Sun. Oct 6th, 2024

This transcript was created using speech recognition software. While it has been reviewed by human transcribers, it may contain errors. Please review the episode audio before quoting from this transcript and email [email protected] with any questions.

meribah knight

The two attorneys, Wes Clark and Mark Downton Were feeling pretty good. They just gotten in a 15-year-old kid out of solitary confinement. And that felt like a big victory against Judge Davenport. They’d also decided to team up for real, form a firm of their own, called Downton-Clark. It had no real office, no business cards. But it did have one very specific goal.

mark downton

The goal was to get out —

meribah knight

Here’s Mark.

mark downton

— to not be juvenile court lawyers anymore because it was too much time for too little money.

meribah knight

And they needed the money. While the work at juvenile court was steady, the pay was low as far as attorneys go. Court-appointed cases were capped at $50 an hour. Wes had law-school loans and was still living at his mother-in-law’s house. Mark was a little more flush, thanks to a side gig, doing document review for higher-paid lawyers. But he also had a kid and mortgages for his house and office.

So they started a private practice that would take civil cases, personal injury, business disputes. They knew it would take some time to really get established. But they had faith. They both remember an early case Wes brought in from adult court that seemed promising.

wes clark

There was a client of mine who — his foot was injured during his jail intake process. He ended up having the foot amputated.

mark downton

So we filed this lawsuit for millions of dollars. And it turned out — fairly quickly, we learned that his leg was supposed to be cut off before he ever went into jail. So that was our first one, that we thought we were going to be millionaires.

meribah knight

Instead, they were out of pocket about $400 for the filing fees, plus other expenses. And things only went downhill from there.

mark downton

So there was a slip and fall. And she had fallen down.

wes clark

Oh, my gosh. We lost a lot of money on that case.

mark downton

And we had the sex offenders.

wes clark

That was a terrible case.

mark downton

Not a single one — that was terrible. Not a single one of those worked out.

meribah knight

Most of their cases were duds right out of the gate. And even the ones that paid out didn’t result in much. One client had so little money, she offered to pay Mark with a homemade painting of Lake Louise.

mark downton

It’s in my bathroom right now.

meribah knight

And it’s while they’re hustling to find cases outside the juvenile court that Mark and Wes got a call from a lawyer at the ACLU, asking if they wanted to take on some new clients, some kids from a school called Hobgood Elementary. They’d been arrested for not stepping in to stop a fight.

Wes had been reading about the arrests. And he thought the whole thing was just so absurd, a bunch of kids arrested on this vague charge of criminal responsibility, a charge that turned out to not even be real. And a few of the kids were even held in juvenile detention overnight.

It would be a pro bono case. And it meant going back to the Rutherford County Juvenile Court, going back in front of Judge Davenport. But immediately, Wes was like, yes, absolutely, we’ll take it, because —

wes clark

I knew that we were already going to get the criminal charges dismissed.

meribah knight

And more importantly —

wes clark

I was definitely thinking about how we could sue somebody for what happened.

meribah knight

Wes figured they’d sue the police, false arrest and malicious prosecution. He began by reviewing the police’s take on what happened. Following the arrests at Hobgood, in an attempt to address all the confusion and the outrage, the police department had conducted an initial audit. So Wes figured he’d start there, with that report.

wes clark

So I clicked that, opened it up. And I didn’t have high expectations for anything written by the police department. It’s always, oh, we’ve conducted a thorough investigation of ourselves and have found no wrongdoing, is generally how that goes. But in this particular instance, the conclusion that they did nothing wrong is based on the assertion that they were following — and let me look here and see exactly what it says.

meribah knight

Wes reads through the report in front of him.

wes clark

Yep, there it is, the line about discussion with DA and court, regarding judicial requirement, that requires juvenile suspects to be arrested and prohibits Department from citing and releasing.

meribah knight

It’s jargony. But to Wes, that line said a lot. You see, in Tennessee, police have a few options when it comes to kids accused of minor offenses, like misdemeanors. Depending on what happened, they can arrest a kid or maybe just issue a citation, with a notification for the kid to show up in juvenile court for a hearing on another day. Or they can do nothing, just send the kid home with a stern talking to. The police have discretion.

