Serial - The Kids of Rutherford County - Ep. 2

Episode Date: November 16, 2023

A young lawyer named Wes Clark can’t get the Rutherford County juvenile court to let his clients out of detention — even when the law says they shouldn’t have been held in the first place. He’s frustrated and demoralized, until he makes a friend. From Serial Productions and The New York Times in partnership with ProPublica and Nashville Public Radio, “The Kids of Rutherford County” is reported and hosted by Meribah Knight, a Peabody-award winning reporter based in the South. To get full access to this show, and to other Serial Productions and New York Times podcasts on Apple Podcasts and Spotify, subscribe at nytimes.com/podcasts.To find out about new shows from Serial Productions, and get a look behind the scenes, sign up for our newsletter at nytimes.com/serialnewsletter.Have a story pitch, a tip, or feedback on our shows? Email us at [e-mail] 

These first two episodes of The Kids of Rutherford County are free. But to hear the whole series, you'll need to subscribe to The New York Times, where you'll get access to all serial production shows and all The New York Times podcasts. And it's super easy. You can sign up through Apple Podcasts or Spotify. And if you're already a Time subscriber, just link your account and you're done. In 2013, three years before the arrests at Hobgott Elementary, when a bunch of kids were arrested and brought to juvenile detention for not stopping a fight, a guy named Wes Clark had just graduated law school. Wes was 25 years

old, smart, ambitious, but he was also just coming out of a pretty wild past. On and off since he was a teenager, he'd been addicted to Oxycontin. A hopeless love of this shit, is how he puts it. With that came Wes's rap sheet, a DUI, some drug charges. So considering this, he knew the chances of getting a job at a Tony White shoe law firm were pretty close to zero, but he needed a job. That's when some lawyers he met in recovery circles gave him a tip. There's always work in juvenile court. They were like, hey, this is a place you can go and at least start out and learn the ropes because there was a need for lawyers to do that. Court-appointed juvenile cases don't pay well,

and lawyers have told me that juvenile court lacks the prestige of adult criminal court. One lawyer harshly described it as the bottom rung of the legal practice. But for Wes... You know, it was something to do, which was much better than nothing to do. At the time, Wes was living in Rutherford County, Tennessee.

And so I just went down to the juvenile court and observed a couple of days and then asked to, you know, be put on the list to take appointments. And it was in January of 2014 that I got my first juvenile court appointment. Wes's first case was for a girl who was being held in detention on a misdemeanor called reckless burning, a crime Wes had never heard of. The girl was accused of setting a small fire in a neighbor's barn. So police had picked her up the day before and taken her to Juvie, where she spent the night in a cell waiting for her hearing. Wes went down to the detention center to meet with her. I remember just like physically how small she was, like kind of struck me like, wow,

this is a really little kid, you know? The girl was 12, wearing the jail's standard-issue jumpsuit. Wes was thrown. I remember feeling like I am in a penal facility. I've visited prisons before. I'd been in jails before myself, and it was very much identical to an adult prison. And I'm sitting across from this little, scared 12-year-old girl who had accidentally started a fire and had now spent the night in jail. It just felt wrong. It did not feel like this is how kids should be treated. It didn't feel like this is how kids should be treated.

It didn't feel like this was the right place for this 12-year-old to be. It turns out juvenile detention literally wasn't the right place for this 12-year-old to be. Because while misdemeanor offenses like reckless burning or shoplifting or trespassing are pretty common in juvenile court, what's less common is having a kid jailed for one. And while this was Wes's first case, and he didn't know much about being a defense lawyer, he did know that step one was to read the relevant laws. He looked up the criteria for reckless burning,

and he also looked up Tennessee's detention statute, which laid out guidelines for when a kid can be locked up. Wes learned that a minor, like this 12-year-old girl, could only be held for very specific reasons, like if she was already on probation, a runaway from another county, or if she caused a serious injury, none of which applied to her case. Reading this, West did a double-take, like, Wait a minute.

