On May 29, 2006, someone driving a Ford Taurus station wagon pulled into a grocery store parking lot near Old Steele Creek Road on Wilkinson Boulevard around 8:30 p.m. and shoved something out the door that looked remarkably like a corpse.
   Shocked onlookers scrambled to call 911 after they discovered the bloody body of Philip James Kaczmarek. Kaczmarek died from stab wounds, police later determined, and the Ford Taurus, which belonged to him, was later found a few miles away.
   Police quickly arrested Jackie Bennett, 44, who had rented a room from Kaczmarek on Avalon Avenue.
   A letter in Bennett's file states that he was charged with first degree murder and that the Mecklenburg County District Attorney "presently intends to seek the death penalty in this matter if this matter is not resolved with a guilty plea."
   The letter, which winds up in the files of defendants in most first degree murder cases, is a joke. Despite hundreds of murders here, it has been almost a decade since Mecklenburg County sent a killer to death row.
  
       
   A selection from the Jackie Bennett mugshot collection courtesy of the North Carolina Department of Correction and the Mecklenburg County Sheriff's Office

   Instead, Assistant District Attorney David Wallace cut one of the stunning plea deals that the underfunded Mecklenburg DA's office is famous for. The plea deal Bennett signed knocked the first degree murder charge down to second degree murder and combined the charge with the robbery with a dangerous weapon charge he received for robbing Kaczmarek.
   The maximum punishment for the two charges was 40 years for the murder and 19 years for the armed robbery. But the charges were consolidated as part of the plea deal, and Bennett received a sentence of a minimum of just 12.5 years in prison.
   As Charlotte Mayor Pat McCrory recently reminded constituents in an email asking them to contact their state legislators and grovel for more money for the underfunded justice system here, there are 144 murder suspects in the Mecklenburg County jail awaiting trial and the DA has the resources to try just 12 of them a year. The rest must be plea bargained. That the DA doesn't have the resources to push for tougher plea deals -- under threat of going to a trial -- in the remaining cases is well known among defense attorneys and public defenders, who cut some incredible deals for their clients.
   Recently, the state agreed to provide Mecklenburg County with half a dozen more prosecutors. That's great, but it is still less than the 15 to 20 more it needs to catch up with similar-sized cities like Portland and Austin.