But this line that Wes found, referencing a judicial requirement, requiring kids to be arrested, and prohibiting police from citing and releasing, it seemed to be saying the police had only one option, arrest the kid. Wes was stunned.

wes clark

So here we’ve got a government police agency, that pins not just the Hobgood situation on this judicial policy, but every single kid in Rutherford County who is charged with a delinquent offense is arrested. And they’re subject to this policy. (OMINOUS MUSIC)

So immediately, I feel like I’m on to something. I’m not taking crazy pills because literally everyone is getting arrested. And it is not limited to the cases I’ve personally handled.

meribah knight

To Wes, the whole thing seemed illegal, and perfect for a big lawsuit.

wes clark

I just remember being giddy, like a kid, like this sentence, this is fucking bonkers, that this exists.

meribah knight

And as for the judicial requirement, Wes knew immediately who was behind it.

wes clark

That’s just Davenport, right?

meribah knight

Davenport, meaning Judge Davenport.

wes clark

There’s no question that it could be anybody else.

meribah knight

2 and 1/2 years earlier, when Wes first started taking cases in Rutherford County, he’d done it because his buddies had told him there’s always work in juvenile court. At the time, he hadn’t thought about why that might be. But the longer he worked there, the why seemed like a more and more important question. And now finally, he felt like he was on the verge of answering it.

From Serial Productions and “The New York Times,” I’m Meribah Knight. And this is The Kids of Rutherford County, Episode 3: Would You Like to Sue the Government?

(POWERFUL JAZZ MUSIC)

When Wes found this line about there being a judicial requirement to arrest a kid for any and all infractions, it felt like a smoking gun. He thought he and Mark finally had what they needed to expose Judge Davenport, the person who oversaw the court and the jail, and also slap Rutherford County with a class-action lawsuit, something much larger than just this Hobgood mess.

wes clark

I remember being super, super, super excited about it, and just couldn’t wait to talk to Mark about it.

mark downton

I wasn’t very enthusiastic about it.

meribah knight

Mark didn’t share Wes’s eagerness.

mark downton

I wasn’t enthusiastic at all because Wesley would have ideas a lot. And some of them were not very good. And he’d bring them to me. And I’d look at them. And I’d try to — he’d get very excited. And I’d try to calm him down and all that stuff. And I thought this was another one of those.

meribah knight

Mark felt they had a better chance focusing on a class-action lawsuit related to solitary confinement. They’d already gotten a favorable ruling on that issue. They should spend their time on that. So he waved Wes off. But Wes, he was still convinced. There’s got to be something here.

He figured, if Mark doesn’t want to help me, I’ll find someone who can. So he spoke to a lawyer he really respected, who’d done some important cases involving police misconduct, a guy named Kyle Mothershead. Kyle’s a good lawyer. He’ll tell you so. And that’s not all he’ll tell you.

kyle mothershead

I am a — I am a very good-looking man. I’ll just say that to you. That’s how I would describe it. In juvenile court is actually when I first started being compared to Bradley Cooper.

meribah knight

As you can hear, Kyle has a lot of confidence, and for pretty good reason. For one, he actually does look like Bradley Cooper. And two, he’s won some big civil rights cases in Tennessee. And even though Kyle told me he found Wes to be, quote, “very, very, very, very, very green,” five verys, this case was too good to pass up.

kyle mothershead

I just want it. I want in on that. And I want to be part of that. And I wanted to have a high-profile case that felt important.

meribah knight

Did it seem like a moneymaker?

kyle mothershead

Yeah, but not massive money, but good money.

meribah knight

Kyle laid out a plan for Wes. Let’s first file a lawsuit on behalf of one of the Hobgood clients. Then maybe through discovery in that case, we can find evidence that Judge Davenport really is telling police to arrest all kids in a way that violates state law. So in July 2016, the lawyers filed a lawsuit. And a few months later, they got their first big round of discovery, an email link to a bunch of documents, internal memos from the judge, the jail, the sheriff’s office and the police.

As they started reading through the documents, they quickly found exactly what they were looking for, a series of policy memos, written by Davenport to law enforcement, about arrests. One memo said, even kids accused of the most minor offenses, things like skipping school, smoking cigarettes, or breaking curfew, should be, quote, “taken into custody and transported to the juvenile detention center.”

There was no other option, no notice to show up in court at a later date, nothing.

