ANN ARBOR, MI – A second Democratic candidate for Washtenaw County prosecutor has emerged.

Arianne Slay, an Ann Arbor senior assistant city attorney, said she’ll run for the seat in 2020.

Slay, 39, worked as an assistant county prosecutor from 2008 to 2017 before taking a job with the city. She said longtime Washtenaw County Prosecutor Brian Mackie doesn’t intend to seek re-election.

Mackie, first elected in 1993, did not respond to requests for comment.

“I have a lot of respect for Mr. Mackie,” Slay said, adding he took a chance on hiring her when she had very little legal experience.

She’s now been a prosecutor for more than a decade.

“I’m a career prosecutor, so I have dedicated my life to public service," Slay said.

Eli Savit, a 36-year-old Ann Arbor native, announced last week he also is running for the seat in 2020.

Savit is Detroit Mayor Mike Duggan’s senior legal counsel and has no experience as a prosecutor.

Savit pledges to reform prosecution in Washtenaw County if elected, saying it’s time to end the era of mass incarceration. He wants to create a more progressive prosecutor’s office that prioritizes rehabilitation over punishment, he said.

Slay said she and Savit have some similar ideas, though they don’t agree on everything.

She agrees more rehabilitation programs are needed, but she doesn’t think the county has a mass incarceration problem with a prison commitment rate of about 16% for felons.

“We have a recidivism problem,” she said. “A recidivism problem, in my opinion, translates to a lack of community collaboration. We are not providing the right support for our offenders.”

Slay wants to bring a renewed sense of collaboration to the prosecutor’s office, working closely with partners in community mental health, housing agencies and substance abuse treatment programs to help people who keep ending up in jail.

“We need to circle the wagons and figure it out together,” she said.

People suffering from mental illness or substance abuse crises shouldn’t be in jail if they’re non-violent offenders, she said.

A Chicago native, Slay moved to Ann Arbor at age 6 and graduated from Pioneer High in 1997.

She and her husband Sean, a fifth-grade teacher at Carpenter Elementary, live in Ypsilanti Township and have two children.

Slay earned a law degree from Michigan State University in 2005 and then worked as a community corrections program coordinator through Washtenaw County Trial Court.

Her work there, she said, involved everything from auditing substance abuse treatment to supervising offenders, trying to get them out of jail and into community programs.

“If they were considered a low risk for harm to another person, then they could come out and have kind of a probation-like service and I would supervise them in the community,” she said, adding she worked to try to get them jobs and help move their lives forward.

Slay currently oversees criminal prosecutions and traffic tickets in Ann Arbor’s 15th District Court, handles negligence and other lawsuits brought against the city, advises the city’s police and fire departments and works with the city’s sobriety court, veterans court, street outreach court and mental health court.

She also provides legal support for the city’s human rights and police oversight commissions.

Earlier this year, Slay helped the city come up with a new approach to prosecuting trespassers, with a goal of better connecting offenders with supportive resources, which can include help with literacy, substance abuse, mental health, housing or food.

Slay said she loves her job at the city, and that it’s given her new insights she hopes to bring back to the county.

“I think I can bring balance to the prosecutor’s office,” she said, adding it’s the prosecutor’s job to protect the community by holding offenders accountable in a manner that’s just and equitable.

She said she’s running as an experienced prosecutor who values diversity and independent, creative thinking.

Knowing when to seek incarceration versus a term of community supervision requires experience, Slay said.

“It requires not only knowledge of what the legislators put in front of us for sentencing guidelines and maximums and minimums, and having that experience as to what you know the court is likely to do, but also to know about the available community programs, to provide the scaffolding for the offenders to be successful,” she said.

Slay said she’s worked in all the district courts in Washtenaw County, as well as circuit court.

“I have done countless jury trials, bench trials, you name it,” she said. “I ran the domestic violence unit for over six years.”

Specialty programs like the women’s court and drug court in 14B District Court and the sobriety court and mental health court in 15th District Court have been successful and life-changing for the people who go through them, Slay said.

There needs to be more of those types of programs, and they need more funding, she said.

“What we do need is treatment courts in the felony courts. Washtenaw County has none,” Slay said. “And I am completely committed to working in a collaborative method with the courts, with the probation department, which would be the Michigan Department of Corrections in that case, and our community partners to get those started.”

Slay said she realized she wanted to be a prosecutor during a public defender internship as a law student.

“I realized that one prosecutor could do so much good compared to 100 defense attorneys,” she said. “It’s important to have balance on both sides of the podium, but if you could stop injustice from going forward, you could change a lot.”

Another one of her passions, she said, is police training. She’s a certified instructor through the Michigan Commission on Law Enforcement Standards and teaches at the Washtenaw Police Academy, as well as in-house with Ann Arbor police.

The topics she covers range from search and seizure to how to admit evidence.

“If you are teaching the police the right way to police from the beginning, then you are changing someone’s life,” she said.

Slay said she appreciated the opportunity to learn from Mackie, and one of the things she took from the experience was respecting victims who are willing to come forward and speak about difficult matters.

“And I understand through working in his office that crime affects not just the victims, but it affects the offenders and it affects their entire family, and it reverberates through our community,” she said.

“I understand it’s not just one file in a stack of 50 on your desk that day. I understand that that is the most important thing going on in someone’s life,” she said. “And if you have 50 of those files, that’s 50 reverberations … and sometimes that can be generational. And so the work that you do as a prosecutor is very important.”

Slay said she wants to maintain that level of integrity for the prosecutor’s office.

“But I will not be the same prosecutor as Mr. Mackie. There will be policy changes, certainly. The focus will be more on individual cases, as opposed to blanket policies,” she said.

“The time I’ve had at the city … I’ve had the opportunity to think outside the box a little bit in terms of resolutions and being able to look at each defendant as an individual,” she said.

As an example, she said, it can be a vicious cycle of poverty for someone caught driving with a suspended license.

“You have one ticket that you can’t pay and then your license is suspended, and then there’s late fees and it compounds, and it continues to get worse,” she said.

“And then when you find yourself where you have to drive to get to work, and then you get pulled over again and you now have misdemeanor charges … it gets worse from there.”

Ann Arbor has been proactive when dealing with those types of cases in court, looking for community-service resolutions, rather than just payment-plan resolutions, Slay said, recalling one offender who had several tickets and was struggling with literacy.

“I’ll make you a deal,” Slay said she told the man, asking him to spend two hours working with Washtenaw Literacy for every ticket.

“The cool part is that I heard back from him months later saying that he had continued to go to Washtenaw Literacy and he was doing much better, so at the end of that he was able to have his case dismissed,” she said. “It worked great. It was a good resolution.”