- (female announcer) Production funding for Behind the Headlines is made possible in part by the WKNO Production Fund, the WKNO Endowment Fund, and by viewers like you, thank you.

- A deeper look at the courts and criminal justice system tonight, on Behind the Headlines.

[intense orchestral music] I'm Eric Barnes with The Daily Memphian.

Thanks for joining us.

I am joined tonight by Josh Spickler, he's Executive director of Just City.

Thanks for being here.

- Sure.

- Along with Yonée Gibson, who's a Program Manager for Just City.

Thank you for being here.

- Absolutely.

- And Aarron Fleming, a reporter with The Daily Memphian.

Before we start, Josh, we've had you on many times, but actually, and I think most people watching the show and kind of following these sort of things know what Just City does, but let's actually set that up.

Give me your quick summary if you're stuck in an elevator with someone, [Josh laughing] of how you'd describe Just City.

- Yeah, we're celebrating 10 years this year, and we have a few programs that help people in the criminal legal system.

One of those is about expungements, people who've been through and are eligible to have their record cleared, we help them with that.

We have a bail fund where we pay low-level bails and let people get out and handle their case from the community.

Yonée runs our Court Watch program, which recruits volunteers to send them into the courtroom.

We're involved in litigation every now and then, but mostly our hope is that the criminal legal system becomes more fair for everyone, provides public safety in actual, meaningful ways, and makes the system smaller, more transparent, more affordable.

- And you're a former, you were in the Public Defender's office before you got to Just City.

- Correct.

- We did a show last week with Bill Gibbons, Head of the Memphis Shelby County Crime Commission, former DA, former Head of Tennessee Homeland Security, and so on, about a report that the state did, a comptroller report, about just the data in the court system and in the criminal court system, specifically in Shelby County.

They looked at a year, in some cases, maybe two years, felonies, misdemeanors, and the volume.

We'll get into some of those numbers as we go, but a big takeaway was, the data is not clean.

And this is not meant to be a software, you know, coding database management show, but as we talked about last week with Gibbons, and talked about with the two of you, it does make it hard, objectively speaking, to understand what's going on.

We deal with this, Aarron deals with this in the news business, and not for our own sake, but just to inform the public of what's really going on.

Huge questions that get debated about people out on bail who re-offend, people who are rearrested, people who are let go on their own recognizance, versus a low bail.

All of that is not real easy to manage among felonies at a time when a whole lot of emphasis over the last five years, I mean, it's always been an issue in my time in Memphis, but especially over the last five years, this emphasis on crime, criminal justice, bail, and all these issues.

So, your key takeaways of the impact of getting this report from the state?

- Yeah, I think it was a really good, thorough, professional, well-done investigation.

I think the folks who prepared it really took their time and learned about this system.

I mean, this is a notorious problem with criminal justice, if you take any interest in it whatsoever, one of the first things you realize is that the data is terrible, right?

It's really hard to get data, it's hard to understand it.

Whether you're a reporter just getting into it, or whether you're someone who's interested in making it better, data is a real big challenge with criminal justice.

And so the report ultimately came away with that same understanding.

You know, they went literally into courtrooms, and sat, and watched, and observed, and took notes in order to get some of the data.

And that is not how we should be measuring things [chuckles] that we spend this much money on.

- Yeah, it was notable, I think just as someone who read, I will admit to only reading the executive summary, there's a full report, it tried very hard to be an apolitical report.

I mean, often when we cover the legislature, we have legislators on, they're Republican, they're Democrat, there's partisan, there's, you know, difference of opinion, some agreement.

This was a very apolitical, very clinical, academic-reading report about, the simple example that I dwell on, but I think it tells a lot is, when people in Shelby County, and this is not unique to Shelby County, they talk about that, but when people in Shelby County go from potentially one of the, what, eight or nine, eight General Sessions criminal courts over to the one of the nine Shelby County criminal courts, the unique identifier changes.

So it's like having two social security numbers.

- And there's a third number in between.

- And there's, okay, a third number in between.

So how you just track what the history of this person is.

And that goes both ways, right?

And I'll start bringing Yonée in here, this person could be guilty of a horrendous crime, this person could be completely innocent.

It goes both ways.

It's not, I don't think, and Gibbons talked about this, it's not about sort of being soft on criminals, or even being hard on criminals, it's just knowing what's going on.

Your take on that report, and also you oversee the Court Watch program that Josh mentioned, how does that jive, or not match, what this report found?