(soft, sad music)

The police had to arrest kids. Wes couldn’t believe it was written down so starkly, just there, in black and white.

wes clark

I remember thinking, how stupid could you possibly be, to put this a thing in writing, in simple terms, and then send it out to a bunch of law-enforcement agencies, because it immediately, to me, appeared to be illegal and in excess of her jurisdiction, borderline criminal because you’re directing law-enforcement officers to commit mass illegal arrests of children.

meribah knight

This explained so much, why Rutherford County’s Police were arresting so many kids. But it didn’t explain everything Wes had been seeing. Remember, for over two years, Wes had been in court, waiving around the state’s detention statute, complaining that his clients were getting jailed when they shouldn’t be.

Tennessee law was really clear and narrow about when a kid could be locked up, generally for only the most serious charges and circumstances. With the memos, Wes now understood why these kids were being arrested and brought to jail for processing. But why were the county’s juvenile jail staff also locking these kids up instead of sending them home? Well, Wes found the answer to that was also written down in black and white.

wes clark

Come to find out that Lynn Duke just wrote the policies. They got rubber stamped and implemented.

meribah knight

Wes is referring here to Lynn Duke, the woman Davenport appointed to run the jail. For years, the jail had an informal system for its intake process. If a jail staffer wasn’t sure what to do with a kid, put them in jail or let them go, well, they could call administrators like Duke or even Davenport, who would tell the jail staff what to do with the kid.

Lynn Duke declined to talk to me for this story. But in a deposition, she said the problem with this informal system was that it was exhausting. Jail staff had just too many questions for administrators like her, especially after work hours. So in 2008, Duke and her team put together a new intake policy, called the filter system, a quote, “guideline” jail-intake officers could refer to when deciding to keep a kid or release them.

It was a two-column chart. On one side was when to release. On the other was when to hold, i.e., hold a kid in jail. But under that section, many of the reasons listed were in direct violation of actual Tennessee law. For instance, this so-called filter system said kids would be held any time a victim alleged an injury, even just a scratch. A kid could get jailed.

The most disturbing category though, was also the most vague. And it echoed something Wes had heard a lot in Davenport’s courtroom. According to the filter system, any kid would be held if they were considered quote, “a true threat.”

wes clark

That’s the line. That phrase, “true threat,” if deemed a “true threat” to themselves or the community, they could detain them for anything, regardless of what the charge was.

meribah knight

But nowhere in the jail’s manual did it actually say what a true threat was. There was no definition. It was up to the ranking jail staff to decide whatever that phrase meant.

wes clark

So this true-threat analysis was the made-up standard that they could use to detain a lot of kids that shouldn’t be detained.

meribah knight

Wes didn’t just how many kids had been wrongly arrested over the years because the police followed Davenport’s memos or how many kids were wrongly jailed by Lynn Duke’s filter system. So just to get a sense of how big this could be, he went into his own files, to look back at all the kids he’d represented.

wes clark

So what I did was, I sat down in my office. And about a third of my files ended up as these people have claims.

meribah knight

From what Wes could see, about a third of his old clients were either arrested or detained illegally, some both. And he was just one lawyer out of a dozen or so who regularly worked at the court. Plus, Wes had only been there for 2 years. The filter system had been on the books for 8. Davenport had been on the bench for almost 20. How many kids were caught up in this?

speaker 1

I was 16, yeah.

speaker 2

It was when I was 14 years old.

speaker 3

15 years old.

speaker 4

Ninth grade.

speaker 5

I was like 11 or 12.

speaker 6

I think I was 12 years old the first time I got arrested.

meribah knight

How old were you?

speaker 6

Seven.

meribah knight

Oh, my God.

meribah knight

I talked to 25 people, now adults, who told me about being arrested or locked up as kids in Rutherford County.

speaker 1

I had gotten into a fight at school.

speaker 2

We went in a store and decided we were going to steal sunglasses and magazines.

speaker 3

I just ran away. I ran away.

speaker 4

I spray painted a penis on a wall.

meribah knight

A kid named Zeb was in ninth grade when he got charged with petty theft for taking a portable speaker from his grandma.

zeb smotherman

I remember sitting on my bed and I hear a knock at the door. And I kind of go towards the door. And then all of a sudden, they come in, and they said, Mr. Smotherman, you’re under arrest for theft, and put your hands behind your back. And I asked him, I said, man, how long am I going to be arrested for this? He said, for a year, for all I care.

meribah knight

Grace, 16, was at a party with some friends.

