Arguing her case for a second term as Ogeechee Judicial Circuit district attorney, Daphne Totten submits that, since weathering a pandemic shutdown, her office, in cooperation with the courts, has largely eliminated a backlog of criminal cases and attained one of the 10 highest case closure rates among Georgia’s 51 judicial circuits.

The vast majority of those cases ended in convictions, most by guilty pleas.

“In my tenure as D.A., through March of this year, we have resolved over 4,500 cases, and when I say resolved, I mean that we have closed those cases through guilty pleas, jury trials and bench trials, and only about 2 or 3 percent of our cases actually go to trial. …,” Totten said in an interview. “Out of the 4,500 cases we’ve received, our overall conviction rate stands at over 99%.”

In jury trials, the conviction rate in the Ogeechee Circuit is 84%, which includes convictions for lesser offenses than those originally charged.

Totten, a prosecutor for almost 21 years, including the past three and a half years as elected D.A. of the four-county circuit, faces a Republican primary challenge from Robert Busbee, a Statesboro-based private practice attorney. This race appears on the Republican ballots in Bulloch, Effingham, Jenkins and Screven counties, concluding with the Tuesday, May 21, Election Day. A final week of early voting ends Friday, May 17.

When Totten was sworn in as district attorney at the end of December 2020, taking over from her former boss, Richard Mallard, who retired as district attorney that year, the D.A.’s Office staff totaled 27 employees, including 10 assistant district attorneys.

ARPA-added staff

Today, the staff numbers nearly 40 people, including 15 assistant district attorneys. But only one of the additional attorneys is actually a regular state-funded assistant D.A. When the circuit, through population growth, qualified for a fourth Superior Court judge, it also qualified for an eleventh assistant D.A., Totten explained.

But four more assistant D.A.’s, including one full-time and three counted as part-time, were added under American Rescue Plan Act grants of more than $800,000 a year the court circuit and D.A.’s office first applied for and received in 2022 and 2023 and have had continued, at reduced amounts, for 2024 and 2025.

With those ARPA grants, Totten has also employed two part-time investigators, a legal secretary, a courtroom technology engineer and an additional victim’s advocate.

The ARPA grants, federal money, were intended to help the courts recover from the COVID-19 pandemic, whose effects were in full force when Totten’s elected term began in January 2021. Under orders from the chief justice of the state Supreme Court, Georgia’s courts were closed to jury trials from late March 2020 until June 2021.

The local judges arranged for hearings and bench trials to be held by teleconferencing, and a few limited in-person proceedings were allowed. So some cases were concluded, Totten notes, but a backlog did develop. The ARPA-funded personnel have helped to clear it, she said.

“It enabled us to hire four additional attorneys to help us work through the backlog of cases that COVID-19 had created,” she said last week. “And so as we sit here today, I would say that we don’t have a backlog of cases, that we have been able to work through that backlog.

“The only exception to that would be that there are some serious, violent felonies that are still out there that need a jury trial, and the things that have delayed jury trials of serious, violent felonies are forensic testing at the GBI crime lab and not having that evidence,” Totten add.

Testing, such as for DNA evidence, always took a long time, and the GBI has continued to have staffing shortages, she notes.

“But … we’ve tried more homicide cases in the last three years than we’ve ever tried in my tenure in the office,” Totten said. By “tenure” she means also including her previous 18 years as an assistant district attorney, also with the Ogeechee Judicial Circuit D.A.’s Office.

Homicide stats

In her elected term as D.A., so far three and a half years, the office’s prosecutors have resolved 25 homicide cases circuit-wide, she reports, counting each victim as a “case.” Out of those cases, there has been one not-guilty verdict in Bulloch County and one not-guilty verdict in Jenkins County, she reports.

“In the other 23 cases, there has been someone that’s been found guilty of either murder or a lesser included offense of murder and they’re sitting behind bars right now,” Totten said. “And so, our overall conviction rate with homicides in Bulloch County is 93%. In Effingham, for example, it’s 100%,” she said.

But the circuit-wide homicide conviction rate is 92%, she said. In a majority of the cases one or more defendants were found guilty of murder, resulting in sentences of life or life without parole. But because guilty verdicts for lesser-included charges are also counted, the total includes, for example, a well-known case in which a defendant originally charged with murder was found guilty of involuntary manslaughter and received a 10-year sentence.

Busbee has a different way of looking at this, as will be seen in an article about him appearing Tuesday, May 14.

Many of Totten’s statistics were included in a slideshow presentation she gave the Bulloch County Board of Commissioners in early April along with her office’s budget request. This year’s request for $716,301 from the Bulloch County government included about a $90,000 increase over the previous year, and $40,000 of that was because she asked that the counties restore funding lost to a 50% reduction in federal Victims of Crime Act grants.

She is also moving to have the previously ARPA-funded victim services person become a county-funded position, as one of five victim services personnel employed through the D.A.’s office.

A 5% pay raise for county-funded D.A.’s office employees was also included.

With the counties paying population-based shares, Bulloch taxpayers and a court fee collected here pay 48.28% of the total $1.624 million total counties-funded portion of the D.A.’s office budget. The four counties’ combined total is less that half the total funding, since the state pays most of the attorneys’ salaries.

‘Fully staffed’

Totten said she has limited most years’ requests for increased county funding to an annual 5% raise for non-state-funded personnel.

“We are one of the few D.A.’s offices in the state that has remained fully staffed during my term,” she  said. “Most D.A.’s offices and public defenders’ offices have battled 30% to 40% vacancies. That’s a problem that’s been going on statewide, so we’ve been fortunate to not have those types of vacancies here.”

With the current number of attorneys, she has two assigned to each courtroom, so they work together to prepare a case and take it to trial.

“That’s enabled us to show up, get the work done and keep the cases moving and work through the backlog and also  make sure that we don’t get behind with the new cases that are coming in,” she said. “So I’m proud of that. I think we’ve managed our money well, we’ve managed our budget well, and we’ve been as fiscally conservative as possible.”

Also included in the presentation to counties was a chart showing that the D.A.’s office closed more criminal cases than it opened, cumulatively, in the last couple of years. In Bulloch County, prosecutors filed 1,337 cases but closed 1,713 in 2022; then filed 1,664 new cases and closed 1,659 in 2023. In Effingham county, 942 cases were filed and 1,275 closed in 2022; then 845 cases were filed and 1,100 closed in 2023.

Information in charts from the state Administrative Office of the Courts showed that the Ogeechee Judicial Circuit had the fifth-highest number of cases filed and disposed, per number of judges, in 2021, and the eighth-highest in 2022.

Originally from Tattnall County, Totten graduated from the University of Georgia and then from Mercer University’s Walter F. George School of Law. She worked with the Statesboro law firm that was then Edenfield, Cox, Bruce & Classens before joining the District Attorney’s Office in 2003.

Currently secretary of the District Attorneys Association of Georgia, she will become  its vice president this year, in line to serve as president in 2025.