- Yeah, as Josh said, it's a very like, well-done report.

I do think, like, selfishly, I'm like very glad that they had to court watch to get the data, because I think it just highlights like the importance of people going into court and knowing what's going on.

From like what we see, and from what like they saw as well, I feel like it's very compatible.

I mean, we're just seeing a lot of the same like delays, we're seeing a lot of people like not actually have court, that is like reset, reset, reset, reset.

Not not have it, they are having like their cases reset so many times.

And like General Sessions is getting 'em done fast, but they don't handle any felonies.

But Criminal Court is taking so long, and people are just languishing in jail, like, while we're waiting.

And the jail right now feels like it's in a state of emergency.

- Yeah.

And that's a pretty bipartisan take on what's going on with the jail.

But let me bring in Aarron Fleming from The Daily Memphian.

- I mean, I guess my question is, you guys have been doing this for a while with the Court Watch program, and was there anything in the report that you guys have seen personally that maybe didn't get hit on?

- I think one of the big takeaways for me was, in the two years plus since Steve Mulroy was elected as the District Attorney, felonies of all types, of all five different felony types, the sentence lengths increased.

People are being punished more under Steve Mulroy than they were in the period before he was elected.

To me, I mean, we're not a prosecutor watchdog organization, but I think that's a telling finding, based on some of the things we've heard around this table, and some of the things we've read in The Daily Memphian about Steve Mulroy, people are being punished more under his tenure.

And I think that's an interesting finding, I found that interesting.

There are other things that I found really interesting about the report, but it wasn't too unexpected, based on what we see in court every day.

- Let me add, actually, that we have Steve Mulroy coming on the show next week, and we'll talk about this report, and all kinds of things, and sentencing and so on.

But back to you, Aarron.

- That's about all I had.

- What's that?

- I think that's all I had.

- Okay, Yonée, let's go deeper into the Court Watch program.

You send people in there, you guys put a report out in 2024, some of it is about sort of, you measure, talk about the key things you guys measure.

I won't do it for you.

Key things that you're measuring.

- Yeah so, we watch a lot of judicial conduct.

And so what we are like, in the process of, is like, how do we go deeper?

And so right now we are watching like, when does court start, and how long is court actually in session?

Because there's a lot of recesses.

And because cases take so long, we wanna know like, how much time is actually spent on the bench?

We wanna make sure that judges are being sensitive to whatever case is before them.

You wanna make sure that there is no bias, that they're not treating any group of people differently based on the same charge.

And then also just wanna make sure that people are getting access to courts, because that is a right, that is guaranteed under our constitution.

But we're not a prosecution watchdog, But I am like, "Oh, hey, there are some things that DA Mulroy has ran on that is inconsistent with what we're seeing in court."

And so we're like, how do we watch that as well?

- And talk about that inconsistency, and I'll bring it up with him next week, and he can, because he's a fan of the show, so he'll be able to address this next week.

- Yeah.

He ran really strongly on like, just focusing on violent crimes, but like, as Josh said, like across all felony levels, sentences are getting harsher.

There's a lot of things that I feel like he- - Is that a result though of changes in the law, is that the result, the sentences are in part the judge, right, I mean, it's a kind of negotiation, for lack of a better word, between the prosecutor and the judge, and you know, potentially the defendant.

Or is this- - Like the state and the prosecution recommends things to the judges.

- Okay.

- And so like, his campaign was so focused on being so different from Weirich that it is just interesting to see.

- Yeah.

- The state has almost all the power in that negotiation, they start the bidding, if you will.

And so it is nearly entirely the district attorney, and a defense attorney, who are coming to these sentence levels.

And I wanna be clear that I'm not here to beat up on Steve Mulroy, I mean, in full disclosure, both Yonée and I were on his transition team.

- Yeah, I was gonna bring that up.

- And, you know, believe that sentences should in fact not be longer.

And so it's a bit surprising that this report reflected that.

- You talked about Court Watch, and I was looking at last year's report, and there was, you know, court starting at 9:00, 9:30, after 9:00, I mean, not a whole lot, and I've heard that from people across the spectrum, not a lot of people wanna say it publicly, we've done some reporting on that, that there is some frustration about how little the courts are in session.

- Yeah.

- How do you quantify that?

Or what can people do about that?

- It's a real big challenge, and it's one of the very, very many data points that we don't collect well in the criminal legal system.