grace

We were just sitting on the couch when all of a sudden, we hear a knock at the door. And we go to the door. And it was the police. And they came and they arrested us. They said it was a noise complaint, was why they came. But then they saw that there were alcohol bottles and no adults present.

meribah knight

So the police arrested grace and her friends for underage drinking. And there was Thomas, the fifth-grader arrested for truancy.

thomas

I didn’t want to go to school. And my mom drove me up there, like you got to go to school. And I got out to walk up to the school. And I tried to turn around and run towards her. And I remember I was crying. And I was like, I don’t want to go here. I remember the principal. He grabbed me and threw me in a chair and sat on me until the cops came.

meribah knight

So he put you in a chair and — what, he sat on you?

thomas

Yeah, he literally sat on me and grabbed my hands until the police showed up. And then they arrested me that day.

meribah knight

Brandon, the seven-year-old, was horsing around with his older brothers in a vacant duplex. And they made some holes in the drywall. Sometime after that, the police came to their house.

brandon

My mom said that they weren’t going to take me in. But since they thought I had contributed to what was done to the house, they were like, well, he needs to learn his lesson.

meribah knight

As varied as the reasons for the arrests were, the people I spoke to were usually thrown into the back of a police cruiser, often in handcuffs, and taken to the same place.

grace

So they arrested us and took us to the juvenile detention center. The cop, she said that in normal instances, she would call our parents and have them come pick us up. But she wanted to teach us a lesson. So she was going to keep us in there until Monday. And this was a Friday night.

brandon

So he cuffed us and gave us a ride down to the juvenile detention center, which as you know, is a real-deal, almost like a prison, in my opinion.

thomas

When they took us in, they were just looking at my date of birth and stuff. And they were just like, oh, well you’re very young, a little too young.

meribah knight

Interesting. But they still kept you?

thomas

Yeah, yeah, they still kept me.

meribah knight

Once the jail staff decided to keep a kid, here’s what would happen next.

brandon

They started doing paperwork, intake stuff, the mugshot, check you for injuries, that kind of thing.

thomas

The intake of it was have to strip down naked in front of this weird — and I’m sorry for the language — weird-ass man. And he has to watch you, naked, take an either extremely cold shower or extremely hot shower. So you really feel like your integrity is completely taken away from you.

brandon

Yeah, just ice-cold water and just getting sexually humiliated, verbally, by a large police officer, telling me to spread my cheeks, talking about my penis shrinking.

meribah knight

That’s gross.

brandon

Yeah, tell me about it.

thomas

That was scary at first. They made me put on the little jumpsuit. And I remember being so little, the jumpsuit didn’t even fit me. It was a short-sleeved jumpsuit that went past my elbows.

brandon

I never experienced something like that before at such a young age. So it was something new to me. And I would do a lot of crying and stuff. I was screaming too because I didn’t know where I was. I didn’t even know I was in jail.

thomas

I felt like I didn’t do nothing wrong. I don’t deserve to be locked up. I’m just mad. My mama died. I’m sad. I’m hurt. Y’all should be trying to help me some instead of locking me up.

speaker 1

And that’s your cell. You have a toilet, shower, bench, bed, nothing.

speaker 2

If you did fall asleep, you had to stand in corners.

speaker 3

You don’t get any books. And you’re forced to sit up all day long. You can do push-ups, sit-ups. You can work out. But other than that, if you layed down, they could come yell at you, threaten to yank you up and then put you on lockdown.

meribah knight

Lockdown, you might remember, was the county’s term for solitary confinement. 15-year-old Quintarius Frazier was once put on lockdown for eight days straight.

quintarius frazier

I’m sitting in there, just looking at myself, thinking a lot of crazy, bad thoughts. I wanted to really take my life because I’m in there and I’m just cold and I was just stressed. And then it got to the point where when I started thinking those thoughts, I would read the Bible because that’s all I had, was a Bible.

meribah knight

Kids told me about their struggles to get their basic needs met. Here’s grace, the girl arrested for underage drinking.

grace

So while I was there, I started my period. And they refused to give me any kind of tampons or pads or anything. So I basically sat in a bloody jumpsuit for two full days while I was there.

meribah knight

Dylan was 15 years old when he went to jail. It was the first time he’d ever been in trouble with the law.

dylan

I had asked him for my medication. They weren’t going to give me that. They weren’t going to give me my retainer, which you know is one thing because that’s metal. But my psychiatrist prescribed medication for my bipolar disorder and my depression. And so there’s just a lot of constant anxiety and stuff.

