Putnam prosecutors reflect on four decades and counting
Forty years have brought a lot of change to the office of prosecuting attorney in Putnam County.
The changes have come in staffing, in caseload, in the nature of crimes being prosecuted and the way those charges are handled.
If a gathering of the four living Putnam County prosecutors — Del Brewer (1979-1987), Bob Lowe (1987-1996), Matt Headley (1996-2004) and Tim Bookwalter (2005-present) proved anything, it’s that the care taken by those entrusted with the job has not changed.
The four men gathered Thursday at the Watson Forum on the DePauw campus for the “Putnam County Prosecutors Roundtable: Four Decades and Counting.”
With Professor Bruce Stinebrickner serving as moderator, the men reflected on the challenges, changes and victories that have come in the last 40 years.
One of the main challenges, Bookwalter said, is figuring out who the really troubled cases are and who are just in there after one bad decision.
“About 10 percent are really ‘bad’ people,” Bookwalter said. “The other 90 percent, we’re seeing on their worst day. Our job is to figure out who that 10 percent is.”
For that reason, particularly in a nation already facing a mass incarceration problem, the prosecutor has to realize that prison is not the answer for every single person who comes through the criminal justice system.
Solutions such as probation, community corrections and work release can aid in this process, as can expungement after the fact.
Plea agreements also play a key role, particularly if the prosecutor and judge hope to ever see this person contributing to society as a worker again.
“We try to get as creative as we can to help,” said Headley, who has served as Putnam Circuit Court judge for the last 14 years. “Our cases are driven, criminally, about 80 percent by substance abuse.”
That means that even when a defendant stands in court accused of burglarizing a house, for instance, the root problem is that he wanted money to buy drugs. This is someone who needs treatment as much as anything.
And he doesn’t need a felony conviction that will keep him from ever working again.
“We need people to work,” Headley said, “and if you write a felony down, you’re done. Your name is in the stack.”
The goal teaching a lesson that will change future behavior.
“How do we best change their behavior?” Lowe asked. “If indeed we can change their behavior.”
The answers aren’t easy and perhaps learned through experience.
“I think the older I get, the better I get at making those calls,” Bookwalter said. “I think you just need to do thousands of cases.”
“When I was prosecutor, we didn’t get training,” Brewer added. “We had to learn as we went.”
However, learning as you go comes with its mistakes, some of which Brewer lives with to this day, more than 30 years after leaving office.
He recalled one case in which a man had been convicted of a crime and sent to prison. However, in seeking an early release, the family petitioned the prosecutor to give his blessing, which Brewer eventually did.
“The biggest mistake I ever made,” Brewer said. He went on to tell how the man, a father of a large family, fell back into his old ways and came home drunk about six months after leaving prison.
“He had a beautiful daughter ... 14 years old ... and he shot her,” Brewer recounted, growing emotional as he spoke. “She was paralyzed for the rest of her life.
“I wish I hadn’t done that,” Brewer added, a catch in his voice. “But we’re not God. We’re going to make mistakes.”
Headley quickly added that Brewer is not alone in this thinking.
“I think we all have cases where we looked back and think, ‘Why did I think that way?’” Headley said.
Unfortunately, there are also cases in which something terrible happened, but a prosecutor knows no conviction is possible.
“Maybe the toughest cases for me were when a really horrendous crime was committed,” Lowe said. “And you’re pretty sure who did it, but you don’t have the best evidence.”
“You always wonder, should I have done that?”
Of course, a prosecutor’s job isn’t all regret. All four men expressed pride in upgrades made to the office in the last four decades. The office has gone from just Brewer (working part time) and a secretary, to two full-time prosecutors, two part-time, an investigator and several more staff members.
Bookwalter talked of the process of bringing everything onto computers early in his tenure and bringing things “out of the stone age.”
There was also a good sense of the family of lawyers in Putnam County and how many of them worked together -- and against one another -- over the years.
“The most pride I take in my time at the prosecutor’s office was the great people I hired, who you later made judges,” Brewer said.
He went on to list Lowe, Diana LaViolette, Sally Gray and Headley, all of whom worked for Brewer and later sat on the bench of either Putnam Circuit Court or Putnam Superior Court.
While Bookwalter was not part of that lineage, he gained the respect of the prosecutors through his work as a defense attorney.
Headley said you could have a case all together and feel sure of the outcome, but if Bookwalter was at the opposite table, you had to wonder, “What’s Tim going to do?”
Through it all, the world has certainly changed. Brewer recalled seeing only a few sexual abuse cases in his time, while Bookwalter said Indiana State Police officers have told him Putnam County is “The child molester capital of the world.”
The question is whether more crimes are being committed or we’ve just gotten better at reporting it.
“That’s something that just didn’t happen,” Brewer said, before correcting himself. “Well, the reason I know it did happen is when we tried some (sex abuse cases), I had to dismiss several women as jurors because they had been victims and you could see the emotions overcome them.”
“We do a better job of reporting,” Bookwalter said.
In a world that’s constantly changing, so does the office of prosecuting attorney. Investigations have gone from the old shoe leather cliche to subpoenas of cell phones, meaning a good prosecutor’s office needs a good, young computer wizard more than a grizzled veteran.
Through it all, Brewer retains his faith in the system, particularly in Putnam County.
“In my entire time as prosecutor,” Brewer said, “I never saw a decision made for political reasons or for the wrong reason.”