By Tony Kukulich
After recent appearances by Beaufort Police Chief Dale McDorman and Sheriff P.J. Tanner addressed residents’ concerns about gun violence in Beaufort County and the City of Beaufort, it was Solicitor Duffie Stone’s turn when he spoke at the invitation of the Northwest Quadrant Neighborhood Association (NWQNA) last week.
Stone is the 14th Circuit solicitor responsible for criminal prosecution in Allendale, Beaufort, Colleton, Hampton and Jasper counties. He was appointed to the role in 2006 by then-Gov. Mark Sanford to replace Randolph Murdaugh III, who left the office in 2005 to go into private practice. His first full term came after his election in 2008, followed by election victories in 2012, 2016 and 2020. His current term expires in 2024. According to the solicitor’s website, Stone is the first solicitor in the 14th circuit who isn’t from the Murdaugh family since the elected office was created in 1920.
When McDorman spoke during an NWQNA meeting in March, his appearance came on the heels of two shootings in the Northwest Quadrant that had residents understandably shaken. While he handled pointed questions from residents demanding action, Stone faced fewer direct questions concerning local acts of violence.
There were three principal topics that Stone addressed; the role of technology in criminal prosecution; changing the prioritization of cases and the number of cases currently pending in his office.
Stone began his presentation by describing his first days as the solicitor in 2006. He requested a list of pending cases the office was handling and was told it would take two days to get the information. The reason for the long turnaround, he said, was that the entire office was running off an antiquated Tandy 1000 computer.
“The technology that criminals are using today, you have got to use from a police standpoint as well as a prosecutor’s office standpoint or else you will not be able to successfully prosecute cases today,” he said. “The long and short of it is that the Tandy computer built by Radio Shack doesn’t cut it anymore. Technology and the use of technology and the focus on technology, both outside of the courtroom and inside, is now crucial.”
The second point Stone addressed was the need to consider the criminal in addition to the crime when determining prosecution strategies. He argued that career criminals are different from the average criminal and he assembled a Career Criminal Team to prosecute them. The team was instructed to not offer pleas bargain deals and to seek the most severe sentences allowed under the law. He tasked the team with achieving a 75 percent conviction rate. Since 2010, the team has won 421 of the 451 cases it has tried, a 93 percent conviction rate.
“You have to look at your body of work,” Stone explained. “You look at the cases pending. Who are the most important people to get to first? That’s where the whole career criminal concept comes from. You don’t just look at the cases and say, ‘This is the oldest case. Let’s take that one.’ You have to figure out who to prioritize. Is it a career criminal from the Career Criminals Team or a career criminal from the Special Victims Unit? Those are the people we have to prioritize and get those first. That’s where our focus is, is to make sure we’re getting the people who are really driving the crime to the top of the docket as soon as possible.”
Speaking to The Island News after Stone’s presentation, City of Beaufort Police Chief Dale McDorman was not completely convinced that Stone’s emphasis on the criminal above the crime was always the best approach.
“As for prioritizing cases based on the criminal and not the crime, I can’t say I completely agree on this point although I understand it,” he said. “The crime, I think, will always play a role. This was part of the larger conversation about the Solicitors Career Criminal Prosecution Team, which I support completely.”
The number of cases pending the solicitor’s office has been a hot-button topic, particularly between Stone and Tanner. In May 2021, Stone issued a press release addressing accusations that Tanner made in a media interview suggesting that Stone inflated the caseload to secure more funding for his organization, an accusation Stone vehemently denied. He placed much of the blame on the pandemic which shut the courts for a year between 2020 and 2021.
Without the threat of going to trial, Stone explained, accused criminals had no motivation to accept plea deals. It was to their advantage to wait for a trial. With no plea deals clearing the docket, cases piled up.
“The year before the pandemic, we cut 300 roughly cases off the backlog to get to the 3,500 number,” Stone explained. “We rose to over 6,000. It hopefully peaked in January of this year. We just now started the downward trend. We’re in the 5,000s now. It’s not going to go anywhere soon.”
Tony Kukulich is a recent transplant to the Lowcountry. A native of Wilmington, Del., he comes to The Island News from the San Francisco Bay Area where he spent seven years as a reporter and photographer for several publications. He can be reached at tony.theislandnews@gmail.com
