background, was on the brink of winning the DA’s seat after calling for an end to marijuana possession charges and cash bail.
Deberry decided to give it a go, launching a campaign that framed reform as the route to a safer Durham. The DA’s office has limited resources, she told voters. Instead of squandering those resources on low-level convictions, Deberry said, let’s use them to fight violent crime. (During her candidacy, Deberry was accused of plagiarizing from Krasner’s website on her campaign website; she denied copying and pasting but acknowledged borrowing heavily from Krasner, citing him as a model for progressive prosecutors, and later updated her website with changes.)
The message was received well in Durham, a city known for both its progressive values and its gun violence epidemic. Deberry edged out Democratic incumbent Roger Echols by eight points in the primary and sailed through the general. After being sworn in, she petitioned the court to waive unpaid traffic fines and fees for residents who’d lost their licenses years earlier, enabling thousands to become legal drivers again. She declined to prosecute nonviolent drug felonies and misdemeanors. With some exceptions, she stopped seeking cash bail. And she resurrected a pretrial release policy that, by the time she was up for reelection, had reduced Durham’s jail population by 12 percent.
Deberry also locked people up. Between 2019 and 2022, her office cleared Durham’s rape kit backlog and brought closure to several cases that had gone unresolved for years. (Last month, her office received a $1.15 million federal grant from the Sexual Assault Kit Initiative to continue the work.) Deberry’s office also closed 75 percent of homicide cases with a conviction, including the high-profile murders of three Muslim UNC-Chapel Hill students. In line with her campaign promise of not pursuing capital punishment, Deberry did not seek the death penalty in the UNC case (her predecessor had initially made it a capital case) but sent the confessed killer to prison for life without parole.
Of everything she’s done in office, Deberry says one of her proudest accomplishments has been expanding support for victims and their families. She’s done that in part by simply validating their experiences. For instance, the families of the UNC students who were killed viewed the triple homicide as a hate crime, and while, to their dismay, federal authorities refused to make that designation, Deberry described it that way, telling courtroom observers the defendant was “a white man who society had taught that his views were the only ones that mattered.”
She’s also tried to support victims by way of transparency, she says. After being reelected in 2022, she partnered with the Wilson Center for Science and Justice at Duke for a yearlong study on plea negotiations meant to explain how and why prosecutors strike deals with defendants.
And Deberry has amped up the use of restorative justice programs, which seek to reduce recidivism in offenders and offer catharsis to victims by bringing the two parties together to discuss the harm that was caused. Deberry made history in using restorative justice in a homicide case, the first in North Carolina. The case involved a Durham man charged with murdering his father. After a year, Donald Fields Jr. and his family made a “repair” agreement. As part of that agreement, he pleaded guilty to voluntary manslaughter and was released from custody in June 2022 with time served. If he violates any part of the repair agreement, he could face up to 10 years in prison.
“Victims really just want to know: Why did you pick me?” Deberry says. “And why did you do what you did?”
But more than a few victims have posed those same questions to Deberry.
Deberry has come under fire for what critics describe as a soft-on-crime approach that not only makes Durham less safe but retraumatizes victims and their families. In 2022, The News & Observer reported that Deberry’s office had failed to notify victims before greenlighting the prison sentence reductions of two convicted rapists and a convicted murderer.
One of those victims was unaware that her rapist had been released until the N&O approached her about it. She told the reporter she felt as though she’d been “raped by the Durham DA’s office.”
Deberry issued a public apology and said she would investigate the oversight. But critics say there’s a larger issue at play. Deberry’s office has approved motions for appropriate relief—requests filed to correct errors that occurred during legal proceedings, and the mechanism by which prison sentences are often reduced—at a higher rate than her predecessor’s. Some have argued that this reflects leniency in letting offenders walk free. Deberry says it’s an indicator of her office’s rigor.
“Some of the cases that we’re resentencing are from times in which we know there was prosecutorial misconduct,” Deberry says. “This job is not about convicting people. It’s about getting to the truth.”
Deberry has also been criticized for the way her office goes about plea negotiations.
Eugene Watt, whose 26-year-old brother Daniel was killed by a drunk driver in 2021, says that the DA “revictimized” his family by going behind their backs to offer the defendant, Gregory Allen Coley, a plea deal with a drastically reduced charge: felony death by motor vehicle rather than second-degree murder.