We can't measure it.

I mean, unless someone is sitting in that courtroom, writing down, which we do, "On the bench at 9:02," you know, "Gavel's out of session at 12:03," right?

That's the only way.

And we can do that every day across, how many courtrooms, eighteen courtrooms, and it's nearly impossible.

Other than putting a judge on a time clock, I don't know.

But it is a problem.

And another thing that this report brought up that we see, and Yonée just mentioned, is the length of time it takes to get through a case, and the backup in these dockets, and it compares Shelby to other counties across the state.

And the breaking through that log jam is almost exclusively the judge's purview, right?

A judge can manage his or her docket in ways that can get through some of that backlog.

- But do you worry that efficiency will put more people in jail, which you would like...

I think it's fair to say, you're not opposed to violent felons being put in jail, but, you can correct me if I said that wrong, but do you worry that efficiency results in more people going to jail unnecessarily?

- I don't.

I think one thing we've learned in the reforms that we put into place in Shelby County a couple of years ago with regard to bail is, when we put public defenders in place earlier, which is one thing that that standing bail order did, cases are resolved more quickly.

And remember, 60% of cases in General Sessions are dismissed, and nearly 50% in Criminal Court.

So I don't worry about that.

Efficiency, you know, justice delayed is justice denied, right?

We know the quicker we can get to justice, the better.

- Before I go back to Aarron, let me just mention some numbers here, from this report, which, again, people can get at dailymemphian.com, or go to the comptroller's website.

There were 8,750 felony cases in 2022, what was it here, that about two years later, twenty-seven percent were still pending, you know, which speaks to some of the length that you guys are talking about.

There were 100,000 cases in all the General Sessions and Criminal Courts, those include misdemeanors as well.

So we're talking about this massive volume of cases.

But let me get Aarron back in the mix.

- So, obviously for people like us, we're sort of interested in knowing what's going on in the system, and making sure, like we talked about the numbers not adding up and having a different number when you're going through the system, why is that important for people on the ground?

Like how is that affecting people that are in the system, or people that have people in the system?

Why is that important for people other than us?

- Well, these delays, in many cases, mean people are sitting in jail, as Yonée mentioned a second ago.

Our time to disposition is up to 46 days in Shelby County.

And what we know about people who sit in jail is that the consequences begin to mount very quickly, the consequences to their family, the consequences to their employment, to their health, to their recidivism probabilities.

We know that the longer you stay in pretrial detention, which is what we're talking about, this is the biggest, actually, impact of these delays, is the jail itself, which Shelby County spends a third of its general fund, a third of its general fund, $167 million, on this jail every year.

And so if we can reduce the amount of time people spend in there, I think, as Bill Gibbons said last week, we can reduce our jail population.

It is one factor to jail population, there are others that I think are more important, but the biggest implication here is jail, and we know people are dying in that jail, you've reported on that.

It is not a place where we want people to be any longer than they have to, and so these delays implicate that jail.

- The report also talks about, you know, there's like, implementing national standards, and trying to speed this thing up.

Like, how long do you think that would take?

I mean, obviously, it wouldn't be something that would happen overnight.

- Yeah, and I think, you know, Yonée can speak to what the judges, how they run their courtrooms, and I think there's gonna be some resistance there, they don't act all together very often at all, it would take an effort, it would take leadership.

But it does lie within those judges' individual courtrooms, and how they run their docket, how they talk to those attorneys.

- I think it also takes a lot more recording than is going on right now.

And so General Sessions is not a court of records, and so only preliminary hearings and plea deals are recorded.

And so there's a lot of cases that are happening that just aren't being recorded.

There's a lot of, and then upstairs, they are-- - Upstairs being?

- Oh yes, upstairs in Criminal Court, the state-level court, they are recording, but then you have to pay for an audio transcription.

And so a lot of the information that you would get from court, we would have to start recording properly and start making that accessible to the people, and like making that an accessible court of records, and like people should be able to have, whatever their court case, they should be able to have it, a copy of it if they need it, they should be able to be able to reference it back.

And we should be able to reference it if we're going to talk about like, "Hey, what does the data look like?"

Well, we don't actually know if we're not recording it.

- We did some work on this some years ago now, 'cause I have no sense of time, about trying to count how many cases the judges heard, how many they closed, how many.

And it was an absolute nightmare, going through paper logs, trying to piece things together.

