Today, Explained - Ruthless County, Tennessee

Episode Date: October 25, 2021

For 11 years, a Tennessee judge sent kids to jail for a crime that doesn’t exist. Nashville Public Radio’s Meribah Knight explains why that judge is still in charge of “juvenile justice.” Today’s show was produced by Victoria Chamberlin, edited by Matt Collette, engineered by Efim Shapiro, fact-checked by Laura Bullard and hosted by Sean Rameswaram. Transcript at vox.com/todayexplained Support Today, Explained by making a financial contribution to Vox! bit.ly/givepodcasts Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Get groceries delivered across the GTA from Real Canadian Superstore with PC Express. Shop online for super prices and super savings. Try it today and get up to $75 in PC Optimum Points. Visit superstore.ca to get started. It's Today Explained. I'm Sean Ramos-Verm, and I use Twitter. Mostly for the lols, but sometimes there's really useful news and information on there, too. And then, on the rare occasion, you see something that just makes your jaw drop. Earlier this month, I saw one of those tweets.

It was actually a Twitter thread from a ProPublica reporter named Ken Armstrong. And the first tweet read, Three police officers went to an elementary school in Tennessee and arrested four black girls. One fell to her knees. Another threw up. Police handcuffed the youngest, an eight-year-old with pigtails. Their supposed crime? Watching some boys fight and not stopping them. Ken's thread went on and on and on to explain how this happened.

It was a pretty shocking story he had been reporting on for a year with Maribah Knight. I'm a senior reporter with Nashville Public Radio. Today on the show, Maribah is going to tell us what she discovered about why children, actual little children in pigtails, were getting arrested in Tennessee. While this happened in 2016, the reason we're talking about it now is because a series of lawsuits have come in the wake of that. And what they did was allow us to crack the door open into this really secret place called juvenile court. And it allowed us to see this really ugly and

unsettling culture in this one county and the mechanism that was behind mass incarceration of children that went on for decades. The systems that created it and the people that were the architects of it, they are still in power. The culture is still there. And while some aspects of it have stopped, the people responsible are still doing their job and really no consequences have come to them. Let's start with this one incident Ken tweeted about. What happened at this school back in 2016? On a Friday afternoon, three officers go to this school, Hopgood Elementary, in Rutherford County, about 30 miles south of Nashville. And they're there to arrest four Black girls ages 8 to 12 and they're there because of a video. Look out, walk it away!

Oh! Walk it away! Beach! Booze! Cut, cut, cut! Catch him, catch him! It was this scuffle that happened following a pickup basketball game. You know Tay-Tay? Tay-Tay beat him! It has a filter on it so you can't see the kids' faces. It's kind of like they're like hyper-color. But you do see a five and a six-year-old,

these really little kids kind of trailing this older kid, kind of throwing feeble punches at him. And this older kid's just walking away like, you know, I don't want to deal with you. And there's a few other kids around. One of them is yelling, stop. Stop, stop, stop, stop, stop, stop, stop. And the other ones are just kind of like tagging behind. One of them is yelling, stop. Stop, Tay-Tay, stop, Tay-Tay, stop, Tay-Tay, stop. No, no, let's just...

And the other ones are just kind of like tagging behind. Get them, Tay! Get them, Tay-Tay! What it turned out was that the police got a hold of that video. And they decided not to arrest the kids that were throwing punches. They were too young, five and six years old. But they were going to arrest every other kid who was looking on. And the charge that they gave them was criminal responsibility for conduct of another. And that turned out to be a totally bogus charge. But the thought was that they didn't stop to intervene in this fight. So they were

culpable for the fight. Just to be clear here, like five or six years old is too young to be arrested, but like eight or nine is not? Yes. It was a very strange, arbitrary distinction, but it was made.

And so this one school resource officer did a two-day investigation, set out to find out all these kids, even though she couldn't identify a single one in the video. She went to go around the neighborhood to talk to the principal and teachers to try to identify all these kids and then proceeded to issue petitions out, which they treated as warrants for arrest. What happens to these kids once they're arrested? They are arrested and taken to the juvenile detention center and processed there. Four of them are held overnight, some for two days. Others are released. And that is a really critical aspect of this story because what that led to was a series of lawsuits that pulled this policy apart and realized that the way that they were processing children and deciding to hold them and also automatically arresting them and bringing them to the detention center was completely illegal.

How many kids get arrested after witnessing this one schoolyard scuffle? them and bringing them to the detention center was completely illegal. How many kids get arrested after witnessing this one schoolyard scuffle? So 11 kids are sucked in. Some are kept for multiple days. Some are kept in detention for multiple days for witnessing a schoolyard scuffle. Yeah. In fact, one of them was put into solitary confinement because he was standing next to his door. No. How old was this kid? Twelve.

There was a set of twins that were arrested. JB1 and JB2 they're identified as in the lawsuits. We interviewed one of them. His name is Jacorius Brinkley. They had put me a blanket and a cup on top, so, like, because they got the cuffs

on me like that. And then they got the little thing, the shaker cuffs on my little legs, so I can't run nowhere, go nowhere. But I ain't gonna run nowhere, no way. And he and his sister were arrested at their home on Saturday. They were cuffed, they were put into a police car, And they were taken to the detention center. And they were processed there. And even though they were being charged with the exact same thing, Jacorius ended up staying for two nights.