Coley was driving 143 miles per hour and had twice the legal alcohol limit when he crashed into a Lyft that Daniel was riding in. A judge refused to entertain the plea deal in June 2023, so the case is still pending. If the plea deal is accepted, Coley’s projected sentence—originally 15 to 20 years—will drop to around five. A court date for the ruling has not yet been set.
“Nothing can bring my brother back,” Watt says. “But there’s a number of years where at least it would feel like justice has been served.”
Watt isn’t opposed to criminal justice reform and says he appreciates the philosophy that Deberry promotes. But “if there were ever a case to be tough on,” it’s this one, he says.
“Nothing can bring my brother back. But there’s a number of years where at least it would feel like justice has been served.”
Eugene Watt, victim’s brother
“My family is Black. My brother was Black. We are fully aware of how the American justice judicial system has treated Black men in America,” Watt says. “A part of me wants to sympathize with the DA for making sure that the punishment fits the crime that’s being committed. Like, should someone go to jail for a long time for a little bit of marijuana? Probably not. But this isn’t that.”
In a statement to the INDY, the DA’s office expressed sympathy for the Watt family and wrote that the DA has to “make difficult decisions every day that unfortunately do not always match the understandable emotions surrounding a case.” The office wrote that Deberry and an assistant DA have communicated about plea terms with the Watt family on several occasions but did not go into great detail.
While some victims and their families have specific issues with Deberry, most of her critics are those who think her progressive policies are leading to an increase in violent crime.
Durham’s violent crime rate has fluctuated over the past two decades. It was highest in 2006 at 937 felony cases per 100,000 people. Seven years later, it had dropped to 683.
The year before Deberry took office, the violent crime rate was 726. The rate stayed almost exactly the same at 727 in her first year, but the city saw a spike in 2020, as did most U.S. cities during the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic. It fell back to 728 in 2021, the most recent year for which statistics are available.
Data from the DA’s office suggests there’s no correlation between felony convictions and violent crime rates. In some years, Durham has seen higher violent crime rates with twice as many felony convictions.
Under Deberry’s tenure, the number of felony convictions in Durham has gone down. She attributes the decrease to her office’s prioritization of serious offenses over low-level crimes.
“We prosecute what needs to be prosecuted,” Deberry says. “Violence is not a Durham issue, it’s an American issue. It’s disingenuous for us to pretend that one person is responsible for all these things.”
A study published two years ago backs that up, finding no correlation between progressive prosecutors and increased crime rates. Researchers at the University of Toronto analyzed crime data from 65 cities—some with progressive prosecutors, some without—and found that between 2015 and 2019, homicides increased in 68 percent of cities with traditional prosecutors compared to just 56 percent under progressives.
The stigma persists, though. Progressive prosecutors across the country have faced backlash, including a successful recall election to oust San Francisco district attorney Chesa Boudin.
These days, Deberry isn’t even using the progressive prosecutor moniker because it “has become almost a slur,” she says. Others in her cohort have dropped it, too. Change from Within—a 2022 book that contains testimonials from 12 reform-minded prosecutors, including Deberry—denounces the title as “a misnomer that suggests a political label of progressive instead of the more apt focus on progress: the essence of reform.”
Nationally, progressive prosecutors have been successful in getting elected to local office, says Carissa Hessick, a law professor who directs the Prosecutors and Politics Project at UNC-CH. Reform-minded candidates even have a higher success rate than conventional ones. But Hessick doesn’t know whether that translates to statewide office, especially in a purple state like North Carolina.
It’s also not clear how Deberry’s criminal justice reforms will work on the state level.
Attorneys general have different duties depending on which state you’re in. In North Carolina, the office plays a large role in criminal appeals. For example, if a murder conviction is appealed to the court of appeals or the state supreme court, the AG is tasked with defending it. The AG also represents district attorneys from around the state in appeals, including allegations of wrongful convictions or jury discrimination, and in some cases, the AG defends legislation the General Assembly has passed—voter ID laws, say, or redistricting maps—in constitutional challenges.
