Op-Ed: Reflections on My Life as a Black Prosecutor

Submitted by Martha Holton Dimick. Martha Holton Dimick is a retired judge and candidate for Hennepin County Attorney. 

Martha Holton Dimick

When I was 13 years old in the late 60s there were race riots near my house in Milwaukee. Black people in my hometown and around the country were rising up against the housing discrimination and police brutality that we had been living with since we moved into cities in the early 20th Century. My family lived in fear of Milwaukee Police Chief Harold Breier. With my hair in an afro in imitation of Angela Davis, I told my father I would be going to a protest instead of going to school one day in early 1967. My dad was a stern man, a lawyer who represented poor Black people in the inner city. He took me aside and said “go to school, get an education, become part of the system, and make a difference from within. That’s how you change things.” The Holtons were some of the only Black kids in school that day.

Thirty years later in 1999, I was the only Black female attorney in the criminal division at Hennepin County. During my first few years of trials, judges and jurors frequently assumed I was the public defender. I was called a “sellout”, an “oreo” and every other synonym for race traitor that you can imagine. How can you work with police and against your own people? One time, I got a booking photo of a defendant who was being prosecuted for battery against a police officer. The officer had a scratch on his arm, the defendant was severely battered. I called the police officer into my office and told him I wouldn’t be charging his case. In retrospect, I should’ve gone further, but I was worried for my standing and job security as a young prosecutor. I weighed my father’s words against those of Thurgood Marshall: “You do what you think is right and let the law catch up.” Not charging the case was my compromise, and that was fairly progressive for the time.

In my 13 years as a prosecutor from 1999 to 2012, the paradigm shifted. The law, and especially the office, did catch up. As the crime wave of the 1990s faded out of memory, compassionate prosecution of lower-level offenses became the norm. The “public health approach” to prosecution that is so trendy now across the country has been in practice in Minnesota for quite some time. In Hennepin and Ramsey counties, we are even more progressive than the state at-large. And after George Floyd’s murder, we went further on bail reform, closed a juvenile detention facility, and further scrutinized pretextual traffic stops.

Since then, the paradigm has shifted again. In the last two years, after a sharp rise in shootings and homicides in my neighborhood in North Minneapolis, something interesting is happening. Some of the most passionate activists who I’ve known for years and used to see me as the enemy now thank me for my work as a judge and a prosecutor. Mothers who have children that have gone through the juvenile justice system tell me that there should be more consequences, not less. And less than a year and a half removed from a clear and indefensible police murder of a Black man, most of my Black neighbors voted to keep the police department. These shifts are not the result of hypnotism or campaigning, but a reaction to the real changes in the system and in our community. People who come in contact with the system know what’s happening in the real world.

I still do get called a “sellout” from time to time, though it generally comes out of the mouths of White millennials who haven’t been through the system. And I am more comfortable with my line of work than ever before. I realize that the conflict is not something to shy away from - it is my greatest gift to the profession and the community. I carry Thurgood Marshall’s words alongside those of my father. Do what you think is right, and make sure you keep your seat at the table if you intend on making real change.

Martha Holton Dimick is a retired judge and candidate for Hennepin County Attorney.