Even if this kid did everything that is said here, they can't be detained according to the statute. I thought, oh, this is gold. You know, I'm going to bust this kid out of here. This is some good, good research here. Nobody's thought of this. So a bit puffed up over his discovery, Wes went and talked to the prosecutor and triumphantly cited the statute, telling her that by law, she can't hold his client in jail. But the prosecutor didn't have much of a reaction to this news. Instead, Wes says she asked him a few questions about his client's circumstances and then basically was like, okay, yeah, sure, your client can go home. And later that day, the 12-year-old girl was released. Wes ended up having mixed feelings about this outcome.

On the one hand, I'm thrilled because that's the best outcome I can get here. But it definitely stuck with me that, like, this statute is pretty clear about when you can detain a kid, and here's the kid being detained anyway. Wes thought maybe what happened to his 12-year-old client was just an isolated incident, a one-off. But here's what he saw next. A boy accused of stealing a football jersey, jailed.

A girl accused of pulling someone's hair. Jailed. A girl trying to use a blank check at a school book fair. Jailed. To be clear, these were all misdemeanor charges and did not qualify for detention under Tennessee law. And yet, many of Wes's clients were still getting picked up by law enforcement and taken a juvie to sit in a cell for a day or two or three.

Wes had gone to law school for a reason. He wanted to argue the law. He was also a brand new lawyer, still figuring out how this all worked. But from what he could see, Rutherford County was operating by its own rules. They had their own form of juvenile justice. And West was about to figure out who and what was behind it. From Serial Productions and The New York Times, I'm Maribyn Knight. This is The Kids of Rutherford County.

Episode 2, What the Hell are you people doing? From the beginning, Wes could see something wasn't right with Rutherford County's juvenile court. And after just a few months taking cases there, he was feeling pretty beaten down. It was just disheartening. I mean, every single docket, there are kids who just simply don't meet the legal criteria to have been detained and even arrested. Yet, here they are in chains, in a jumpsuit, having a detention hearing to determine whether they're going to continue to be detained. That had a pretty negative effect on me and about like, well, gosh, what's my role here? Like, how good of a lawyer am I if I'm just kind of going along with this system? Did you ever talk to the other lawyers about like that person shouldn't be detained? Yeah, I did. And what were those conversations? I mean, it would mostly be like complaining after a hearing and say, oh, can you believe this?

Like, look right here. You know, the statute. Look what it says. This kid had a misdemeanor assault. There's no way this kid could be detained. And I don't remember ever really getting more than like, oh, well, yeah, what are you going to do? To Wes, it seemed obvious that this what are you going to do attitude was because of one person,

the judge, Donna Scott Davenport. Judge Davenport oversaw the entire juvenile justice system in Rutherford County, the court and the juvenile jail. The jail's director answered to her. And with no jury in juvenile court, she had the final say for every case that came before her. West says Judge Davenport set the tone on everything. There was always a feudalistic feel to the courthouse. She was the seat of power, and there was that feel that we were all part of a community, and she made the rules of the community. That was just how it was.

Judge Davenport was the only juvenile judge the county ever had, first elected to the bench in 2000, when the county's juvenile court was established. A white woman with a commanding presence, often wearing her signature teal-colored robe, Judge Davenport had a banner hanging in the courthouse, reclaiming her the county's favorite elected official, an award given out by the local paper. She was sometimes referred to as the mother of the county. She even referred to herself as the mother of the county at times.

