- (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.

- District Attorney Steve Mulroy 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 Steve Mulroy, Shelby County District Attorney General.

Thanks for being here again.

- Happy to be here.

- Along with Aarron Fleming, who covers criminal justice and public safety for us at The Daily Memphian.

We'll talk about all kinds of specific things.

We'll try to get through as much as we can over the course of the 26 minutes.

I wanna start though that for 2024, and I think the trends have continued in the first quarter, overall crime is down in some really key categories, very dramatically in some of the areas around car break-ins and auto thefts and so on.

- Auto thefts.

- There are exceptions to that that we'll get to.

But in general, what do you feel like is working, you're what now?

Two and a half, coming up on three years in the job, that your office or your office in conjunction with other parts of the system, what impact do you think you're having to reduce crime?

- Right, well, so I think it's something to be celebrated that for six consecutive quarters now we have had significant increases in crime across all categories, violent and nonviolent.

- I think you meant decreases.

- Decreases.

Boy, I better get that right.

- Yeah, you don't want that in a campaign.

- Yeah exactly.

So for six consecutive quarters, crime has been trending down, double-digit percentage decreases across all types of categories, and it's been consistent and that's a good thing.

Now it's coming down from an unacceptably high level, right?

So we're not popping any champagne corks yet.

We still gotta work to keep those trends going down, but at least the trend lines are in a positive direction.

I do not take sole credit for that.

I think it's, you know, working with law enforcement and our own office, you know, partnerships with city and county government.

I mean, it takes all of us working together to do this, including the community.

There are community groups out there, violence intervention groups that I think have been doing good work, so it's really all of us working together.

And, you know, frankly, there are demographic and economic trends that are in the background that are gonna be driving these things sometimes that we don't have any magic levers over.

But, you know, you asked about our office, you know, one of the things that I'll highlight is that we did this V11 program at the beginning of 2024.

- V11 stands for?

- It's a fast track violent crime initiative for 11 categories of offenses that are either violent or associated with violence that we targeted for special priority.

And special priority means three things.

It means we've been moving the cases through the system faster, we've been tougher on bail and we've been more robust in our investigation.

So for example, we've been using jail calls a lot.

And I think.

- What are jail calls?

What is that?

- Oh, I'm sorry.

Well, we'll listen in on calls of, you know, defendants are in jail, right, while their charges are pending and they will make phone calls and, you know, it's, there are signs that say your calls can be monitored.

- Yeah, so you hear them talking.

- Yeah, which sometimes we've been able to actually hear them planning crimes and we've been able to prevent crimes from taking place in the first place.

Other times when we didn't have the evidence that we needed, we were able to get that evidence because we overheard admissions.

- Yeah, so you, we talked about this a little bit before the show.

Well let's start with the Brent Taylor, State Senator Brent Taylor been very public in criticizing you, putting a lot of pressure on you.

Went into this last legislative session trying to get you removed and working through.

Dropped that effort but has now called for the, I think the legislature before it ended, passed a resolution, it's a non-binding resolution, but asking that three district attorneys across the state, Nashville, Van Buren, and then you of Shelby County being you, be investigated by the Tennessee Supreme Court.

So it didn't happen that you were removed, but a lot of pressure there, a lot of political pressure.

You've also had criticism from folks on the left.

Last week, Josh Spickler, head of Just City, was on your transition.

You know Josh well.

- Right.

- Was critical that you are being more tough on crime than you ran on.

Do you feel like you've shifted in the two-and-a-half years since you were elected based on this pressure or based on anything?

Or do you feel like you're doing what you were elected to do and what you promised to do?

- The latter.

I have not shifted.

I've been doing what I was elected to do.

So I'll first note the fact that I'm getting criticized from the left, from my friend Josh Spickler, as well as from the right ought to tell you something, you know, and I think the criticism from the left about me being too tough gives the lie to the whole false narrative that we've been hearing for the last, you know, ten months from Senator Taylor and maybe a few others about, you know, me being not tough enough on crime.

But it's important to note that I haven't ever really changed what I've been doing in terms of the day-to-day practice of the office in response to Senator Taylor's criticisms.

Now what I have changed, Eric, is my communication strategy.

Of necessity we changed our comms to rebut the false narrative of soft on crime and to remind the public on a daily basis that we are still out there doing the day-to-day job.

We are enforcing the law, we are locking people up when that's appropriate.

And so, you know, you've seen a change in tone in terms of the communications, but only because we've had to rebut a false narrative.