Dawn Blagrove, the executive director of the nonprofit organization Emancipate NC, has high hopes for a Deberry-led AG office. She believes Deberry would stand firmer in the position than Stein, who has at times defended the state in criminal appeals that run counter to his stated beliefs. In the case of Russell William Tucker, a Forsyth County man on death row who claimed prosecutors used a “cheat sheet” to strike every Black person from the jury pool, Stein’s prosecutors argued this was not evidence of racial discrimination and sought to uphold the conviction. The state supreme court agreed.
North Carolina was one of the last states in the country in which an appellate court found that prosecutors had illegally used race to strike a Black person. With the Tucker decision, the state is retreating from recent progress, Blagrove said.
“This job is not about convicting people. It’s about getting to the truth.”
Satana Deberry
“We are now back at the bottom of the heap,” Blagrove says. “And a lot of that has to do with politics and the political will of elected officials. With someone like [Deberry] in a position as important as the attorney general, we will get an opportunity to see what it looks like when a politician’s rhetoric matches their actions.”
Graig Meyer, the lone state senator who has endorsed Deberry, says he expects North Carolina to legalize cannabis in the next four years and views Deberry as the right person to lead the state through that transition.
“We’re going to need an attorney general who helps us figure out what the next step in drug enforcement looks like,” Meyer says, particularly as it also affects taxation, health care, transportation, and other sectors.
Meyer’s and Blagrove’s ideas of how Deberry’s policies might translate statewide are more specific than what she is currently willing to share. She declined to discuss specific policies but shared a broader vision for her role in the office.
“As AG, I would do the same thing that I do here, which is—the law matters,” Deberry says. “We review every case. We look to see if the law is followed. North Carolina deserves an AG who’s really taking a look at: What does the law require? How does the law protect the most vulnerable people in our community, whether those people are victims of crime or victims of poor policy?”
Deberry’s approach to the office would be “proactive and not reactive,” she says. As far as defending conviction appeals goes, she would “try to be fair.”
Deberry’s office is set up like the well of a courtroom. Her desk faces a love seat flanked by flagpoles, seating guests the way a counsel squares up to the judge’s bench. An armchair is stationed near where a witness stand might be.
As such, sitting in the armchair comes with the risk of being questioned, even when you’re the one doing the interview.
What’s the extent of her courtroom experience?
“Why would anyone assume I don’t have courtroom experience?” she says.
She waits for a response (“It’s just something we haven’t touched on yet”) and then lowers her guard. She has spent time in the courtroom as a defense attorney, she says. And as DA, she’s been the lead prosecutor on several large cases. She also argued cases in person during the first year of the pandemic while her assistant DAs were quarantined.
The primary against Jackson is an uphill battle against someone with more name recognition and more money. Why did she want to take this on?
“Let me ask you a question,” Deberry says. “Why do you think it’s an uphill battle?”
She sees the framing as problematic, she says.
“The fact that the media is setting this up as a horse race between those two guys means that it’s interested in the horse race. [The media] isn’t interested in what this will actually mean for the lives of everyday regular North Carolinians.”
And neither is her primary opponent, she says.
The AG’s office has often been a launchpad for aspiring governors, including Stein, Roy Cooper, and Mike Easley. Because Republican redistricting made it unlikely that he would win reelection, Deberry feels that Jackson’s candidacy comes more from a desire to stay in office and climb the political ladder than from a vocation for the role of AG.
Jackson’s campaign declined an interview but wrote in a statement that he has “tried hundreds of cases as a prosecutor, passed substantive criminal justice reform, and stood up for voting and abortion rights.” Jackson “has great respect for DA Deberry and will continue running a positive primary,” the statement added.
She doesn’t comment on what she thinks her chances are in the primary.
“Why is it always a few white guys who get to decide what happens to the rest of us?” she says, opening her palms into a shrug with such force that she knocks an arm off of her desk chair.
She laughs and bends down to pick it up. When she had her C-section, she says, reaching under her desk, she and her daughter Zora made it off of the operating table alive because she had a Black obstetrician who believed her when she said she was in pain.
She’s not going to leave voters without an option for representation.
“At the end of the day,” she says, “if it’s Jeff Jackson versus Dan Bishop, we’re not going to be talking about any of this stuff.”
Correction: The line about Jackson’s Senate bid has been corrected.
Lena Geller is a staff writer at INDYWeek.
Michael Hewlett is a staff reporter at The Assembly. He was previously the legal affairs reporter at the Winston-Salem Journal. You can reach him at michael@theassemblync.com.