Judge Davenport declined to talk to me for my reporting. But in other interviews, she said she saw her work as a ministry more than a job. I'm here on a mission, she said. It's God's mission. She was strict when it came to enforcing the rules of her courtroom. No untucked shirts, no sundresses, no spaghetti straps or spandex, no body piercings, no uncovered tattoos. Pants must be pulled up at all times and definitely no swearing. But to Wes, it wasn't just that Davenport was a tough judge. What bothered him was the courtroom dynamic,

where the staff, and especially some of the lawyers, were less advocates for their clients and more supplicants to the judge. Within the first few detention hearings that I attended, there was a lawyer who was arguing for his client not to be detained. And Judge Davenport was yelling about how much of a danger this kid who had been caught breaking into a car, how this wasn't something we could tolerate in this community. To be clear, breaking into a car did not meet Tennessee's criteria for juvenile detention. And the lawyer gets up, and he's standing there in this suit that looks like it's been

stuffed in the trunk of a car for weeks. You know, you can see the wrinkles on the back of it, on the sleeves. And he's got one of those beards that's not like an intentional beard, but just, you know, fuck it, I haven't shaved for a week kind of beards. And he's making this argument. But as he's saying the words, he's looking down, like visibly submitting to the prosecutor and to the judge and saying, judge, you can detain this kid. And, you know, he's subject to that. But just please don't. That was the essence of what he was saying.

Just groveling, begging without any reference to any rules that actually apply to the situation. What are you thinking as you're watching this happen? I don't want to be like that guy. Wes tried to not be that guy, but it didn't get him very far. So you're regularly going in front of Davenport and saying, you cannot detain these kids. Yes. With the statute.

Like, you're holding it? Yes. I would print it out and I'd have it in my file and I would read it and I would say this kid is not eligible to be detained period. So you have to let him go. So the first time you did that it was like you didn't even say anything. Right. Second time you do that. It's like I find this child's a threat to himself for the community and i'm gonna hold him and i'm like that's not the analysis like there have to be these prerequisite findings of like felony or prior convictions or the kids on probation

and it just that would be like i you know was just talking about nothing. And then the third time. And the fourth time. Yeah, I mean. He said it would go on and on. The phrase that West says Davenport would cite in order to justify detention, finding a kid a threat to himself and the community, that phrase came up a lot.

She would say it as if citing a legal rationale. But a kid being a threat can't be the only legal metric for jailing them. That's just not how the law is written. It seemed obvious to Wes that Davenport and the jail she oversaw were violating this detention statute. But he seemed to be the only one in the court who felt that way. By the time I got there, which was 2014, like, it was just generally accepted, this is how the juvenile justice system operates. To Wes, everyone was falling in line with how the judge did things.

But this was Wes's perspective, and he was coming at it from the point of view of a defense lawyer, a very green one at that. So was Wes right? Was this follow-the-leader attitude really the culture here? I wanted to find out from someone with a different perspective. So I went to the court's longtime prosecutor, Leslie Cullum. She spent 16 years working in Davenport's courtroom. And just by demeanor, she's almost the total opposite of Wes. Where he's quick to be outraged, Leslie is much more deliberate, a careful observer of the court's politics. It is my experience that officials, maybe especially judges, don't particularly like to be told they're wrong

or how to do things. See what I mean? Deliberate. Leslie remembers Wes was an antagonizing presence in the courtroom, both toward her and Judge Davenport, and she didn't think that was always the most effective approach. That said, Leslie herself didn't always like Davenport's approach. Like when Davenport would yell at child defendants and their families from the bench. I think if a middle-aged lady yelling at you was going to solve your problem, you wouldn't be in court. Because I think most of the mothers would have done that already.

Leslie told me she wanted to get families treatment, get them into programs, things like anger management, drug and alcohol counseling, which in her eyes didn't happen nearly enough in Davenport's court. I asked her if she ever saw what Wes did, kids being held in detention when they shouldn't have been. I'm sure there were examples of that. And did you feel like you could say anything? Not really. Was that a frustrating

place to be in? Yes, sometimes. But at the end of the day, it's her courtroom. And I need to make myself work within her rules as much as I can. So back to Wes. He'd just started his legal career at the juvenile court, and he was already frustrated and demoralized. He was up against a judge who kept dismissing his argument about the detention statute, a prosecutor who seemed to follow her lead, and colleagues who accepted the status quo.

