When Florida state attorney Aramis Ayala said she wouldn’t seek the death penalty for murder convictions while in office a couple months after she was sworn in this past January, one local official wrote on Facebook that she should be “tarred and feathered if not hung from a tree.” She is the first black official to serve as a state’s attorney in Florida.

The case over which Ayala, a Democrat serving in Orange and Osceola counties, defined her stance involved Markeith Loyd, who is accused of killing his pregnant ex-girlfriend and a police officer. “I have determined,” Ayala said last month, “that [seeking the death penalty] is not in the best interests of the community or the best interests of justice.”

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Being a reform-minded prosecutor has always been hard. “There is no roadmap for progressive district attorneys,” Stanford Law professor David Alan Sklansky wrote in the “Progressive Prosecutor’s Handbook” this year. And, as Sklansky told MTV News, organizational culture — meaning existing hierarchies and the baked-in status quo — “is one of the hardest things to change, if not the hardest, in a prosecutor’s office. It’s why having a reform-minded prosecutor doesn’t necessarily translate into significantly better policies.” You also can’t plan for how the politicians higher up the ladder in your state will feel about reform. Just because you’re in the same state doesn’t mean you have the same constituents.