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Longtime Montgomery County District Attorney Daryl Bailey is retiring, his office announced on Friday.
Bailey’s last day will be Tuesday, according to his office. He is expected to join a Montgomery-area college in some capacity, a source told APR.
Bailey has served in the Montgomery DA’s office since 1994 and has been district attorney since 2014. During that time, Bailey has prosecuted a number of high-profile cases and often been at the forefront of the state’s most controversial issues involving crime.
In 2016, he made national headlines for moving forward with the arrest and prosecution of a Montgomery police officer in the shooting death of Greg Gunn, an unarmed Black man who was shot dead just steps from his front door.
It was also Bailey who, in 2018, raised alarms about Alabama’s parole board releasing a number of incarcerated people with violent crime histories and less-than-stellar records behind bars. That led to a public outcry and eventually an over-correction, with the board essentially shutting down paroles and ignoring those who had met and exceeded guidelines for release.
Those two situations were a microcosm of Bailey’s career as DA – a person who did the job according to his principles and guidelines, rarely concerning himself with the politics of it all.
That apolitical approach also has guided Bailey in dealing with the recent statewide focus on Montgomery’s seeming uptick in gun crime. While he has advocated for tougher sentences and more leeway for judges to keep violent and repeat offenders locked up, he also has pushed back on lazy, uninformed criticisms of city leaders and the manner in which they’ve addressed crime.
“It’s very complex, obviously,” Bailey said during an interview on the Alabama Politics This Week podcast in June. “It’s not just ‘lock them up,’ as if that is going to be the answer. That’s certainly part of it as you know, there are people that need to be separated from society. I mean, there are people that would rather shoot you and your family than have a conversation with you. And those folks do need to be separated from society. I don’t have any issues with that. But if we’re truly doing our jobs and we truly care, we’ve got to do a lot more on the front end to make sure that these folks are not coming into the criminal justice system to begin with.”
A retirement reception will be held for Bailey on Tuesday at First Baptist Church in Montgomery.