In terms of what we've been doing, that hasn't changed.

And just real quick, if I could, my non-fatal shooting policy fall of 2022, the aggravated assault policy early 2023, our cars unit in juvenile court, mid-2023, the V11 program I just referenced early 2024.

All of these things I did before Senator Taylor ever started talking about having the legislature remove me from office, which was a joke to begin with.

So that really didn't change.

That was of a piece with my campaign promise to refocus on violent crime.

- All right, let me bring in Aarron Fleming.

- Are you confident that the measure is dead?

So now it goes to the Supreme Court and I mean, what are your thoughts on that and the court having this resolution now?

- Well, first of all, let's be clear about what this is, okay?.

This is a no legal force in effect, non-binding, face-saving bit of window dressing by a state senator who could not get the votes in the legislature to do what he so boldly promised he was going to do, right?

Either remove me from office or even investigate me by the legislature.

And the reason that he couldn't get the votes, quite frankly, it's no wonder, because there were never was a case for removal or even investigation in the first place.

And you don't have to take my word for that.

The Ethics Board keeps dismissing all of his meritless ethics complaints that he keeps filing against me.

The Comptroller General did a financial audit recently that gave our office a clean bill of health, no findings, right?

Which gives the lie to all the stuff he was saying about our finances.

The U of M Bail Report, I think vindicates my position on bail and another Controller General report, a comprehensive study of the Shelby County Criminal Justice System had no criticism of my office.

So I think that's really what's going on here.

It was a face-saving bit of window dressing and off ramp.

Now as to what the Supreme Court will do, you know, it's up to them, but I don't really think that much is going to come of this.

I don't think the Supreme Court has a big appetite for getting involved in individual investigations of DA's, but of course we'll have to see what they do.

- And I'll say, Senator Taylor's been on the show numerous times and written for us, quoted by us.

So, you know, there's lots of give and take on this and hearing both sides, and we're trying to get Senator Taylor and Mark White on to talk about schools.

May end up talking about some of these issues in the coming weeks or months.

You mentioned the Bail Report.

Bail has been this hot button issue going back years.

You know, the highlighting of people, whether this is widespread or anecdotal or, you know, one-off situations where people are out on bail, they reoffend.

Why would they be out on bail when they have a long history of accusations or convictions?

What did that, to you, what did that Bail Report say?

- So the U of M Bail Report, I think was quite helpful and quite comprehensive.

And I think in a nutshell, it showed that bail reform, despite the claims of critics, did not increase the percentage of people who were rearrested while out on bail.

It didn't increase the percentage of people who didn't show up for court.

It didn't increase the repeat offender rate.

It didn't do any of the things that the critics had complained about.

What it did do though was provide extrajudicial review and access to attorneys for indigent defendants who hadn't been convicted of a crime, and it did so without jeopardizing public safety.

And I'll also note, Eric, that the other thing that that U of M report looked at was the two signature tough on bail laws that Senator Taylor passed in the most recent legislative session.

And it concluded that they really didn't have much of an effect on those metrics that I talked about or on bail generally, right?

So I think it shows that you can have bail reform without threatening public safety and that some of the get-tough things that we reflexively do don't really have much of an effect.

- We had the folks from U of M, the data scientists who did a lot of that reporting or analysis on the show a couple weeks ago.

You can get that wkno.org or Daily Memphian or YouTube.

Bill Gibbons, one of your predecessors was on the show as well.

Now with the Crime Commission.

I think it showed from January '24 to January '25, median bail actually went from about $2,000 to $5,000.

And the rearrest rates were around 13%, release on their own recognizance numbers were about the same, I mean as prior to the bail.

And those numbers are pretty consistent in other studies that the data is a mess, as we talked about- - That's true.

- In the last two shows.

I won't revisit all that.

- That's true.

- But this big, this Comptroller report that you talked about, talked about how the data, and they really said this is a national problem and a statewide problem.

But they highlighted, given the scale of the court system and the volume of cases in Shelby County, that the data's a mess.

You're two-and-a-half years into this job, almost three years, would you confirm that the data is a mess?

And the example I keep using is, as you know, the accused would go through the system from court system to court system, maybe from general sessions over to, you know, the state criminal courts, even some other place.

Simple thing of their unique identifier changes.

So it's like a social security number not being the same as someone moves along in life, and so you lose track and the system loses track.

That's one simple but really, you know, glaring example.

- Right.

- What has your office been able to do?

What does your office want to do?

