Much has changed about Wake County—not to mention the state, nation, and world—since incumbent District Attorney Lorrin Freeman was first elected as the county’s chief prosecutor in 2014.
After growing by more than 200,000 people (or about 20%) in the last decade, Wake became the state’s most populous county. The year 2016 saw the rise and election of Donald Trump. A global pandemic followed in 2020, as did widespread civil unrest, the likes of which are playing out again in the streets of cities across the country as stepped-up federal immigration enforcement becomes increasingly violent.
All of these events have impacted the DA’s office, and it will be a much different place for Freeman’s successor—in all likelihood, one of three Democrats running in the March 3 primary—when they step into it in 2027. (No Republican filed to run.)
Today, the challenges the office faces are manifold: A staggering lack of resources (Wake County, despite being larger, has half as many prosecutors as Mecklenburg) means assistant district attorneys are overburdened with their caseloads, resulting in backlogs, scheduling delays, and an overcrowded jail. Morale among prosecutors is low, local attorneys say, and turnover is high. And whoever comes after Freeman will have to navigate a changing local and national political landscape when it comes to policies governing everything from public safety to immigration.
Then there’s the question of how the office will move forward from Freeman’s three terms at the helm. Criminal justice reform advocates have criticized Freeman for her reticence to go after bad actors in law enforcement—she has never prosecuted an officer for fatal use of force, and many were confused by her ill-fated attempt to prosecute former Attorney General, now Governor, Josh Stein over allegedly lying in a campaign ad.
For the three candidates running, distinguishing themselves from Freeman, or not doing so, is a hallmark of their campaigns. And all three candidates would bring different experiences and perspectives to the role. Wake County voters will have their choice between a 27-year veteran of the office in prosecutor Melanie Shekita; a former criminal defense attorney who’s made his career in politics in Wiley Nickel; and an attorney with experience in the public and private sectors in Sherita Walton, who currently advises the Raleigh Police Department (RPD) and is Freeman’s choice to follow in her footsteps.
Campbell Law School graduate Melanie Shekita has worked in the Wake County DA’s office for 27 years. A Raleigh native and mentee of former DA Colon Willoughby, the Cary resident was a founding member of the office’s Special Victims Unit and has led the unit for the past 17 years. In that role, Shekita investigates and prosecutes sexual assault cases against children and adults in nonintimate relationships, child exploitation cases, cases involving child sexual abuse material, and homicides.
If elected, Shekita said, her priorities for the office include reducing gun violence and tackling rising rates of juvenile violence through collaboration with law enforcement, the school system, and churches. She wants to fast-track the most serious offenses through the county’s logjammed courts system.
Despite her longevity in the office, Shekita is up front about her differences with Freeman’s management style. A big priority, she said, would be to recruit and retain experienced prosecutors.
“In order to keep the public safe, it takes time and resources to get prosecutors up to speed to be able to prosecute violent and more serious felonies,” Shekita said. “[Right now,] I don’t think people in the office feel valued. … Sometimes members in our office are treated the same whether they work hard or if they don’t put forth as much effort, so my priority would be to incentivize folks to show initiative, good work ethic, and a commitment to the public.”
Shekita said it’s her years of experience in the courthouse, as well as her service in the greater community, that make her the best candidate for the job. She’s currently the board president of Criminal Justice Alternatives, a local nonprofit aimed at reducing jail populations and offering rehabilitative options via pretrial services and juvenile diversion programs, such as teen court. Shekita has served as a volunteer firefighter and has “a unique understanding of being a first responder and being on the front lines,” she said. And Shekita was instrumental in opening the SAFEChild Advocacy Center, now located in east Raleigh, 10 years ago. Since then, the center has helped thousands of children involved in open investigations into abuse or neglect.
“I’ve demonstrated my commitment to Wake County and will continue to do so,” she said.
Wiley Nickel, a former criminal defense attorney who spent some time as a prosecutor in California, is no stranger to electoral politics. A former aide to President Obama, Nickel, also a resident of Cary, has since served two terms in the state Senate and one in the U.S. House before his district was redrawn. Nickel announced plans to run for North Carolina’s open U.S. Senate seat in this year’s election before former Gov. Roy Cooper entered the race.