And so to be in there without this medication, now I’m manic depressive in this cell. And that’s either got you bouncing off the walls or wanting to sleep all day. And you can’t do either of them. You’re stuck in a box. And so it’s almost like a four-day panic attack.

I remember on the fourth day, I was starting to get really manic and out of control.

meribah knight

At some point, the kids will go before Judge Davenport for their hearing, where they’d find out if they’d be released or stay in jail even longer.

speaker 1

They had us in shackles from our feet to our arms, going into court.

speaker 2

I just remember staying in there. And I’m pretty sure I had — I guess they’re not handcuffs if they’re around your feet. But shackles —

meribah knight

Oh, the shackles?

speaker

Yeah, around our feet. And our parents were there. And all my friends’ parents were there. And they had all four of us come out there. So obviously, just had been in there for two days and been crying and looking a mess. And I was just embarrassed.

meribah knight

What do you remember about the judge?

speaker 1

She called our parents up and made them stand single file in front of her, and said that because of what they were doing as parents, that this was the problem with Rutherford County.

speaker 2

She treated us like we were beneath her.

speaker 1

That there were kids like us running around the street.

speaker 2

She treated us like we were scum.

speaker 3

The one thing I remember is, she said that I was a threat to myself and my society.

speaker 4

Yeah, she told me that I was a menace to society. And I was deemed infamous, is what she called me.

speaker 5

I think she had a gavel too and hit it, to — you’re staying in juvenile until I see fit to take you out.

speaker 6

Something about I wouldn’t see Rutherford County again until I was an adult and out of her courtroom.

meribah knight

As for seven-year-old Brandon, Judge Davenport sent him back to jail for another week.

brandon

Because for me, I feel like it was like a dream that never happened. But it actually happened.

meribah knight

With two key pieces of evidence in hand, the arrest policy and the filter system, Wes knew they had the makings of a massive lawsuit, just the kind of case he’d been dreaming of. These policies have been on the books for years. And now, seeing just how many of his own clients were affected, it didn’t take much imagination to ponder the scope of it all, 4, 5 6,000 kids maybe, all of whom were now potential plaintiffs.

wes clark

So I started calling those kids and their parents, and just telling them, hey, I’m Wesley. Good to talk to you again. I hope things are going well. Would you like to sue the government?

meribah knight

When a handful said yes, that they were prepared to be the named plaintiffs for a class action, that’s when things got real. Even mark, who dismissed all this early on, was by now, fully on board.

mark downton

This was now a huge case. It was a huge case.

meribah knight

A case that could finally hold the County responsible for its juvenile justice system, and make a difference in the lives of the kids there. But let’s be honest. These guys are also plaintiff’s lawyers. And they also saw the potential for their lives to change.

wes clark

We did think that we were going to make more money than we’d ever made on anything because it was such — it seemed so obvious to us that this was a gross deprivation of the Civil Rights of thousands of children. And how could that not be worth millions of dollars?

mark downton

$30 million, I think, is what Wesley and I would throw around.

meribah knight

The guys now knew, with all their hard evidence, that they had a powerful story to tell in court about the illegal things Rutherford County and Judge Davenport had been doing to kids. But for years, Judge Davenport had been telling her own story. And that story held a different kind of power. That’s after the break.

(soft, sad music)
archived recording

(SINGING) WGNS, Murfreesboro.

archived recording (bart walker iii)

Well, good morning to you. Welcome in to the action line from WGNS. This morning, we’re talking about the Rutherford County Juvenile court system. And Judge Donna Scott Davenport is our guest this morning. Good morning to you.

archived recording (donna scott davenport)

Good morning, Bart.

archived recording (bart walker iii)

Good to have you with us today.

archived recording (donna scott davenport)

Thank you, always —

meribah knight

Judge Davenport wouldn’t talk to me. So I wasn’t able to ask her directly any of my questions, which were all variations of the same question. Why? Why order law enforcement to arrest children when they shouldn’t? Why allow jail staff to lock them up when they shouldn’t? But there was a place where, for 10 years, Judge Davenport shared many of her views on all things juvenile court, WGNS Radio, Rutherford County’s “Good Neighbor” Station. On the first Tuesday of every month, she could be heard chatting with host, Bart Walker III.