What do you wanna see in terms of the wonky stuff of the efficiency of the court?

- Yeah, this is something that I had been talking about since I first took office and when I had my crime summit in August of 2023, one of the consensus strategies that we came up with and we agreed to, was doing a better job of data sharing and having our data systems be more interoperable.

Having them talk to each other more seamlessly.

And there is a lot of work that still has to be done on that.

And that unique identifier problem that you just mentioned was one of the things that came out of the Comptroller General report that I totally agreed with something that we need to do.

We are not doing the job that we need to, to share data among the various criminal justice entities and to have agreed upon metrics and to have a public facing dashboard.

These are all things that I've been working on.

Now, we have made recent progress.

We finally have a Memorandum of Understanding with the General Sessions Clerk's Office and the Criminal Court Clerk's Office, which generate a lot of this data, and our office to share that data.

We've been working cooperatively with the City of Memphis about, you know, putting some stuff on the public dashboard, but there's still more work to be done.

- Let me bring Aarron in.

- The report also talks about things like case delays and how judges can better manage their dockets.

Where does your office kind of fall into that in as far as speeding things up and?

- Yeah, so, you know, we did a Speedier Justice initiative that we've been working on for a while.

We've done a number of things.

We've brought back what we call the 60-day list, so it's a list of all cases that are ready for indictment that haven't been indicted in 60 days.

And then the supervisors go over that list with the prosecutors and figure out, you know, why is this case on your 60-day list?

A lot of times there's good reasons for that like we're still waiting for TBI lab results, but when there isn't, then there's accountability.

We've generally been trying to move our V11 cases out of General Sessions into Criminal Court quicker.

We've had some success with that.

We actually will be, we made an arrangement with the judges so that we can stack cases.

So like we might schedule three or four trials on the same Monday in front of the same judge with the expectation that a lot of them will settle.

But if more than one of them is ready to go, then the judges have very graciously agreed to transfer those cases among themselves so we don't have delays, we can just keep the cases moving.

We've increased our number of trials 2024 over '23 by 60%.

We've already done 25 trials so far this year.

We're on route to break that record.

But perhaps more significantly in light of some of the findings that you've referenced about the Comptroller General's report, our office is gonna be meeting with the General Sessions Court judges in the near future to think about ways that we can speed cases along through the General Sessions Courts.

Just to give you one example, when I took over the culture was if you had to do a reset, you had to postpone, to wait for something.

The default would be to reset for 30 days.

Well, very often you don't need a 30-day delay, you know, you could reset for a week or two and then get these cases moving through the system quicker.

- All this is kind of, a parallel part of this, it seems to me, is obviously the jail.

The state of the jail, just the, I mean , you know, the locks weren't working.

It's by all accounts, I mean, not that jail's supposed to be nice, but it's not supposed to be inhumane in the United States.

- Right.

- People are talking about $1 billion plus to build a new jail.

And the problems of, some of these people in there are, I mean there's sometimes, on some folks will sort of say, especially in the comments of The Daily Memphian that, well, who cares about these people?

You know, let 'em stay in this horrible place.

Some of those people are innocent.

- Correct.

Right.

- There is no guarantee that everyone in there is guilty as charged.

- Right.

- Should the county pursue a new jail, what would that mean and look like for the operations of your office?

- Okay, so the first thing I wanna do is reaffirm what you just said.

You know, some of those people in that jail are in fact innocent, right?

Not every one of them is guilty.

These are people who have not been convicted of any crime and they are entitled to humane conditions and decent treatment and getting out as quickly as possible, you know?

And I think there's a lot of room for improvement here in Shelby County on all of those scores.

You know, in terms of the condition of the jail, I mean, obviously we've gotta do something.

You know, we have reports of jail deaths on a regular basis.

I get those calls all the time.

It's above the national average.

You know, we have doors that don't lock.

We have significant problems at the jail, I think everyone agrees on that.

Now, you know, how quickly we can do a new jail and when we do it and who pays for it.

Those are some pretty tough questions and I don't necessarily have the answers.

But in terms of the way it interacts with our office, really we're gonna do the same thing we do all the time, you know, which is make appropriate recommendations for bail.

Keep in mind the fact that these people haven't been convicted of a crime and, you know, unless there's some reason to think that they're a danger to public safety or a risk of flight, then, you know, not necessarily have unaffordable bail amounts.

- Yeah, I mean, does that come into play and if we take out the, you just said the extreme violence, accused of extreme or these violent offenders, does it for you and your folks in the DA's Office, does the state of the jail influence whether you're going to hold somebody in jail before trial?