I think even when we published some of the numbers, judges came back and said, "Well, that's not true.

It was this."

And, "Well, could you make this readily available?"

And we, of course, corrected that.

And so again, when we had these debates, and you and I and others have these debates at this table about laws at the state that are being passed, people saying, "Well, this person was out on bail, and they reoffended, and the whole system's broken," without that common baseline, it's kind of hard.

We're kind of talking past each other, it seems to me.

- Again, yeah, I think in America, and especially in Shelby County, which is one of the most incarcerated places in the most incarcerated country in the world, we have long thought that more is better, that the more people we can bring in and prosecute, that the more sentenced, the longer the sentence, the better, the more jail population, the safer we are.

And these are things that are not true.

So we've got to begin to hone in on the metrics that actually makes sense, right?

How long is a judge on the bench?

When a prosecutor offers and gets this conviction for this sentence, what is the outcome?

What is the cost, number one?

DAs across the country are beginning to be required to present that cost to the judge before the judge approves the sentence, right?

And then at the end, 5 years, 10 years later, has that person recidivated, has that person come back into the system?

Those are the types of things we need to be measuring, because more is not better, and we know a lot about the destructive nature of more.

- Jail is a big topic right now, the conversation about a new jail, about all the problems.

I mean, you alluded to them.

Are you in favor of a new jail?

- Well, I can't sit here and say that, if you walk by that jail at 201 Poplar you know that it needs to be replaced.

It is an old building, it is dangerous in and of itself.

But I am not in favor of a sales tax, or a property tax, or even talking about the plans for a jail until we answer the question, why are there 2,600 men in that jail right now today at 201 Poplar, and another 300 women at Jail East?

Why do we have that number of people there, and why has it increased the way it has in the last two years?

We can build a much different jail if we would get the process right-sized.

- But so it's not an opposition to jail in and of itself, or a new jail in and of itself?

It's just why, you know- - I'm not an abolitionist, I believe Shelby County needs a jail.

[chuckles] - Yeah, yeah.

No, no, no.

Because you know there are people who think- - There are.

- That's what you believe.

- There are, and I'm not one.

Unfortunately in America in 2025, jails are necessary.

But it's ridiculous to think that we need 3,000 men, women, and children in our jail in Shelby County.

In a community the size of ours, we do not.

And the people in jail do not need what we're giving them, which is that building, which are those conditions, which is that treatment, that understaffing, that neglect, all of the things that they're receiving.

We can have a jail that's much, much smaller, and much more affordable also.

- Yeah.

Let me circle back before we go to Aarron, to you Yonée, on a thing you said about the Court Watch program and the volunteers that are in there about the sensitivity of judges.

Follow up on that, what did you mean when you talk about the sensitivity they showed?

- Yeah so, we have observed a case where a judge, a woman's there for sexual assault and the judge talks about her legs in the middle of the courtroom.

Like, on a sexual assault case, that is not what you want to hear the judge talking about, you don't want to hear yourself objectified as the victim in that case.

And so I think judges just understanding like, hey, yes, it's just another day at work for you, but this is somebody's life, I think it's important to be mindful that, hey, your words actually matter.

Your words matter more because you are a judge.

And so being sensitive and being mindful of like, "Oh, maybe I shouldn't make light of this very serious situation."

- Yeah.

Bring Aarron in here.

- Speaking about the judges again, you mentioned that a lot of this is coming down to how they run their courtrooms and things like that, so how do you sort of make them work?

I mean, we've got the Board of Judicial Conduct, but like, can they put them on a time clock, can they make them show up at nine o'clock?

I doubt they can, right?

- Yeah, it's really hard to hold elected officials accountable in between elections.

And, unfortunately, that's an eight-year term in Tennessee.

And so the comptroller's report references a study, and I wish I had memorized this before we went on air, but there is a not too old study about docket management, and that's what we're talking about, the docket is the series of cases that a judge hears every day, and managing that docket and limiting the number of times that you reset a case is critical to reducing this backlog and speeding cases up.

And judges have to do that individually in their courtroom, they have to say, "You will get," for example, "Two resets after your attorney is present, "and then you will have to come and tell me what you're gonna do with the case or we're going to trial."

Right?

And that's it.

And that can be done a lot faster than the nine months that it's taking us generally to get a case done.

So they have to choose to do it, or they have to feel some pressure from the public to do it, the Board of Judicial Conduct can't make them do it.

