Intense, sustained thunderstorms in Pennsylvania on April 29, featuring some of the mightiest winds ever reported in the region, made the morning of April 30 very messy in the Pittsburgh region. About 400,000 people suffered power outages, closing schools and daycares and workplaces. Hundreds of fallen trees and collapsed electrical lines shut down major roads and damaged so much property that one local insurance agent called the event “by far, the most widespread storm I’ve ever seen.”

And so it came as great relief to Pittsburgh public defender Lauren Leiggi when the judge in the Allegheny County courtroom in which she was working that morning showed considerable lenience to defendants running late for or entirely absent from their hearings. “He was very understanding, telling people to take their time and figure things out,” Leiggi said. “I had clients who couldn’t charge their phones, who were 90 minutes late because bus routes were affected, so it was reassuring.”

But just down the hallway, her colleagues reported very different treatment from judges. “There were courtrooms where they still expected people to be present by 9 or 9:15,” she said. “If they were late, a warrant was getting issued.”

Leiggi is now on the ballot to join this court, one of 22 people vying for eight seats on Allegheny County’s Court of Common Pleas. Leiggi is inspired, she told Bolts, to be the sort of jurist whose patience she so appreciated on that late-April morning.

“It’s about asking, ‘What can we do to make sure a person can reintegrate into society successfully?’” she said. “It’s a mindset of reducing incarceration in general, and not just using jail as the answer every time.”

Leiggi is not alone in this mindset; she’s one of the “Slate of Eight” candidates running for the court who are endorsed by local progressive groups seeking to unwind what they see as a longstanding culture of punishment in Allegheny County. 

This slate features candidates from backgrounds that tend to be underrepresented in the judiciary, with multiple current or former public defenders, a former social worker, a union lawyer, and a civil rights attorney. Only one has worked as a prosecutor, compared to at least seven of the 14 candidates who are not on the slate, according to Bolts’ review of their biographies.  

The groups backing the “Slate of Eight,” such as the Pennsylvania Working Families Party and Pittsburgh’s Alliance for Police Accountability, hope that people with these types of experiences would, as judges, be attuned to the issues faced by criminal defendants, from high bail to poor jail conditions. Their work matches nationwide efforts by progressives to place people with public defense experience on the bench, including through local elections, and to push against the usual dominance of prosecutors. 

Local police unions, which have tended to oppose criminal justice reforms, have endorsed at least five competing candidates in the Allegheny County race, four of whom are former prosecutors. 

The candidates face their first test next week, in the May 20 Democratic primary, which will be followed by a general election in November. 

All 22 candidates are running on a single ballot in the primary, and the top eight will move forward as the Democratic nominees. Six of the 22, including two of the “Slate of Eight” candidates, are also running in the GOP primary—a practice known as “cross-filing”—and are certain to make it to the general election. But Allegheny County leans blue, so the winners of next week’s Democratic primary will carry a clear advantage into November.

Law enforcement in the county has a long history of disproportionately targeting majority-Black neighborhoods, creating vast inequalities in arrests and prosecutions. Black people account for 12 percent of the county’s residents but roughly two-thirds of those detained in its jails.

These disparities are not, of course, a simple product of judicial discretion. Defendants have necessarily interacted with many other systems and offices—schools, police, and prosecutors, among others—by the time they stand before a judge at the Court of Common Pleas. But, at that moment, judges have substantial discretion to potentially alter a defendant’s course, so left-leaning advocates in Allegheny County want more scrutiny on them. 

“When we say we need less people in the jail, better outcomes for kids charged with crimes, for people to feel like their civil and human rights are respected—that all happens in the courtrooms,” said Tanisha Long, political director of the Pennsylvania abolitionist group Straight Ahead, who helped decide the “Slate of Eight” endorsements. “We need to also look at judges.”

Long told Bolts that she and local allies were drawn to candidates they believe would advance their aims of restricting cash bail, shortening terms of probation, and finding alternatives to incarceration, especially for children. 

The coalition did not demand that candidates sign any particular pledge. Still, the “Slate of Eight” candidates who agreed to interviews with Bolts said that their priorities were broadly in line with those expressed by representatives of the groups endorsing them. 