And his sister was released. And they put him in solitary? They put him in solitary. He was standing next to his window trying to watch a TV. I was just standing by the door. Like a guard just keep on walking past and stuff saying, you can't be by the door. You got to sit down.

I can't even see the TV. That's what I'm telling him. And then eventually said, He talked about, man, you finna get put on lockdown. They take everything from you. Your cup, you can't even drink water. Remind us how old Jacorius is at the time this is happening?

Twelve. They take everything. They put a 12-year-old in solitary because he witnessed a fight. Yeah. And obviously, from hearing his voice, Jacorius isn't 12 anymore. How does he look back on this experience? A number of the ones who were rounded up in that mass arrest that day

at the school had bad dreams. They were scared to go back to school. They were scared they might get arrested at any moment. And that is a really vital and important example of this breakdown in the relationship between Black children and law enforcement. The parents of the kids said, you know, my child will never look at law enforcement the same way. What is going on in this jail? The facility had a policy called the filter system. And this is at the heart of our story. And this is what was deemed absolutely illegal by a federal judge. They had a policy written into their standard operating procedures that said,

we can keep a child in detention if we deem them to be a true threat. What a true threat is or was was never defined. It was absolutely up to whoever was screening the child. Tennessee and other states have very strict limits on when a child can be detained because the science tells us that it's incredibly damaging and traumatic to put a child in jail. So there have to be really specific reasons by statute when you're going to detain a child. This facility ignored that completely. And they just said, if we think that they are a true threat, then we can keep them. So Jacorius was deemed a true threat and his sister was not. Was the school okay with this?

The school did not want this to happen. The principal did not want this to happen. They did not think that their kids were going to be arrested. They thought their kids might get a talking to. They thought that they might be trying to figure out if anybody was a victim or wanted to, you know, talk about bullying. No, the principal did not think that this was going to go this far. And even some of the police officers sent to the school that day to arrest the kids were not on board with this at all.

Tell me more specifically about the racial dynamics at play here. All the kids are Black, right? Yeah. And everyone else in this picture is white? The woman who investigated the case, who decided to take out the petitions and really spearheaded these arrests, was white. There are three officers, like I said, that go to the school that day. Two of them are Black. The two that are Black are sitting there going, what is happening? Why are we here? Would we be

here if this was a white school? And one officer actually starts to call up his chain of command to say, is there anybody that can override this? We should not be doing this. And the parents? They were so upset. It makes me want to fight. I'm not going to lie and say it doesn't, because, I mean, what if it was your child? How would you feel?

I'm frustrated. For a while, police were telling the principal that she couldn't call the parents. I mean, the principal is supposed to be the parent in that moment, because the parents aren't there. And the police are telling her, no, you cannot call the parents. They will be called once the children arrive at the detention facility.

Well, eventually the principal just said, screw it. No, I'm calling the parents. And she started to call the parents and they descended and they were angry and horrified. But also, this is something that had been going on for so long in the community that a lot of the families I spoke with said they really had no idea what was happening to their children was illegal. Like it felt wrong and it felt messed up, but they didn't realize that it was actually illegal. This is a community where people, you know, multiple generations have cycled through the juvenile court. And so it's just how business is conducted there.

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Please contact Connex Ontario At 1-866-531-2600 To speak to an advisor Free of charge BetMGM operates pursuant to an operating agreement With iGaming Ontario. Built in 2008, the Rutherford County Juvenile Detention Center is a 43,094 square foot facility that is located in the heart of Tennessee. Just minutes from Interstate 24 in Murfreesboro, the center is easily accessible with plenty of lodging

and restaurant choices to choose from. Maribeth, where's the buck stop in Rutherford County, Tennessee? Who's responsible for all these kids being locked up in this jail? Judge Donna Scott Davenport. I have all these favorite quotes in court, but one is, ma'am, you gotta show up to play. And you don't show up at this next hearing.

I'm gonna play without you. And she's been the juvenile court judge since 2000 when the position and the court was created. And she oversees the court and she oversees the jail. She has an exceptional amount of power. And what's her story? She really believes that children need consequences. And she likes to talk about her 17 years of law enforcement experience

that give her the credentials to do this work. Those credentials don't match personnel records. She claims to have been a police officer. She was never a police officer. She claims to have worked for the Department of Justice. She never worked for the Department of Justice. She worked for an agency, a private agency that contracts with the Department of Justice. So there are lots of cracks in her story, but she does like to promote herself. She has a radio show on the local commercial radio station that she has had for a decade where she talks about her work. Everybody wants to take care of our children. We want to stop it while we can and try to get

through to them. Does she talk about arresting kids? She does. I've locked up one seven-year-old in 13 years, and that was a heartbreak. But eight and nine-year-olds and older are very common now. Or she'll say, I'm going to let you be young and dumb one time. Children need consequences. I mean, being detained at our

facility is not a picnic at all. It's not supposed to be. She's got this personality. She's got this attitude on the bench. She is the one that sets the tone for the whole court. She came on the bench in the late 90s, just as our whole idea about youth and troubled youth and super predators was really falling out of favor. It seems as though she never kind of caught that wave. She's stuck in that kind of mid-90s idea about children and the poison of, you know, video games and cell phones and social media and the things that just really ruin a child and how there needs to be more structure and families need to eat together. And, you know, there was a time when, you know, she's very kind of of yesteryear. Every 10 to 15 years, we have a different sense of morals and ethics and responsibilities

and our character and what we as people want for ourselves. And we want to help others in building that. And when we have lost that for so many years, then we continue to go downward with our morals and our ethics. And she really operates on the bench by her gut and her emotions. We talked to a lot of people who said she's really not someone who studied in case law.

