The Renegade Sheriffs: Interview with Ashley Powers

Sheriffs are pretty powerful in the United States. Each sheriff gets a certain amount of leeway in terms of what laws they enforce. For instance, if you have a nice sheriff in your town, you probably won’t have to pay a fine or go to jail if you’re caught jaywalking. And it may be comforting to know that the person enforcing the laws is human just like you; they understand and have the power to forgive human mistakes like anyone else.

But sometimes this sheriff’s power is overused, sometimes the boundary between the sheriff’s jurisdiction and the federal government’s jurisdiction is toed. This can lead to some controversial arrests, or unarrests: when sheriffs release people they think have done nothing wrong.

In 2016, Ashley Powers - a freelance journalist living in Washington DC - came across a group of sheriffs who had stepped right up to - and possibly over - this boundary. Constitutional sheriffs. Sheriffs who believe that they personally have the power to determine the Constitutionality of a law, and, from that, can decide whether to enforce it or not.

Powers saw a pattern here - a pattern between Constitutional sheriffs and the recently elected president: Donald Trump, who brought to his presidency the question of whether laws we’ve accepted as standard are actually just or not. And whether they should even be allowed to be enforced. The fundamental question became: how much legal power should different elected officials have?

Powers spent a year investigating these Constitutional sheriffs, and recently had a piece published in the New Yorker about the phenomenon, under the title ‘The Renegade Sheriffs.’ Aisha Tahir sat down with Powers last week to talk about her reporting.