But what could he do about it? He was only 25 years old and still just learning the ropes of juvenile court. He knew he wasn't going to change things on his own. But then one day, hanging out in the smoker section in front of the courthouse, he found an ally. That's after the break. This is Sarah Koenig, host of The Serial Podcast. If you're hooked on this show, and I'm guessing you are, then I'm hoping my job here is pretty easy, to get you to subscribe to the New York Times so you can listen to the rest of it. My father was an ad man who taught me

the best ads are declarative, no puffery. So here goes. Serial shows are expertly reported and inventive. Nobody makes them like we make them. But Serial's great Serials aside, when you subscribe, you get all the Times shows. The Daily, Ezra Klein, Wirecutter has a new podcast. My advice, though, don't just get an audio subscription. Go big.

Subscribe to the paper. All access. The whole magilla. Serial is part of the Times, so technically I work at the Times, and honestly I'm kind of cheap, but I subscribe for the news, obviously, and the games, and the cooking, and the magazine, and Serial. I think of the Times as a staple. Even my kids, who are not budding journalists and who don't even really listen to Serial, they both asked me for Times subscriptions. All the cool kids are doing it.

So please, sign up. You can do it through Spotify or Apple Podcasts, or if you're already a Time subscriber, sign in. It's worth it. By the time I met Wesley, I'd been back in that court for seven or eight years, seeing the same stuff over and over and over again. This is Mark Downton. When Wes first arrived at the court in 2014, Mark had been a juvenile attorney there on and off for almost 15 years, though he admits several of those years were a blur, in part because... I think I would show up to court still drunk from the night before.

That would happen. You know, if you drink till 2 a.m., at 8 a.m., you're probably still a little drunk, right? Just like Wes, Mark had come to the court with some baggage, a couple DUIs, and a big drinking problem. He arrived in 2000, the same year Davenport became the juvenile judge. He'd left a few times over the years for better paying jobs, but he always lost them because of his drinking, and then found himself back in the juvenile court. Eventually, Mark got sober and started focusing more on his work. And then one day, he found himself sharing a smoke break with Wes outside the courthouse. They quickly hit it off over their

shared history of addiction and their run-ins with the law as kids and adults. Mainly, though, they bonded over their shared struggles defending kids in juvenile court. Like Wes, Mark also had a document he was always bringing up

in the courtroom. I'd bring up the Constitution and I, you know, it never won. I never won an argument talking about the Constitution in that courtroom. Wesley never won an argument talking about the Constitution in that courtroom. Wesley never won an argument talking about the detention statute.

So we kind of hit it off and... Again, here's Wes. Complaining about how a lot of these really good legal arguments we were making were being ignored, you know? You know, so it's like we're, you know, Don Quixote or whatever, you know? You know, so it's like we're Don Quixote or whatever, you know? We're fighting against phantoms and doing it over and over and over again. Pretty quickly, Wes told Mark his ambitions. He was tired of citing the actual law, failing to get a client out, and then everyone going back to business as usual, locking up more kids.

He wanted to end this system. Mark remembers the main thing Wes wanted to do. Boy, he wanted to sue that, he definitely wanted to sue Judge Donna really early on because of that statute. But the whole idea about suing the juvenile court, like, it wasn't, I didn't think it was crazy. I just thought, like, it was so hard to do, to find the right mechanism to get in because of all the immunities that a court has. So, like, I was like, whatever, Wesley, it's just not going to happen. There's no way to do it. There's just no way to do it, to sue this court. For various reasons, courts, and especially judges, are pretty well insulated from lawsuits.

Generally, you can't directly sue a judge because of something called absolute immunity. I'll spare you the details, but still, Wes was determined to find a way. So for the next two years, Mark and Wes had these pie-in-the-sky conversations about suing the court. Until Wes finally got a case they both saw as an opportunity. In April of 2016, West got an email from the court about one of his clients, a kid named Quintarius Frazier. Quintarius was 15 years old, and he was being held in detention for aggravated robbery.