She kind of looks at what's in front of her and she makes a gut decision. We found in a deposition where a lawyer asked her about taking the bar exam. It took her five tries to pass the bar over nine years. Okay, so Judge Davenport isn't exactly getting appointed to the Supreme Court anytime soon and maybe shouldn't be sitting on any bench to begin with. Do we know how many children she's put behind bars? For the last year data is available, statewide,

the average number of cases in juvenile court that end up in detention is 5%. Okay, so 5% of all the cases that cycle through juvenile court end up in detention. In this county, the number was 48%. And that is astonishing. So that's like the smoking gun. And this is all happening because of Judge Davenport. Is she appointed or elected? She is elected.

She has been elected three times and she is up for reelection this summer. You know, this is a great example about do we know who we're voting for? Juvenile court is sealed. So, so much of it happens in darkness. And so when you're voting for a judge for juvenile court, I mean, how much do you really know about what's happening? Because so much of it is behind this curtain of privacy. You know, the judge is incredibly popular because she has a rhetoric that, you know, this mostly white conservative county stands behind. Consequences are important for children. Structure is important. So, so many families have cycled through this system that it, in a way, has become normalized

because there's no other way of doing business in this county. Because the juvenile court was created at the same time that Judge Davenport came into power. This has been the way it's always been. And so you have mothers and fathers who have gone through her courtroom and now have children that are going through her courtroom. And so it is traumatizing. It is not a good place to be. A lot of people talk about how horrible they feel when they are in her courtroom. But it's also the way it's always operated. There's never been anybody else. So they don't know. They have no idea what is normal. A lot of them said, we just thought this was the way it was and it would always be. So come summer 2022, it's quite possible that Judge Davenport gets reelected.

I mean, that's the thing. In Tennessee, it is so hard to remove a judge. You need actually two-thirds vote in both chambers of the state legislature to remove a judge. That's not going to happen. Really, this is up to the voters. They have to decide they want a different judge. But this county has a very layered history. This is a mostly white county,

and it is a county rooted in slavery. The ghosts of the Confederacy are all over this city and this county, and it is inextricably linked to its power and its success. And you see that every single day. I mean, where this fight took place, where many of these children live, is just south of the plantation. There are still street names with Robert Lee, Forrest. The slaveholder of the county was Maney. The main street is Maney. That gets into your bones.

And that kind of attitude is reflected in the subjugation of a certain group of people that live there, and it is ruled by a kind of old boys network. So when you talk about feeling empowered to make a change or to go to the ballot box, there's a lot of baggage in a city it's like so astonishing and you're like how did this happen and then you back up and you realize that there's this whole mechanism behind it and it's this mechanism that has been just racing along that inevitably was going to lead to something like what happened that day at this elementary school. It was inevitable. At some point, this thing was going to go so off the rails that this was going to happen. But it's a mechanism.

It is absolutely a mechanism. And the mechanism is that this judge, Davenport, issued a memo to law enforcement in 2003 that said, upon the arrest of a child, they must be taken to the detention center. This is pretty astonishing to have a judge telling law enforcement what to do. That is not normal. But she did it. And it speaks to her level of power and what she thinks is her authority, which is directing law enforcement to take children, arrest them, send them to the jail. So Judge Davenport is still on the bench for the time being. What about this mechanism you're talking about, the filter system that helps her jail kids?

The filter system was stopped by a federal judge who issued an injunction in 2017 saying that this caused irreparable harm to children, that it was a violation of the Constitution. So that has stopped. What has also stopped is her process for arresting children. That is a violation of state law, and that has stopped as well. So these two larger parts of the mechanism are no longer happening. But the culture is still there, and the people in charge of them are still there. So does that mean it's less likely 11 kids are going to get arrested for witnessing a fight in a schoolyard tomorrow? Yeah, I think it does. It does. And that's great news. But generations of children have been traumatized by these policies. And as we point out in the story, almost no consequences have come to the adults. I want the children that come in front of me to leave better than they came in.

I want them to leave better than they came in. Maribah Knight, she's a reporter with WPLN, Nashville Public Radio. You can find more of her investigative reporting at WPLN.org. She reported this story out with Ken Armstrong at ProPublica. It's titled, Black Children Were Jailed for a Crime That Doesn't Exist. Almost Nothing Happened to the Adults in Charge. You can find that at ProPublica.org. Victoria Chamberlain produced this episode of Today Explained. Thank you.