I would say Shelby County Government, who foots the bill, and the State of Tennessee, which foots the bill, could have some say in this.

But it's really hard, because they're elected officials, individually in their own capacity, and they can run the courtrooms generally how they want.

- With the five minutes left here, we were talking about the number of people in the jail, and so on, but all this is against the backdrop of the crime stats by and large coming down.

- That's right.

- Even since last week, we talked about it with Bill Gibbons, and then the quarterly numbers came out, so these are for the year end 2024, overall crime down 11% from '23 to '24, violent crime down only 4%, murders fell 30%, major property down 20%, serious juvenile crime is the low point as of 2023.

That's the data that was available when I was putting this together.

Crime's trending down in a lot of key categories.

Is that not possibly a result of more people being in jail and harsher sentences by the DA?

- Well, let's remember the lag that I just talked about in my last answer, is months, averages months, typically years on these crimes.

So those folks are still in jail, right?

Those cases, for fewer crimes, right, and remember, we're reporting crimes from the street level, right, when a victim complains of a crime to the police, and an arrest is made, that's reported, that's what we're talking about.

Sixty percent of those are dismissed in General, right?

So, the delay, number one, tells me that that is not the case, that in spite of what we're doing, crime is going down.

Crime is so complicated, and I know I've said this a million times around this table, the factors that go into our crime rates and the amount of crime that is happening on our streets is incredibly complex.

And I try not to sit here and pretend that I know the answer, 'cause there is no one answer, there are thousands and thousands of answers that even sociologists can't give you a clear answer to.

- But do you point to any, like in, in any part of any sort of crime, I mean, we had CJ Davis on a couple months ago, she talked about, and people can go back and get that at wkno.org, YouTube, Daily Memphian, and she talked about certain strategies, being smarter about certain things, focusing on people, around like the car break-ins and the window break-ins that just felt like were ubiquitous for a couple years there, and finding the people who really are committing those, concentrating on certain areas.

I mean, do you give credence to some of those policing strategies as being helping to prevent crime or no?

- Again, I'm not a policing expert, and that is a factor, I can't deny that how we police is a factor.

But what I do know is that Just City and many of our allies in this community helped Shelby County decide how to use the jail differently.

And this report, this comptroller report we're here to talk about, is the third such report that measures how people do when they're out on bail, and it found no impact on crime.

Jonathan Bennett sat here at this table last week and said it, these reforms have not caused this community to be more dangerous.

- The changes in the bail.

- That's right.

They have not.

And yet we continue to spend a third of our general fund on the jail, and yet people continue to die at an incredible level.

And that is baffling to me, why we wouldn't just reduce the population of our jail while crime's going down, when people are dying.

- But, I was gonna go to Aarron, [laughs] reduce the population of jail, who gets out?

The non-violent offenders?

I mean, I don't think you're advocating for someone accused of multiple shootings to be out of jail.

- I'm not.

Another finding in this report is that bail amounts have gone up.

We had a man just this week with our bail fund who kept a rental car too long.

That is unacceptable, and you must be held accountable for that, that was his only alleged defense in his lifetime, is keeping a rental car longer than the period of rental, and he was set a $15,000 bond.

That's a bond amount that, 10 years ago, as an attorney, I would've seen maybe for a C-felony, a very serious felony where bodily injury is alleged.

That's the kind of thing we're seeing.

We're seeing a response to the media narrative, and to certain lawmakers narratives, that are keeping people like this man in the jail for weeks at a time when he's not dangerous.

- Play out an alternative, because as you said, he shouldn't have kept that car.

What's the alternative, a diversion program or- - He comes to court and answers to the charge, just like you or I would, we would pay the $15,000 bail.

He couldn't, it was his source of income, he was an Uber driver, and he couldn't get out of jail.

And so he stays there for three weeks, four weeks, and Shelby County pays for it.

And we don't see any benefit from it, because this is not a dangerous person.

- We're out of time.

Sorry, Aarron, I didn't get back to you, but I wanted to follow up on that.

Yonée, thank you for being here, Josh, thanks for being here again.

That is all the time we have this week.

If you missed any of the episode, you can get it at wkno.org, The Daily Memphian, or YouTube, or download it as a podcast.

Same with the show from last week with Bill Gibbons, the CJ Davis show from a couple months ago.

And next week, DA Steve Mulroy.

Don't what we'll talk about, but we'll figure something out.

Thanks very much, we'll see you then.

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