Or do you have to, you and your folks, have to completely blind yourself to the state of the jail in making those decisions?

- So I guess it would be an overstatement to say that we completely blind ourselves to it, you know?

Are we mindful of the conditions of the jail?

Yes.

But I don't think it can be the driving factor because if in a given case we think someone because of their criminal history is a danger to the community or a risk of flight, well then we have to seek jail confinement.

- As we sit here on Thursday morning, the Tyre Nichols trial is going on.

Aarron's been covering that.

We have lots of reports on that in The Daily Memphian.

I'm gonna guess you don't want to comment on that trial as it's underway.

But you mentioned earlier about on track, being on track for a record number of trials of 25.

It is, I think for some people who see a crime problem, they'll hear that and think, wait, we're four months in.

There've only been 25 trials.

That's on track to do 75 for the year, which would be a record and that's, or whatever that.

But let me turn it into a question.

The number of trials is separate from overwhelmingly-- - Right.

- The settlements that happen.

Bill Gibbons, one of your predecessors has talked about this many times.

I mean a Republican more, you know, I don't, you know, a Republican DA, head of Homeland Security for the State of Tennessee who has said, there's no way we're gonna take more than a fraction of cases to trial.

It is all about settling.

- Right.

- That's just how it operates.

- Of course.

That's true across the country, right?

So, you know, across the country between 95 and 98% of trial of cases are settled, right?

Only 1-2% are gonna go to trial and that's true in Shelby County as well.

And that has to be the case.

We don't have the capacity to do anything else.

And most of the time, you know, as I tell my prosecutors, I'm agnostic as to whether we settle a case through trial or through settlement as long as the settlement is fair.

If the plea deal is a fair one, then great.

Let's not waste time with the trial.

The trials are for the ones that we can't settle.

And when I don't wanna overstate it, it's a record compared to the last few years, it's a record compared to when I took over, right?

Pre-pandemic we had a higher number of trials.

- Fair.

Okay, that's good clarification.

- But the number of trials really shouldn't be the metric, right?

For the reasons you just said.

If the settlement is fair, that's all that we care about.

- How many trials pending?

Before I go to Aarron, I mean, how do you measure that?

The backlog?

Do you feel like you're making headway on the backlog for all these other reasons you've talked about, or?

- Well, you know, the way we measure the backlog is, you know, the number of cases of people who are in detention for more than 500 days.

And you know, we have been plugging, chipping away at that and trying to push that downward.

It always fluctuates between 5 and 600, which is actually pretty reasonable given that we have 40,000 cases a year.

But there's still room for improvement there.

- Aarron.

- How often are those trials actually ending in convictions?

- Oh, I mean the significant majority, overwhelming majority of the trials do end in conviction.

- Let's go, we mentioned the legislature's wrapped up.

One thing that was passed was putting a constitutional amendment on the ballot in 2026 statewide that would remove, and this I'll ask you to be a law professor in a second here and correct how I phrase this, that would remove from judges the right to grant bail for more acts, particularly violent acts, terrorism, second degree murder, rape.

That will be up I think in the November 2026 election.

So people have a whole lot of time to think about it.

Is that amendment a good one?

- I actually support it and let's just, what it does is it removes the requirement that a judge always provide some amount of bail.

So right now, Tennessee is actually a little bit to the left of most states.

It's an outlier and it says under the constitution that unless it's a capital offense, unless it's a death penalty offense, the judge has to provide bail, okay?

They have a right to it.

In the federal system, you know, where I was a prosecutor, if the federal judge thought that the person was a risk of re-offending or a danger to the community or a risk of flight, they'd just say no bail, period, end of story, right?

And most states are like that.

Most states say, at least for violent offenses, that is an option.

In Tennessee it's not an option.

So what this amendment does is it gives the judge discretion in violent cases, even if they're not death penalty cases, to say, you know what, no bail for you.

I am okay with that because like I said, I'm used to the federal system.

I think right now the workaround that judges do is they will set bail unaffordably high, right?

So I don't think this amendment is gonna change all that much.

- I gotcha.

- And that's why I think you can be a progressive and still support this amendment.

- About five minutes left, so we'll speed through some things that we could do whole shows on.

But there was a bill passed around juvenile court and the sharing of information from the juvenile court to judges of prior acts that right now there was a real hard line between somebody setting, you know, there's a 21-year-old, 22-year-old, - Right.