In the Wake County DA primary, Nickel is staking himself as the most progressive candidate in the race, making a point of highlighting how differently he would approach the job from Freeman.
He has pledged to prosecute political corruption cases and go after law enforcement agents—including ICE and Border Patrol agents—who use excessive force. Nickel says the office is uniquely situated, in the capital, to investigate and prosecute corrupt officials. He said he would be more aggressive than Freeman in doing so, though inaccurately claimed she has not prosecuted a single Republican for political corruption (Freeman has prosecuted multiple Republicans for what could be considered political corruption, including former state Sen. Fletcher Hartsell for campaign finance violations, a felony, and former Wake County Register of Deeds Laura Riddick for embezzlement by a public official.)
“Candidates who seek the office of district attorney should publicly commit that the office will not be used for political purposes,” Freeman said in an email to the INDY. “Failure to do so will undermine their ability to protect the public interest.”
There is “a real issue of trust and accountability with that office right now,” Nickel continued. He called some of Freeman’s decisions—like the one to investigate Stein—“head-scratchers,” and he said he wants to improve the Wake DA’s office’s relationship with the state attorney general’s.
With that posturing, Nickel may find he has a hard time convincing the Republican-controlled legislature to fund more prosecutors’ positions in the office, which currently has 43. Nickel’s solution, he said, is to look to the county and the city of Raleigh for assistance as some other offices have; Charlotte and Mecklenburg County, he noted, pay for 23 of the DA’s office’s 94 prosecutor positions.
“As a former state senator, I have the ability to go to my former Democratic and Republican colleagues to make that case and will continue to do that,” Nickel said. “I’m going to use every ounce of my political capital to get that done at the state level. But it’s not just the state level to do that.”
Nickel made a direct connection between the strength of the Wake County district attorney’s office and the ability, at the local level, to stand up to Donald Trump, “who is shredding the Constitution in the Oval Office every day.” He pointed to Minneapolis, where federal agents have killed two people while conducting immigration raids. Nickel said that, right now, an officer convicted at the federal level can count on Trump’s pardon, so any justice for victims would have to come in the form of state charges.
“ICE will not get a free pass in Wake County,” Nickel said. “When I’m district attorney, I’ll use the full weight of my office to hold any federal agent accountable who breaks the law.”
Sherita Walton is the one candidate in the race who isn’t purposefully putting much daylight between herself and Freeman. A prosecutor in the Manhattan district attorney’s office for eight years before she moved to North Carolina with her family, Walton joined the Wake County DA’s office in 2016, handling everything from low-level traffic infractions and break-ins to shootings and homicides and mentoring younger DAs.
Following a personal loss and George Floyd’s murder at the hands of police, Walton said she wanted to effect change before criminal cases reached the courthouse and understand the realities of the job for law enforcement. So in 2021, she took the advisory role with RPD; there, she teaches recruits and officers on the legal aspects of their jobs while occasionally going on ride-alongs and assisting at crime scenes. Walton also advises the department on criminal law, procedures, and all public-facing matters, from use of force situations and mass shootings to release of body camera footage.
“My ‘why’ is I always like to see people at their best,” Walton said. “Coming from New York especially, growing up as an inner-city kid, I recognize law enforcement is needed, they are important to our ability to be safe as a community, and they need to be supported … internally. I want to provide my perspective from not only being a former prosecutor but from my lens as a person of color. [I want to be] helpful so officers are the best versions of themselves.”
Walton said her dual perspective as a former prosecutor and police adviser informs her public safety-first platform as DA. Out of the three candidates, she is the least concerned with the office’s lack of resources—”Coming from humble beginnings, you tend to make do with what you’ve got,” she said—but plans to fully audit the office’s operations to find ways to ensure violent offenses take priority on the courthouse calendar.
Like Shekita, Walton has suggested creating a specialized unit for violent offenses to get them fast-tracked through the court system so that victims and the accused can get justice more quickly. Also similar to Shekita, she proposed convening what she called a Youth Advisory Council to bring in diverse perspectives on how to tackle juvenile crime. Finally, Walton said, she wants to assign assistant DAs as liaisons to the different law enforcement agencies across Wake County in order to know more about what’s going on in those agencies, identify issues or patterns, and address problems before they become full-blown crises.
