How SC’s new US attorney plans to curb gun deaths, corruption and environmental crimes

Adair Boroughs, South Carolina’s new U.S. attorney who was tapped by President Joe Biden, said her top crime-fighting priority will be to address gun violence in the Palmetto State.

“The job right now is gun violence,” Boroughs, 42, told The State newspaper in an interview at her Main Street office in downtown Columbia.

Gun deaths have grown sharply in South Carolina in recent years.

In 2016, the state reported 889 gun deaths. That number grew to 1,130 in 2020, the latest year for which statistics from the S.C. Department of Health and Environmental Control were available.

Almost half of the state’s 1,130 gun deaths in 2020 — 527, or more than one a day — were killings, as opposed to firearm suicides or accidents, DHEC reported.

Previous U.S. attorneys in the state have made gun violence a priority — in accordance with directives from the Department of Justice — and Boroughs said her emphasis involves working with communities to come up with evidence-based solutions that will have an impact on the actual level of violence.

“We aren’t just doing something just to do something,” she said. “It’s about our strategic enforcement of these laws to actually lower the amount of violence.”

Boroughs is the sixth person to serve in the state’s top federal prosecutor’s office since 2019, a job that handles prosecutions of crimes investigated by federal agencies such as the FBI, IRS, Secret Service, Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms and the Drug Enforcement Administration.

The office’s high-profile, crime-fighting initiatives frequently make news, from its successful prosecutions of two top officers of the now-defunct SCANA electric utility to its leading a joint state-federal dog-fighting task force last month that rescued 305 dogs.

Next month, the office’s prosecutors will put former banker Russell Laffitte, an associate of disbarred attorney Alex Murdaugh, on trial for fraud charges in Charleston.

Boroughs took office in July after being nominated by Biden in June, and has since kept a low public profile.

Raised in rural Barnwell County, Boroughs was educated at Furman University and Stanford Law School.

A Democrat, she had been in private law practice after losing a congressional bid in 2020 to longtime U.S. Rep. Joe Wilson, R-Springdale.. Her husband, Bryan Boroughs, whom she met at Furman, is also a lawyer and is currently running for a seat on Richland County Council.

Boroughs is the second woman nominated by a president to be South Carolina’s U.S. attorney in the office’s history.

Sherri Lydon, who became U.S. Attorney in 2018 after being nominated by former President Donald Trump, vacated the post in 2019 to become a federal judge, was the first.

“In law enforcement, having a woman at the top is more rare, but it’s really important for the community,” Boroughs said. “I’m a big believer in diverse perspectives, and that’s the way I lead. It’s not just because it’s something that makes me feel good and fuzzy. It’s because the data shows you make better decisions when you have different perspectives at the table.”

Groups that are diverse in their makeup, Boroughs added, make fewer factual mistakes and are more likely to correct mistakes when they make them.

In addition to gun violence, Boroughs said her other priorities include areas where federal laws are pretty much “the only protection” people have. She said those include civil rights violations, public corruption, environmental justice, complex financial and white collar crimes.

“South Carolina is one of the two states in the country that doesn’t have a state hate crime law, so if we want to vindicate those rights, we have to do it at the federal level,” she said.

Legislative efforts to pass hate crimes legislation failed in the State House this year after a House-backed proposal stalled in the Senate.

In the past week, the U.S. attorney’s office created an environmental justice coordinator post. That person will oversee enforcement of all environmental violations, which, Boroughs said occur disproportionately in “low-income and minority neighborhoods, not just rich white neighborhoods.”

“We care about all our communities here, and we are going to be enforcing environmental laws across the board,” she said.

The office also will aggressively seek out civil and criminal civil rights cases “to make sure those cases are coming to us,” Boroughs said.

“The community needs to know we are willing to put resources here,” she said. “It’s something big on my list.”

And the office will go after cyber criminals, Boroughs said.

“We’re seeing a lot more criminals use cryptocurrency to put money out of the grasp of law enforcement,” she said. “We have federal partners who have the ability to seize that currency, and sometimes our state and local partners don’t.”

Curbing gun deaths No. 1 priority for Boroughs

Gun violence is already confronted statewide by the state’s 16 regional solicitors, or elected prosecutors, and nearly all of the 46 sheriff’s departments and numerous police departments.

But Boroughs said her office, which prosecutes violations of federal gun laws, is in a unique position to be a leader in working with local communities to come up with and implement various strategies to reduce gun violence around the state, she said.

