Brewbaker, a third-generation automotive dealer and former teacher, served one term in the state House and two in the state Senate, refusing to run for easy reelection in 2018 because he insisted on honoring a self-term-limit pledge.
Both party primaries in March featured multicandidate fields in which no candidate won a clear-cut majority, thus necessitating primary runoffs on April 16. In the Democratic race, candidates Anthony Daniels and Shomari Figures are running attack ads against each other, and on the Republican side, lawyer Caroleene Dobson is attacking Brewbaker unmercifully. Brewbaker, though, isresponding in kind.
One Dobson attack hit close to home for me. She blasted Brewbaker for having worked to “allow parole for people serving life sentences.” She made it sound as if he isn’t tough on crime. He answered that he was merely trying to correct a flaw whereby some convicts were serving life sentences not for violent crimes but merely for “three Class C misdemeanors.”
I spent copious time publicizing the effort nationally, which resulted in copycat legislation in dozens of states. Unfortunately, a large number of those states overshot the target, ignoring Livingston’s stricture that the no-mercy penalty should apply only torecidivists.