Government force must be limited to protecting people and their rights. Nothing else justifies it.
The justice system exists to answer real harm: violence, theft, fraud, and acts that put other people in danger against their will.
The further it drifts from that job, into managing peaceful people and generating revenue, the more it becomes the kind of threat it was built to stop.
What I believe
A crime needs a victim
Laws should be limited to violations of the rights of others through force or fraud, or deliberate actions that place others involuntarily at significant risk of harm.
I favor repealing all laws that create crimes without victims. Peaceful people are not criminals, and filling jail beds with them is not public safety.
Enforcement is not a revenue source
Safer communities come from law enforcement focused on protecting people and property, not from fines, fees, and forfeitures treated as a funding stream.
When government profits from enforcement, its incentives rot, and everybody can feel it.
And on forfeiture specifically: property should never be taken without a conviction. Seizing first and making the owner prove innocence later is punishment without trial.
The accused still have rights
I oppose overcharging defendants to intimidate them into plea bargains instead of giving them their day in court. A plea extracted by the threat of a stacked sentence is not justice, it is leverage.
I support the right of juries to judge not only the facts of a case, but the justice of the law itself.
Officials answer too
I support abolishing qualified immunity so law enforcement and prosecutors who break the law under color of law face real accountability for misconduct, wrongful convictions, and other acts of injustice.
A badge or a title should never be a shield against the same law everyone else lives under.
I oppose the death penalty
A government powerful enough to kill its own citizens will sometimes kill an innocent one, and there is no correcting that error.
It is also the expensive option: a 2025 Indiana analysis put the average death penalty trial at about $290,000, roughly eight times the roughly $36,000 cost of a life-without-parole trial.
Life without parole protects the public without handing the state the power of life and death.
What I will do on the Council
Honest scope: the Council does not write criminal law, prosecute cases, or run the sheriff’s office. What it does is fund them, and funding decisions are policy decisions whether anyone admits it or not:
- Scrutinize sheriff, jail, and court budgets in public: what is the county paying for, and who is it being used on
- Ask, on the record, how much of our jail and court cost is driven by victimless offenses and pre-trial holds instead of real danger to the public
- Oppose budgets built on expected fines, fees, and forfeitures, and demand seizure and forfeiture reporting be public and complete
- Use this seat to press Indianapolis for real reform: repeal of victimless crime laws, an end to qualified immunity, and an end to civil asset forfeiture without a conviction
Justice that protects rights is worth funding. Force aimed at peaceful people is not, and I will not vote to pay for it.
No coercion. No extortion.