- And not knowing that they maybe had committed other acts in the past.

- Right.

- You had found a way with Judge Sugarmon to have a certain amount of communication about prior acts.

I don't know if that's the right term.

- Right.

- Now, how will this law change how your office operates?

- So I've actually advocated for this law for a while.

- That's what I thought.

Yeah.

- And this is something that I actually agree with Senator Taylor on.

So, you know, we actually never got to the point where we actually changed what we were doing.

We were in discussion with Judge Sugarmon about in individual cases, would Judge Sugarmon use his statutory authority to allow us to, you know, take a look at that.

But now we're gonna be able to do it across the board and I'm okay with that.

I'm a big believer in that juvenile court record should be confidential.

We don't want this to be a scarlet letter, a mistake that a kid made traveling through them the rest of their life when they're trying to get an apartment or a loan or a job.

But if a 21-year-old is accused of car theft and he had five car theft convictions when he was 16 and 17 and it's time to set bail, we want the judge to know that.

Now, there maybe should be a cutoff.

Like maybe by the time the defendant's 25 or 30 maybe we should just look at their adult record.

- Right.

- But I, in general, I support the concept.

- One more from the legislature before I go back to Aarron.

The legislature did not pass a bill that would've prevented defendants from being released on their own recognizance when they're charged with use or display of a firearm resulting in bodily harm.

This also I think was brought forward by Senator Taylor and John Gillespie on the House side.

And you know it, again, we talked about the overall crime numbers being down, but there's been some really high profile, really scary and awful mass-level shootings.

- Sure, yeah.

- Somebody driving around town shooting people, thankfully not killing all of them.

That's the experience of guns in Shelby County, I think for the overwhelming, the data shows, the survey show, the overwhelming number of people want laws like this.

They seem common sense, they seems like somebody's been doing dangerous things with a gun, they shouldn't be released.

But what can you do given the legislature's resistance to put past laws like this?

- I believe that judges should have discretion to look at the facts of individual cases.

That's why we elect them.

I think a one size fits all approach is not the answer.

And so I think judges should have the discretion, just like the constitutional amendment, I think judges should have discretion to deny bail outright when the record of the defendant is bad.

I also think that judges should have discretion to do a release on recognizance when the facts and circumstances suggest otherwise.

So I'm not really concerned that that law didn't pass and I think we have enough tools in our toolkit to address the very serious violent crime problem that we have.

And I think the proof's in the pudding.

Six consecutive of, you know, quarters of a decrease , I got it right this time, in crime.

- Aarron.

- Even though, so do you think things like the constitution amendment or looking at juvenile records and setting bail, could that add to the jail population given that it's already overcrowded?

- That is one argument against it and I recognize and respect that argument.

The reason that I'm not concerned about it is what I said before about the workaround.

I think judges right now are already doing a workaround by setting unaffordably high bail amounts in those cases.

So the act, I don't think this amendment will actually significantly increase the jail population that much.

There might be a marginal uptick, but I don't think it's gonna be significant which is one of the reasons why I don't think people should oppose it.

- Last one, back to the legislature.

They passed millions of dollars for the Grizzlies to keep the Grizzlies in town, renovations to the FedExForum, but also this Downtown Safety Plan.

Are you, is your office involved with the formation of that plan?

- I'm, no, that's been the city that has done that in, you know, cooperation with the legislature.

I certainly support any kind of state assistance for that.

I'd like some more state assistance regarding a crime lab or at least forensic equipment.

That's something I've been talking about.

- The crime lab got nowhere this year.

- That's right.

I think there are some opportunities for us to get grant money to help with forensic equipment.

And it doesn't matter to me whether it's a freestanding lab or just an increase in forensic capability, but we need it.

- And what would that mean, in just 20 seconds?

In a practical level.

- It just means that, you know, the Sheriff's Office would get rapid DNA capability.

The police department would vastly expand their capability of doing cell phone data dumps, you know, to collect evidence in those kinds of cases.

Things like that.

You know, maybe more money for ballistics testing.

- All right, thank you for being here.

We're out of time.

We'll have you back later in the year.

We appreciate that.

Thank you for being here, Aarron.

If you missed any of the show today, you can go to wkno.org, The Daily Memphian or YouTube and get the full episode.

You can also download the show as a podcast wherever you get your podcasts.

I mentioned recently we had Bill Gibbons on, Josh Spickler on, and some months ago we had CJ Davis, the police chief on and other shows including Church Health and so on.

Thanks very much and we'll see you next week.

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