Some of those efforts, including the program Project Safe Neighborhoods, are characterized by getting buy-in from community leaders, law enforcement agencies, parents and even grandparents, a strategy developed by criminologist David Kennedy, a professor at New York’s John Jay College of Criminal Justice, Boroughs said.

Boroughs said that law enforcement and communities can also work to take “high-impact players off the streets” by getting them to reform or, if they don’t, arresting them when they commit offenses.

That is a wrinkle of an already existing informal program whereby some South Carolina law enforcement agencies turn some gun crimes over to the U.S. Attorney’s office for prosecution, since federal gun laws are much tougher, and can bring far longer prison sentences than state laws.

Columbia has a Project Safe Neighborhoods program and Greenville just started one, Boroughs said.

“It’s a full-on partnership with state and locals,” she said. “Locals know what’s actually happening on the ground ... and you do it one neighborhood at a time. It’s not something you do statewide.”

There’s plenty of work to do in curtailing gun violence.

Through May, South Carolina had 12 mass shootings, where four or more people were killed or injured, according to the nationwide database Gun Violence Archive. Those shootings wounded more than 60 people and killed seven.

In Columbia, from January to Oct. 3, city police have reported 81 persons shot, including nine fatal.

Outside Columbia city limits, Richland County Sheriff Leon Lott said his department has investigated shootings that involve 88 victims, including 19 who died and 69 who were injured.

“She (Boroughs) said her top priority was gun violence, and I said that was our top priority too. It’s not only plaguing Richland County but the whole state,” said Lott, who has talked to Boroughs since she became U.S. attorney. “In federal courts, you get a lot more bang for the buck in prosecuting gun crimes.”

Hard-to-get prosecutor jobs

Some 150 people work for the South Carolina U.S. Attorney’s office, which when fully staffed has approximately 63 attorney positions, 74 full-time other staff and 13 contract staff, Boroughs said.

The Department of Justice classifies U.S. Attorney offices as small, medium, large and extra large.

The S.C. office is a large, in part, because South Carolina is one big district and the state isn’t split into two or more districts, Boroughs said. Its offices are in Columbia, Florence, Charleston and Greenville.

“We do work you can do nowhere else,” Boroughs said. “I started my career at (the Department of) Justice, and it was the best thing I ever did. I was in court arguing motions a month after I was licensed. The mission is great. You know you are saving lives and improving your community every day that you work.”

The mentoring program offered at the U.S. Attorney’s office is excellent, Boroughs said, and at some private law firms, “you will spend years before you actually get to stand up and talk in a courtroom. You’re going to do it immediately in this job. There’s no better place to learn the practice of law than the Department of Justice.”

There’s no shortage of prosecutor applicants, who typically have least three years’ experience, and a federal judge clerkship is a helpful credential, Burroughs said.

For a recent prosecutor’s vacant position, the office had 61 applications. The office now has two openings in the white collar crime prosecution section, she said.

Boroughs also has approval to hire a public relations officer to “tell the public stories about what we are doing.”

”The public doesn’t know what the U.S. Attorney’s office is doing by and large. A lot of people call me the attorney general,’’ Booughs said. “We have some incredible prosecutors doing incredible work and civil attorneys. A lot of this work is not getting the daylight it deserves.”

In the months since she took office, Boroughs said she has spent time meeting with state and law enforcement chiefs, including Attorney General Alan Wilson, State Law Enforcement Division Chief Mark Keel and Richland County Sheriff Lott, as well as numerous federal judges and magistrate judges.

“We had a good conversation, and I expressed to her my concerns about violent crime and talked about the benefits of what the U.S. Attorney’s office could bring,” Keel said. “Hopefully we can make a dent in it.”

Like Boroughs, Keel hails from Barnwell County.

“I told her we have to stick together. (There) aren’t too many people from Barnwell County who end up being chief of SLED and U.S. attorney,” Keel said.

Bill Nettles, South Carolina’s U.S. attorney from 2010 to 2016, said the office runs very well handling the gamut of federal crimes that come its way.

“All of that, you can prepare for. The hard part is handling the stuff you can’t prepare for, like a Dylann Roof,” said Nettles, referring to the convicted white supremacist who killed nine Black churchgoers, including a state senator, at a prayer meeting in a Charleston church in June 2015.

Roof ‘s case was prosecuted by the U.S. Attorney’s office. He was sentenced to death in 2017 by a federal jury after a trial in Charleston.

Boroughs said her office is up to handling whatever fate throws its way.

“We can take on whatever we need to take on to protect the public,” she said.