“A lot of times, judges have a really hard time putting themselves in the shoes of a litigant, and understanding how scary and overwhelming and traumatic that experience can be,” candidate Amy Mathieu, a civil rights attorney who says she is passionate about LGBTQ rights, told Bolts. “I want to be someone to make the courtroom safe for everyone.”

Craig Stephens, a “Slate of Eight” member who is currently serving as a lower-court judge, has participated in food and clothing drives that he says have deepened his understanding of why so many people experiencing poverty end up in court.

“They don’t have housing and they’re getting into situations where they don’t have proper treatment, and it’s leading into them getting caught up in the criminal justice system,” he said. “Incarceration is not the answer.”

Reform groups often make the case that the court system is unduly harsh toward poorer defendants, pointing in particular to the cash bail system. Matthew Rudzki, also a current lower-court judge in the county who features on the “Slate of Eight,” told Bolts, “I’m not perpetuating a two-tiered justice system, where if someone can’t afford to pay they get stuck in jail.”

Four of the eight “Slate of Eight” members did not respond to requests for interviews. Neither did the three police unions that handed out endorsements in these judicial elections, nor the candidates they endorsed. Overall, most candidates in the 22-person pool have campaigned on general commitments to fairness and justice, as opposed to highlighting any specific changes or political allegiances, keeping with the convention that judicial candidates seldom make firm policy promises.

A similar progressive slate, with similar backing, ran successfully the last time the Court of Common Pleas had a major election, in 2021, nabbing five of the nine seats up for grabs that year. 

None of those five victors has been assigned to the criminal division of the court, which local experts say has limited the impact of their wins on criminal justice policy. 

The 44 judges on this court elect a president judge, who assigns the others to various divisions. Those assignments, a court spokesperson told Bolts, are based on several factors: seniority, judges’ personal preferences, attrition, and the president judge’s own discretion. 

Reform activists say that expanding their presence on the criminal division, which covers 14 of the 44 seats, is their priority. They stress that they’re playing a long game: Building more power on the bench overall, they say, will improve their chances of gaining a foothold in the criminal division specifically. 

Notably, two of the “Slate of Eight” candidates, Quita Bridges and Alyssa Cowan, are current judges in the criminal division, having been appointed by Governor Josh Shapiro to fill vacancies in the last few months.

Still, the other, non-criminal divisions of the court—the civil, family, and “orphans” divisions—are important to reformers, too. Those courts cover a broad range of matters, from divorces to cases in which kids have been accused of crimes, to name changes and civil lawsuits. Several candidates running this year told WESA, a Pittsburgh public radio station, that they’re specifically seeking assignments outside of the criminal division.

Prior to 2021, local activists tell Bolts, Court of Common Pleas elections were dominated by endorsements of the Democratic Party, with judges vying for the backing of the local political establishment and law enforcement leaders.

The county’s Democratic Party this year has endorsed eight people running for the Court of Common Pleas, four of whom are in the “Slate of Eight” as well. Overall, five of the party-endorsed candidates are former prosecutors. (The county Republican Party told Bolts they’ve made no endorsements so far.)

There are more players in town these days, with left-leaning groups like the local Democratic Socialists of America chapter and the Working Families Party gaining influence in and around Pittsburgh over the last decade. Local progressives have celebrated recent victories in races for Pittsburgh mayor (Ed Gainey, who is up for re-election this year and facing a stiff primary challenge); for county executive (Sara Innamorato, who ran on a platform of racial and class justice); and for Pittsburgh’s seat in Congress (Summer Lee, part of the so-called congressional Squad). 

The left here has had setbacks, too—most notably in the 2023 failure of Matt Dugan, a reform-minded candidate for district attorney, to unseat local prosecutor Stephen Zappala, known for his staunch opposition to criminal justice reforms.

Miracle Jones, an advocate with 1Hood Power, an anti-racist Pittsburgh-based organization that hosted a candidate forum two years ago in the DA race between Zappalla and Dugan, turned her attention this year to the judicial elections, helping interview candidates for the “Slate of Eight” endorsements. She says judges are a key backstop to government overreach.

“When you have people elected to office who see you as a threat and your existence as a blight on the community, they’re not going to love you and see you as a human being,” Jones told Bolts. 

“When people do see you as a human being, it can look like people not going to jail for being five minutes late to court,” Jones continued. “People getting second and third chances.”