archived recording (bart walker iii)

And it’s a sunny day out today.

archived recording (donna scott davenport)

It is. Even if we got a little snow coming in, that’s OK. We’re always open for business down on South Church Street.

archived recording (bart walker iii)

Well, of course, tomorrow —

meribah knight

I’ve listened to 70 hours worth of these radio broadcasts. And in the process, I’ve come to understand something of Judge Davenport’s worldview, a worldview with a healthy dose of nostalgia for a simpler time —

archived recording (donna scott davenport)

We don’t have that old, traditional family, sit down at dinner, how was your day —

meribah knight

— a time when society had better values —

archived recording (donna scott davenport)

Then we continue to go downward with our morals and our ethics.

meribah knight

— back before things like cell phones and video games infiltrated kids’ lives.

archived recording (donna scott davenport)

And every year, whatever would be new with the video games, and now we’ve got the phones and the games, with that comes increasing aggression. And I’ve been here so long that I do see the increase of our violence. The main thing that —

meribah knight

During the years Davenport had this radio segment, juvenile crime in Rutherford County was actually on the decline. But statistics be damned. According to Judge Davenport, things were getting worse every year. And she was seeing younger and younger kids coming into her courtroom.

archived recording (donna scott davenport)

We are having younger children that need assistance. And we do not have programs for children 11, 10, 9, 8, 7. And we are locking —

archived recording (bart walker iii)

You have seven-year-olds now?

archived recording (donna scott davenport)

I’ve have 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.

archived recording (bart walker iii)

That’s scary.

archived recording (donna scott davenport)

Yes.

archived recording (bart walker iii)

That sounds like kindergarten kids.

meribah knight

Part of the problem was parenting. Judge Davenport said many parents were simply unwilling to do what was necessary to keep their kids safe.

archived recording (donna scott davenport)

You need to be monitoring what they do. Do not let them lock their bedroom door and not allow you in. And some parents, they’ll say, well, what do you want me to do? Well, take the door off the hinges. Oh, well, that’s a good idea. Well, they don’t need to be driving. Well, disable the car. Take the car keys. Don’t have your keys out where they can take them. Common sense. We need a Department of Common Sense.

meribah knight

Listening to these radio segments, it sounded to me that Judge Davenport saw herself as part of that Department of Common Sense, waging a battle against the decline in civility and morals, the increase in entitlement and aggression. And the detention center was a vital tool for keeping kids from going down that path.

archived recording (donna scott davenport)

And they know if they break the law, there’s going to be a consequence. And they’re going to be detained, possibly. They’re going to be held for a while. And they are going to be held accountable for their actions. And there is no more slap on the wrist. They’re going to see some consequence. And I’d like to think that that’s part of it, and that we will use our facility to detain children.

meribah knight

Davenport bragged about the detention center all the time, the great staff there, the great programming, how state of the art it was. She called it a dream come true, and even opened it up for tours.

archived recording (bart walker iii)

You have an open house coming up soon.

archived recording (donna scott davenport)

Yes, we’re always excited about our open house. And you can bring your family. We do like to wet your whistle there and give you a little piece of cake. And we will have two tours.

meribah knight

As for the kids who are held in the jail, Davenport liked to refer to them as hers, as in, I’m seeing a lot of aggression in my 9 and 10-year-olds. In fact, her role as a stand-in parent was pretty explicit.

archived recording (donna scott davenport)

Absolutely.

archived recording (bart walker iii)

In watching you, you act like a proud parent.

archived recording (donna scott davenport)

Well, I’ve been called the Mother of the County. So — (LAUGHS)

archived recording (bart walker iii)

That is good to see.

archived recording (donna scott davenport)

But I am. I’m very proud of them because that’s my job, is to push them and shove them and fuss at them to know what’s important, and help shape their lives and have them a future. That’s mine.

meribah knight

Listeners to the radio show would sometimes call in to praise Judge Davenport’s work.

archived recording

We just wanted to call in and tell Judge Davenport how much we appreciate her, and wanted to thank her for everything she does. You’re a very good judge. You’re very fair. I thought you do a very good job. I was very impressed.

archived recording (rich campbell)

This is Rich Campbell. I just wanted to say, thank you for your years of leading the young people of this County. You’ve done a heck of a job.

