SPENCER MERRIWEATHER'S CHALLANGE

Last year, Charlotte registered its most homicides in 26 years and a dramatic surge in gun violence. The district attorney, the first person of color to hold the position, has adjusted to combat the spike—and called on North Carolina to recognize that criminal justice in our growing cities can’t be done the old way anymore

- GREG LACOUR

WE TAKE THE ELEVATOR to the basement. “Now, these are closed files,” says Spencer Merriweather. “The open files are spread throughout the office.” We disembark, and Merriweather opens the door to the archives, what you might call the Hall of Shelves and Boxes. You can’t see the end of it.

“I mean, this is what we’re dealing with,” he tells me, as we step between cliff faces of cardboard boxes jammed with paper. We pass some of the greatest hits of the Charlotte district attorney’s office—here’s the 16-box collection from the trial of serial killer Henry Louis Wallace, the “Taco Bell Strangler,” in the 1990s; and here’s the Rae Carruth case, 19 boxes that have filled space on the shelves since the ex-Carolina Panther’s murder-conspiracy conviction in 2001. Carruth finished his sentence in 2018, but the paperwork remains in prison down here—where, on a drizzly February morning, an industrial dehumidifier runs in one corner to offset a leak from the ceiling.

“Now what happens is, we’ll send some of these and put them on microfiche or send them someplace,” says Merriweather, the district attorney in Mecklenburg County since 2017. “But we’re all based on paper here. For most court systems, this is highly unusual. If you go to any of our ADAs’ desks, they’ve got files and files of this stuff. You go to California, everybody’s walking around with iPads.”