The Columbia County prosecutor vying to be Augusta’s next district attorney pledged to “uphold, protect and restore” at an Oct. 1 campaign launch.
Amber Brantley, the former chief assistant solicitor in Richmond County who now serves as a senior assistant district attorney in Columbia County, is challenging first-term DA Jared Williams on the May 21 Democratic primary ballot.
Brantley, recently named assistant district attorney of the year by the State Bar of Georgia, said she’d be a force for change in the DA’s office. After seven years prosecuting cases, Brantley said, “we need a different stance on crime and what’s happening in our community.”
That means to “uphold the law and seek justice,” Brantley said. “Justice looks different for every case because every case is different.”
In a nod to ongoing litigation by Williams and three other Georgia district attorneys against the state’s new Prosecuting Attorneys Qualifications Commission, Brantley said she’d study every case as DA that came before her.
“I will analyze each and every case and render a fair and just decision as to how to prosecute that case,” she said.
Augusta crime has “tripled” in the last few years, with murder suspects making up 10% of the Richmond County Jail’s population, she said.
Meanwhile, Burke County residents are concerned Augusta crime will “trickle down” to the second county of the Augusta Judicial Circuit, she said.
“Restore” refers to restoring faith in the system, she said.
“A lot of people have lost faith in the criminal justice system…People that have been victimized don’t feel like they’re being taken seriously,” she said. “I vow to restore faith in the criminal justice system and to handle victims with care, because they have been victimized and it is traumatic.”
Brantley said she’d take on drug addiction, mental health issues, sex trafficking and gang activity that comprise “the situation in our communities right now.”
“There must be values in the criminal justice system,” she said. “We cannot lock people up and just throw away the key. We can’t just always be concerned about ‘prison, prison, prison.’ We also have to have compassion, we have to have mercy, we have to have grace…But we also have to take serious crime seriously. We have to take prosecution seriously, and it has to do with values.”
Brantley said she lost her mother in June and was wearing a pin with her photograph. To campaign through her grief shows her drive, she said.
“If I can do this and that didn’t take me out, nothing anyone can say or do to me can stop me,” she said.