archived recording (donna scott davenport)

Well, that’s what I love doing every day.

archived recording (rich campbell)

Well, I know. I know it is. Thank you.

meribah knight

It’s like in one reality, there were the lawyers, Wes and Mark, and now Kyle, who were saying, the way you’ve been running this operation is against the law. And it’s pretty clear. The State says exactly when to arrest and jail a kid. And you and the County have ignored what the State says, and made up your own rules. But on the other side was Judge Davenport, who was confident in her own criteria.

archived recording (donna scott davenport)

And then you look to see if they are a risk to themselves or a risk to the community. And if there is a finding that there are risks, then we can hold them. We don’t use our facility as punishment. We use it only as detainment, if they’re a risk to themselves or a risk to our community. If they pose a risk to themselves or this community, we will utilize our detention facility.

archived recording

A special thank you to Judge Donna Scott Davenport for joining us this morning.

archived recording (bart walker iii)

Hey, stay with us. We’re going to check on the weather. And we’ll be back.

(dolly parton, “imagine”)

(VOCALIZING)

(SINGING) You may say that I’m a dreamer, but I’m not the only —

meribah knight

In the spring of 2017, nine months after Wes, Mark, and Kyle filed their lawsuit, they got their chance to put the two versions of reality side by side in a different courtroom, where a different judge presided. It was a preliminary injunction hearing, where they would present all the evidence and say to a federal judge, hey, while we know this lawsuit is still going to take a while to resolve, in the meantime, Rutherford County is illegally arresting and jailing kids. Can you force their hand, make them stop using these policies immediately?

The attorneys had uncovered a hefty bit of evidence to present, the memos outlining the arrest policy, the jail’s manual, laying out the filter system. There was also some striking data from the County and the State that they found too, from just a few years before. It suggested that Rutherford County had been jailing kids at 10 times the state average. They also had depositions.

Judge Davenport, in a deposition, told the lawyers that when she’d issued her arrest memos, it was never her intention to take away police discretion. But a sheriff’s deputy, in his own deposition, said essentially, well, that’s how his Department interpreted Davenport’s memos. It was why they arrested kids for even the most minor offenses. It’s our policy to obey court orders and not be in contempt of juvenile court, the deputy told the lawyers.

Jail staffers testified that they were trained on the filter system, that they could be quizzed on it went up for a promotion or disciplined for not applying it as written. One said, we were told, when in doubt, hold them because it’s better to hold a kid that should have been released than release a child that should have been held.

Now, inside the stately halls of Nashville’s Federal Courthouse, the federal judge would weigh the lawyers evidence. And he would decide what reality they were living in, Judge Davenport’s or the law’s. Here’s Wes.

wes clark

It was surreal. I remember, I’m waiting outside the courtroom before the hearing is to begin. And the county’s lawyers are there. And a couple of the other witnesses are there. And then suddenly, Judge Davenport walks up. And I’m like, oh, my god, there she is. And it was such a different context from how I had previously encountered her. And she was here to have to give an accounting for the policies that she had implemented at this place.

And so I was at the counsel table. And I only examined one of the witnesses during that hearing, partially because Kyle was not impressed with my deposition skills. But I watched as he examined Duke.

meribah knight

Again, Duke being Lynn Duke, who ran the jail and put together the filter system.

wes clark

As he examined Duke and Judge Davenport, and in that really thorough meticulous way, like he wouldn’t let them avoid a question. And if they tried to just talk around his questions, he would just ask it again and nail them down to the reality of what they had been doing here, and of the reality that this two pages of statutory mandate, that I had been carrying on about years before that, they now had to explain why they weren’t following it.

And they simply couldn’t. Judge Davenport, she just could not give a straight answer, that made any sense, about why that statute wasn’t being followed. And in that context, everyone in the room realized how absurd it was that the statute wasn’t being followed. So it was just — it was the inverse of the review of the statute in the juvenile court.

meribah knight

Yeah, dig into that a little more. So you’d spent years waving the statute around, telling her you’re not following it. And now, she’s on the witness stand, in a federal court. And she’s having to explain why she didn’t follow it.

wes clark

Yeah, it was so satisfying. I remember grinning. I remember just feeling my cheeks from the musculature tension of me grinning for the entire time she was trying to give some cohesive explanation for the detention policy. And at first, I was worried. Is there something we don’t know? Is there some brilliant legal strategy they’re going to employ here today that we just didn’t see coming?