“But also it would allow for the ADA to make sure they are doing what they can to support law enforcement agencies’ efforts to keep their respective communities safe,” Walton said. “Things going on in Holly Springs [are] different from Raleigh, and I want each locale to feel like they have a voice in what happens in our courthouse.”
In the last four decades, only two district attorneys have served Wake County: Freeman and Willoughby, her predecessor. No matter what they think of the job Freeman has done over the past decade, local court watchers—activists, defense attorneys, members of the judiciary—seem largely to agree that the next district attorney will need to make sweeping administrative changes.
The turnover—14 of 43 prosecutors quit in 2021, for instance—is a problem. The office has also drawn criticism for a perceived lack of diversity. News reports and courthouse workers suggest new assistant district attorneys need more comprehensive training to evaluate cases and prosecute them swiftly; some prosecutors in the office have been accused of serious malpractice.
Courthouse insiders, for their part, are lining up behind Shekita. She has endorsements from Willoughby, as well as from many former judges.
Jackie Willingham, a local defense attorney who criticized Freeman’s office over its handling of a case Willingham was working on in which a prosecutor was accused of withholding evidence, stopped short of endorsing Shekita but said she would likely be the best choice.
“As a career prosecutor, she’s more aware of the issues actually facing the office,” Willingham said. “Having well-trained prosecutors who can actually move cases would be very important to ensuring our clients’ rights are protected.” Willingham also noted that, having handled “really horrific” cases, Shekita has the perspective to know “what they need to go hard after and what is more of a societal issue, crimes that are charged that don’t harm anybody.”
For Dawn Blagrove, the executive director of Emancipate NC, a nonprofit dedicated to dismantling structural racism and mass incarceration, and an outspoken critic of Freeman, it’s Shekita’s long tenure in the DA’s office that works against her.
“[The Wake DA’s office] is not a place that needs incremental change,” Blagrove said. “It is a place that needs radical transformation. Anyone that has been associated with that office is going to be dubious, in my opinion, about whether or not they have the political will or the desire to create the radical change that I believe is necessary to create a … more just judicial system in Wake County.”
Blagrove and others are also suspicious of Walton’s background with law enforcement. RPD, especially, has come under scrutiny while Freeman has been in office, from officer shootings to the department’s use of a problematic confidential informant and, more recently, a police officer fired for conducting illegal searches and RPD’s handling of the investigation into the highway crash that killed Tyrone Mason.
“[Walton] will have a lot of ground to cover in earning the respect or the trust of the people in her ability to police the police,” Blagrove said. “She’s not making very strong indications that she is willing to disassociate herself from the time that she spent there, or that she is explaining especially why she would be someone that we should trust in creating accountability for police officers. I just don’t have any trust in that.”
Walton is used to hearing this line of critique. She said the only way she knows to build and maintain trust is through transparency, and when officers’ actions are in question, she is committed to putting as much information out there—such as police reports and body camera footage—for the public to see and decide for itself.
“[There’s a] likelihood of there being some skepticism about the decisions made, especially if I’m the one at the helm,” she said. “I get that, I understand. I’m not asking people just to accept what I say. I want you to see what I see too, and I’m going to explain where I come out on it based on the law and facts. At that point, I’ve provided the information, and it’s going to be up to the community that receives it how it lands on them, but it will not be from a lack of transparency on my end.”
Nickel—with his pledge “to protect the people of Wake County from the federal government in the form of ICE” and his opposition to using cash bonds to hold people pretrial—”speaks to the fact that he might be a person who understands some of the real harms that these systems create and may have the wherewithal to change them,” Blagrove said. She said that for a candidate, she finds that encouraging.
But the legal community is less sure. Aside from the perception that he’s an independently wealthy outsider whose main interest is in holding an elected position, Nickel has no experience working in the Wake DA’s office.
But Nickel, who likely has the most name recognition in the race, not to mention the most cash on hand from fundraising from prior campaigns, pushes back on that characterization.
“You just have to look at what the job is,” he said. “[It’s] 100,000 cases a year … running a large office, and most importantly, it’s expanding it. It’s focusing on policy that keeps our community safe. … My goal is to do things for public safety, to keep our community safe, that we can show the rest of the state they can do, too. That’s how you set policy. … That’s what the job is, and what my focus will be.”
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