In the email, detention staff wrote that Quintarius had been acting out in jail, flashing gang signs, rapping, hollering, and they'd been holding him for a few days in something called lockdown. Now they wanted the prosecutor, Leslie Colum, to file a motion giving them the authority to keep Quintarius in lockdown indefinitely. Wes read this and immediately called Leslie. I'm like, what the hell is lockdown? What are we talking about here? And she's like, oh, well, you know, it's this process. And she explained that, you know, the kids, they put them in the cell 23 hours a day and let them out an hour a day. And I'm like, like, that's solitary confinement. What are you talking about? Like, I'm just indignant about the whole thing because I'm like, surely I'm missing something. Like, really,

they're not putting kids in solitary confinement. Surely. After getting off the phone with Leslie, Wes headed to the detention center and met with Quintarius. And I'm like, hey, buddy, like, what's going on back there? And he's like, well, I got, you know, I got in some trouble and they put me on lockdown. I'm like, what's lockdown? Quintarius told Wes he'd been placed on lockdown before. It was twice in the past few weeks, actually.

Once for eight days straight. The staff would take everything out of his cell, including his bedding and his mattress. During the day, he wasn't allowed to lay down, so he'd sit on the metal bunk. Quinterius told Wes that they covered up his window so he couldn't see out. All he was left with was just a Bible and a cup.

My jaw is like dropping that like this is happening and that he's even like sitting there composed and just like, it's not like registering with him that this is like some human rights violation that's occurring. It's just like, this is my life now, you know? So I'm like, listen, man, this is insane, okay? They can't do this to you.

We're going to put an end to this. This is some real next-level bullshit, and it's not going to fly. Part of the reason Wes was so outraged is because he himself had been put in solitary confinement once, when he was 18. It's a long story from back in Wes's wild days. It involved a heavy dose of LSD, insulting an officer, and then getting into a fight with an inmate. Wes got thrown into solitary, and he remembers feeling like he was totally alone, and that anything could happen to him. You know, your whole world shrinks down to this little concrete hole. And after that point, I found out that I may have rights on paper, but in practice, if I'm alone in a concrete hole under a courthouse and there's a bunch of, you know, angry law enforcement officers that are just irritated with me,

I've got precisely as much liberty as they decide I have. And that was pretty scary. So now, here Wes was, a decade later, a lawyer representing a kid who was going through almost the same thing he did. Except his client, Quintarius, was going through it at the age of 15. Now to be clear, lockdown was technically legal in Tennessee. The state's Department of Children's Services allowed it as a way to manage behavior. And juvenile detention centers could use it as much as they wanted, sometimes calling it isolation or seclusion.

But to Wes, no matter what it was called, he thought it all amounted to the same thing, solitary confinement. And he thought for children in particular, it was cruel and inhumane. Leaving Quinterius in the detention center, West had just two hours to go before his hearing in front of Judge Davenport. So he sat down in the courthouse and pulled out his iPad, frantically looking for any legal justification to get Quinterius out of solitary. And he found plenty of material to support his argument.

A recent executive order from President Obama had banned solitary confinement of children in federal facilities. A report from the UN qualified the practice as torture. And he also found some psychiatric articles that all said the same thing. Solitary confinement is really bad for kids. West assembled his argument right up to the moment the hearing began in front of Judge Davenport. So the judge is like, well, Mr. Clark, what do you have to say?

And I start rattling off the statistics and the generally accepted definition of solitary confinement and how it's like torture for children. And I don't get too far into it before the judge kind of interrupts me to say, we don't put anybody in solitary confinement. And I'm like, hold up. Didn't we just say you're going to put somebody in a room for 23 hours and then let them out for one hour a day? I'm looking around the room for like these other adults in the room. They're like, what the hell are you people doing?