And whenever she started talking about the safety of the kids and the community as the standard, I knew that this was it. She was going down. And I remember looking up at — Judge Waverly Crenshaw is a very imposing intellect and figure. And I’m watching him observe her testimony.

And I remember he held his face with his hand. And his elbow was down. He was taking notes. And then at some point, he just set his pen down and put his hands and crossed them in front of him, and didn’t take any more notes. And I was thinking, that’s a good sign that he’s already made up his mind as to the testimony that’s being presented by this witness.

meribah knight

Up until now, had you ever contemplated what Davenport’s motivations were?

wes clark

Yes. And we knew that it was not that she was somehow pocketing money off of any of this. We knew that was not what was happening. So the question still remained, why do this? What’s the benefit? But the answer to that question, I believe, is just power, that this bureaucracy that she was the chief administrator over, this was all wrapped up in her identity.

meribah knight

Do you think she didn’t understand the statute? Or do you think she cared more about power than the statute?

wes clark

I think that it is impossible for her not to have understood the statute because I explained it to her on dozens and dozens of occasions. And I don’t think she’s dumb. I don’t think she’s an idiot. It doesn’t take 170 IQ to understand how that statute applies in that context. And I don’t know what exactly is in her mind. I just know that is not a realistic possibility.

meribah knight

The hearing lasted only one day. And then the lawyers waited for a decision. If Judge Crenshaw rejected their request for an injunction, that could kill the entire case. It would mean the lawyers were out months of work and thousands of dollars. Even more, Rutherford County would likely continue to jail kids at an extraordinary rate.

It took about a month, until one day, having just finished a medical appointment, and sitting in his car in the parking lot, Wes got a notification. The judge’s ruling was in. Only Wes couldn’t read the order on his phone.

wes clark

So I remember flinging the phone into the passenger seat. And I’m backing up out of the parking lot. And I’m trying to use the voice dial to yell at my car, to call Mark Downton. And I’m just dying to get back to my office so I can actually open the order up and see for myself. But Mark picks up. And he’s already — he’s got his hands on the actual order. And we’re basically like schoolchildren who’ve just gotten a free holiday or something.

meribah knight

Needless to say, they’d won.

wes clark

We were screaming, like, can you believe it, we did it, we did it, blah, blah, blah. They’re so fucked. I think we probably said that two or three times, at least. They are so fucked.

meribah knight

Judge Crenshaw found that the kids were, quote, “suffering irreparable harm every day through Rutherford County’s illegal detention of them.” He ordered the County to stop using the filter system immediately. He also said, the arrest policy likely violated State law. But he ruled it wasn’t a constitutional issue. So it was out of his hands. That said, police departments in the County eventually stopped following Davenport’s policy anyway.

For Wes, he told me Judge Crenshaw’s ruling was the best thing he’d ever read in his entire life. For so long, he’d complained about Judge Davenport and what her court and detention center were doing to children, the arrests, the jailings. And for so long, he felt like he’d failed, failed to get anyone to see what he did.

Now, finally, his reality had prevailed. What had been happening to the kids in Rutherford County was wrong. The next step in the lawsuit was to make the County pay for it. That’s on the last episode of The Kids of Rutherford County.

(UPBEAT MUSIC)

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, Meribah Knight, with additional reporting from Ken Armstrong. The show was produced by Daniel Guillemette, with additional production by Michelle Navarro, editing from Julie Snyder and Jen Guerra along with Sarah Blustain and Ken Armstrong at ProPublica and my colleague, Tony Gonzalez, at Nashville Public Radio. Additional editing from Anita Badejo and Alex Kotlowitz.

The supervising producer for Serial Productions is Ndeye Thioubou. 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, Al-Amyn Sumar, and Simone Procas.

The art for our show comes from Pablo Delcan. Additional production from Jenelle Pifer. Mack Miller is the executive assistant for Serial. Sam Dolnick is the deputy managing editor of “The New York Times.” Special Thanks to Katie Mingle, Mike Comite, Aaron Reiss, Bianca Giaever, Jordan McCarley and Rob Robinson. The Kids of Rutherford County is produced by Serial Productions, “The New York Times,” ProPublica, and Nashville Public Radio.

By NAIS

THE NAIS IS OFFICIAL EDITOR ON NAIS NEWS

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