Lohra Miller seeks re-election as Salt Lake County District Attorney

WEST JORDAN — Lohra Miller is proud of some of the things she's accomplished in the two years she has been Salt Lake County District Attorney and said she is running for a second term because she's passionate about finishing certain projects and taking on a new, wide-ranging effort to revamp the county's criminal justice system.

She announced her candidacy at the Children's Justice Center, surrounded by supporters such as Utah Attorney General Mark Shurtleff, former U.S. Attorney for Utah Brett Tolman and victim advocate Ed Smart.

Miller later sat down with the Deseret News to outline her plans.

During her two years as district attorney, Miller has created special teams to handle domestic violence, driving under the influence and, more recently, elder abuse.

"We've seen a vast improvement in how we handle domestic violence cases," she said. "The office used to have a 70 percent dismissal rate for domestic violence cases, but we've changed that to a 70 percent conviction rate."

The DUI team, aided by federal grant money, is heading for a weeklong seminar on how to create a DUI court program. And Miller has high hopes for the elder abuse team.

She also is enthusiastic about another project, an "Early Case Resolution" program, for which she received a different federal grant. It is intended to bring police, prosecutors, legal defenders, court officials, parole agents and pretrial services to work together in a streamlined way. Cases would be screened quickly; discovery material would be provided to defense attorneys electronically; people charged with crimes would be well-informed about their cases and court dates, and resolutions for low-level felonies could be reached within as few as 30 days.

Miller said her office already has support from other agencies because they see the savings in money, employee time and other resources that could result.

The resolution also could be good for the person who commits a less serious felony.

"People in our criminal justice system are largely people who have made mistakes," she said. "They have committed a crime and they must be held accountable, but we have to be careful in the way we treat them in the system so we don't create a criminal."

Miller said a study of the 75 largest counties in the U.S. showed that Salt Lake County had a 40 percent "failure to appear" statistic, which means that nearly half the people who are supposed to show up for court do not do so. That was double the "failure to appear" statistics for the next worst county in the study.

That isn't surprising, Miller said, since there are two obvious indicators of whether people will make it to court: they have not done so in the past or they have been let out of jail early due to overcrowding.