DA Peavy looks to 2025
District Attorney Dee Peavy puts cases involving child sex abuse at the top of her priority list for 2025, followed by drugs cases, she said in an interview following her Jan. 2 swearing-in at the Young County Courthouse.
Enterprise: Can you give us an update on how everything’s going and what your priorities are for 2025.
Ms. Peavy: For 2025, it’s not unlike all the other years. We have some serious cases that we need to address. As you know, the sexual assaults of children take priority as far as being set up for trial over other cases. We have many of those cases that we are working on.
And of course, our drug problem, it’s always there, and it hasn’t gotten any better due to the border situation. We’ve seen Fentanyl in Stephens and Young Counties, and that’s alarming to me considering how deadly that is. I would say that our priorities are those offenses that create danger to our communities.
Certainly the illegal drug trafficking has - it’s just torn apart the fabric of so many communities, and especially our rural communities that have suffered greatly from those kinds of things.
Our law enforcement has been outstanding in aggressively pursuing those offenders and we deal with them in the same way we deal with other offenders. We seek justice. But also we try to send a message by aggressively prosecuting them so that people know that we’re not going to tolerate that sort of thing in our community. That it’s unacceptable.
Enterprise: You got some money from Senate Bill 22 last year, how did that help?
Ms. Peavy: The SB 22 has been just a godsend for rural prosecutors’ offices because we are always strapped for resources. So I cannot thank our legislators enough for those sorts of resources. I hope that they will continue to recognize the situation with rural prosecutors. I know that [Rep.] David Spiller is very aware and he stays in tune with the problems facing rural communities.
Enterprise: As far as your caseload goes, what is the trend versus last year?
Ms. Peavy: We were very busy in the last half of 2024 and I anticipate that we will continue to be just as busy in the first half of 2025. We were trying to clear out the cases, which would pose a conflict for Judge Gregory. And we’ve really done a great job on that. Our disposition rates have been just amazing for the last few months. We still have some cases remaining, which are conflict cases for Judge Gregory and we will have a visiting judge – Judge Bristow – assigned in order to resolve those cases.
As far as the caseload, it continues to get larger every year. We’ve had some really large dockets, what we call rocket dockets, and we are continuing to have some of those set for visiting judges and Judge Bristow and Judge Gregory.