In the summer of 2020, millions of protesters nationwide took to the streets after George Floyd died with his neck underneath the knee of a Minneapolis police officer who’d stopped him on suspicion of passing a counterfeit bill, calling for his mother with his last breath.
That included Athens, where some protesters were met with tear gas late at night. A couple weeks later, thousands more gathered downtown under the watchful eye of the National Guard to rally against the criminal justice system. It was the culmination of the Black Lives Matter movement.
That was the environment in which Deborah Gonzalez was first elected district attorney for the Western Circuit, during a campaign conducted largely through Zoom and social media in the pre-vaccine days of the COVID-19 pandemic. It’s no wonder voters wanted change.
And she had to fight to even get that far. Incumbent Ken Mauldin’s resignation and Gov. Brian Kemp’s refusal to appoint a replacement triggered an obscure state law pushing the election back two years. The Georgia Supreme Court eventually ordered a special election to move forward in November 2020.
Given the times and Athens’ political leanings, it was no surprise that Gonzalez won that race on the strength of promises to reform what she described as a racist good ol’ boy system, to support marginalized communities, and to redirect resources toward addressing the root causes of crime. Almost immediately, state Republicans pounced, setting up a commission with the power to remove “rogue prosecutors” who refused to send low-level drug offenders to jail. Some Oconee County residents wanted to secede from the circuit. The pressure mounted when a Venezuelan national was accused of murdering a white Athens college student, sparking a nationwide backlash among conservatives against immigration policies from the Biden administration all the way down to the Athens-Clarke County government.
At the same time, more information was coming to light: Prosecutors were leaving Gonzalez’s office in droves. Then more left. Then more. Then judges started calling out their replacements for basic legal errors like failing to turn over evidence during discovery or failing to contact victims about plea deals. Her office lost several high-profile cases, including some she tried herself. Gonzalez blamed it on everyone else—her former employees, the judges, the police for not giving her good enough evidence, the mayor and commission for not giving her more money, even the public defender’s office. Crime rose during the pandemic, and even though it started to recede in 2023, the perception of high crime remained. Slowly, putting an entertainment lawyer with no criminal justice experience—even one committed to reform—in charge of prosecuting felonies started to seem like maybe not such a good idea, even to some liberals.
But who could beat her, and how? Running to the right in a Democratic primary would be an uphill battle. And given the partisan leanings of the circuit, a Republican would likely be doomed. In the end, a political newcomer named Kalki Yalamanchili stepped up to run as an independent, requiring him to gather thousands of signatures to put his name on the ballot, unburdened by an R next to his name.
Throughout the campaign, Yalamanchili insisted the position should be a nonpartisan one. He accused Gonzalez of numerous missteps, while telling voters that he had the connections to restaff the office and the experience to successfully prosecute serious crimes. He also countered her message of reform by promising to utilize accountability courts so that defendants suffering from mental illness or substance abuse issues would get the treatment they need.
Gonzalez, meanwhile, ran as a partisan progressive Democrat, tapping into Kamala Harris’ slogan, “We’re not going back.” She hammered him on abortion, pointed to the hundreds of thousands of dollars he took from Republican donors, cited her ceiling-shattering status as Georgia’s first Latina DA, and accused him of being a part of the same good ‘ol boy network that had tried to thwart her at every turn. (That’s a charge that may have stuck better were Yalamanchili not the dark-skinned son of Indian immigrants.) In addition, an endorsement from Mayor Kelly Girtz—who said he agreed with Gonzalez’s philosophy, but that her office was nonfunctional, leaving defendants to rot in jail while awaiting trial—gave Democrats cover to break party ranks.
When Oconee County posted the first results on the evening of Nov. 5, it looked like Yalamanchili had spent half a million dollars for nothing. His support was virtually identical to independent James Chafin, the former Mauldin deputy who faced Gonzalez in a 2020 runoff after Mauldin’s heir apparent, Democrat Brian Patterson, was eliminated.
Later that night, when Clarke County results started to pour in, it became apparent that Yalamanchili had won running away with about three quarters of the vote in red-leaning Oconee and half the vote in blue-leaning Clarke. More than 12,000 Harris voters also cast their ballots for Yalamanchili.
At a watch party at Big Dogs on the River attended by a bipartisan group of about 100, Yalamanchili was nearly in tears as he thanked parents and his wife, Caitlyn, for supporting him through the campaign even though she had just recovered from breast cancer.
“It wasn’t fair for me to ask you to do it, but I think you knew this was something I had to do to be able to look at myself in the mirror,” he said.
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