This is a child. Like you're adults. This is a legal system. And you're telling me you're putting this kid in a hole for 23 hours a day. I explained, well, this has just been outlawed in the federal system. President Obama, you know, issued an executive order prohibiting this practice, and this is exactly why. And then the judge scoffed at that,

that, well, this is not President Obama's courtroom. This is my courtroom. And it was just the craziest feeling because it's like holding a glass of water and yelling at people about what's in your hand, and they pretend like they don't see it. Or they pretend like, you know, the reality that you are there observing with your own eyes is just not happening.

At the end of the hearing, Davenport issued her ruling, sending Quinteria's back to lockdown. On the order, she scrawled the conditions. In cell, 23 hours. One hour free time. If disrupts during free time, the 23 starts again. Signed, Donna Davenport. Wes had lost.

I walked out as angry as I've ever walked out of a courtroom in my life. My jaw is clenched. My hands are clenched around my briefcase. And I don't want to look at anybody. I don't want to speak to anybody because I don't have anything but contempt for anyone that could just let that go on. I mean, it's bad to say, it's bad to feel,

but I developed a real hatred for some of the people that were doing these things. On his drive home from the courthouse, Wes called Mark. Mark's like, holy shit, man, this is really something. And he, too, had read the Obama executive order, and we talk about how this could really be the basis for a lawsuit. Like, this is it. We're going to do it. A few days later, they filed a 28-page emergency complaint with the federal court saying the juvenile jail had violated

the 8th and 14th Amendments to the Constitution. In other words, what Rutherford County was doing to Quinterius was cruel and unusual punishment. Within hours of filing, the federal judge granted the lawyer's request, writing Quinterius was being subjected to, quote, inhumane conditions likely to cause him irreparable harm. The judge ordered Rutherford County to let Quinterius out of lockdown immediately.

Legally speaking, the judge's decision was a narrow one. It only applied to Quintarius, but it was bigger than that, too. For one, it set a precedent. Within a year, Tennessee had banned the practice as a form of punishment for kids in detention. But on top of that, for Wes, it was a personal victory. For two years, he'd been trying to get someone to see what he did, that Rutherford County wasn't following the rules. And now, at least for this one kid, he'd finally gotten someone, someone with authority to listen. Meanwhile, the same week that Wes and Mark were dealing with the Quinterius case,

news began blowing up about 11 local kids arrested for not stopping a fight. Kids as young as 12, 10, 8 years old, who were taken to the juvenile detention center, some even booked and held overnight. When Wes heard about the arrests, he didn't think much of it. In fact, it seemed pretty typical for Rutherford County. He even joked about it. What's the news here?

But what he'd soon realize is that this little scandal, it would eventually provide the roadmap he and Mark had been looking for and would reveal what was really happening inside this juvenile justice system. That's next time on The Kids of Rutherford County is a co-production of Serial Productions, The New York Times, ProPublica, and Nashville Public Radio. It was reported by me, Maribyn Knight, with additional reporting from Ken Armstrong. The show is produced by Daniel Guimet, with additional production by Michelle Navarro. Editing from Julie Snyder and Jen Guerra,

along with Sarah Bluestain and Ken Armstrong at ProPublica, and my colleague Tony Gonzalez at Nashville Public Radio. Additional editing from Anita Batajow and Alex Kalowitz. The supervising producer for Serial Productions is Nde Chubu. Research and fact-checking by Ben Phelan, with additional fact-checking by Naomi Sharp. Sound design, music supervision, and mixing by Phoebe Wang. The original score for our show is from The Blasting Company. Susan Wessling is our standards editor, and legal review from Dana Green, Alameen Sumar, and Simone Prokus. The art for our show comes from Pablo Delcon. Thank you. thanks to Elizabeth Davis-Moorer, Susan Beachy, Kitty Bennett,

Alan De La Carriere, Sheila McNeil, and Kirsten Noyes. Special thanks to our session musicians, Austin Hoke, Dopu Leo, Hannah Sorrells-Tyler, Dominique Rodriguez, and Keith Carman. The Kids of Rutherford County is produced by Serial Productions, The New York Times, ProPublica, and Nashville Public Radio.