She plans a fundraiser in a week with Colon Willoughby as a named host.  In addition to her length of service to the office, the backing of Willoughby who hired Shekita as a junior prosecutor in the early 2000s and was himself the elected District Attorney for Wake County until his resignation in 2014 puts Shekita in a strong position.

As the special victims’ unit lead, Shekita has lead the time that prosecutes Wake County’s child-victim (child abuse, child pornography) and sex-offense (rape, sexual assaults, and sex offender) cases.  She has also prosecuted other high profile and serious offenses, including capital murder cases.

Shekita’s campaign appears to be run by Brad Crone, a Raleigh-based campaign consultant

Her sole announced opponent in the Democratic primary right now is Sherita Walton, whose campaign appears to be run by Maven Strategies, campaign consultants who previous supported outgoing DA Lorrin Freeman’s election efforts.

I’ll post updates here under the tag #wakeDA

In 2022, I raised roughly $140,000. In addition, outside groups spent, if I recall correctly, another $300,000 to $400,000 to essentially support my campaign.  Some of them, like the ACLU of North Carolina, did issue mailers to targeted voters.  Others, like the Color of Change PAC, did issue mailers and door knocking.  Law prohibits the coordination of the campaign – i.e., me – and outside groups, so I could not direct them what to do, nor could they ask me what I would have wanted them to do.  

The bulk of fundraising came from people I knew or had life-long friendships with, including family and college friends.  People with higher net-worth friends can raise more money.  While campaign consultants will tell the candidate to “dial for dollars” by cold calling lists of people who have given, in my experience it’s hard to convince someone to give if you don’t know them personally and especially if they don’t live in Wake County.

People who have had prior experience either serving in or running in elective office will have a much easier time raising money.  In some cases, they may have the money already raised, in which case they will be permitted to use that toward a run for DA.  In other cases, they will have built up friendships with people who have a habit of giving to a political campaign and have the money to do so.  And so asking those people to give for a run for Wake County District Attorney will be relatively easy, and much easier than cold-calling.

The money having been raised, everything else is much easier. 

Where does the money go?  A treasurer.  The first thing I did was to hire a treasurer, whose task is to simply make sure the campaign is compliant with state campaign finance laws and file the campaign finance reports.  The expense was relatively low – under $5,000 over the whole campaign – and reduced stress on me to do that work myself or the worry of relying on a volunteer.  Since I was running for an office whose whole mission is integrity, the last thing I wanted was even an innocent campaign finance violation.

A campaign manager.  For most of my campaign, I had a professional campaign manager.  A volunteer simply will not work since, unless a very special person, volunteers will treat what is crucial work as optional.  Since I had to keep working at my day job of being a criminal defense lawyer, I could not simply spend time each week managing my campaign and running for office.  Given the election will be next Spring when the Democratic Party primary takes place, you would expect roughly $60,000 to $80,000 to go to a campaign manager over the next year.

The other expenses then will be signs, door tags for canvassing, some bumper stickers, social media/internet advertising.  Radio and television ads are unlikely expenditures for anyone but the most well-funded campaign.

The best funded campaign may have two or three paid staff members, the value of which is fantastic, especially if the candidate himself or herself does not need to hold a job during the course of the campaign.

I’ll post updates here under the tag #wakeDA

As I wrote on Facebook, we all owe Lorrin gratitude for the more than a decade she has served as District Attorney following service as the Clerk of Court.  

When I ran against Lorrin in 2022, I had some sharp policy disagreements that I expressed during the campaign.  But during this term, the office under Lorrin’s leadership has worked diligently to get through the backlog that was created during COVID with a very large number of homicide cases having been resolved by trial or plea.  The office has also not sought the death penalty beyond the Brandon Hill case which had already previously been declared capital.

Sherita Walton, a former Wake County Assistant District Attorney and current lawyer for the Raleigh Police Department, has announced her candidacy.  A current assistant district attorney with the District Attorney’s Office is in the formative stages, but has not yet formally announced.  Observers think another three or four candidates will run for the Democratic Party primary, which, given that Wake County leans heavily for the Democrats, would effectively make the primary the election itself.

I’m glad that Lorrin has announced her desire not to seek the office again so that we can have a vigorous and open election about who should be the top law enforcement officer for the County.

I’ll post updates here under the tag #wakeDA

“Hashing is a powerful and pervasive technique used in nearly every examination of seized digital media. The concept behind hashing is quite elegant: take a large amount of data, such as a file or all the bits on a hard drive, and use a complex mathematical algorithm to generate a relatively compact numerical identifier (the hash value) unique to that data. Examiners use hash values throughout the forensics process, from acquiring the data, through analysis, and even into legal proceedings. Hash algorithms are used to confirm that when a copy of data is made, the original is unaltered and the copy is identical, bit-for-bit. That is, hashing is employed to confirm that data analysis does not alter the evidence itself. Examiners also use hash values to weed out files that are of no interest in the investigation, such as operating system files, and to identify files of particular interest.” Richard P. Salgado, “Fourth Amendment Search and the Power of the Hash,” 119 Harvard Law Review Forum 38 (2006)

The software or employees and volunteers identify potential CSAM visually or by checking the hash values of uploaded or shared CSAM against a database of known child porn. A “hash value” is an alphanumeric string that serves to identify an individual digital file as a kind of “digital fingerprint.” Although it may be possible for two digital files to have hash values that “collide,” or overlap, it is unlikely that the values of two dissimilar images will do so. United States v. Cartier, 543 F.3d 442, 446 (8th Cir.2008).

Hash values are relatively short – usually 256 or less bit length.  Common hashing algorithms include MD5 or SHA-1.

The North Carolina Court of Appeals has recognized the reliability of hashing, even using outdated hashing algorithms such as SHA-1 which was developed in the 1990s, broken in 2005, and deprecated by Microsoft in 2020. State v. Gerard, 790 S.E.2d 592 (N.C. Ct. App. 2016).