The Kids of Rutherford County - Ep. 4

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Speaker 6 In the spring of 2017, after a preliminary injunction hearing, a federal judge ordered Rutherford County to stop using the filter system, their policy for illegally detaining kids.

Speaker 7 The impact of that decision was massive.

Speaker 16 The number of county kids sent to jail dropped by almost 80% over the next year, which was good for the kids of Rutherford County.

Speaker 6 And that injunction was also good for Wes and his legal team, who were still pursuing a lawsuit against the county.

Speaker 21 Like we thought, great, we've got the injunction and then, you know, they're going to have to settle this thing or face a trial and we have all these good arguments and we're going to get these experts and we would have a really great shot at convincing a jury of the value of these claims.

Speaker 6 So Wes and the two other lawyers on the case, Mark and Kyle, started gearing up for the trial of their careers.

Speaker 6 They did more depositions of jail and court staff and hired an expert witness to testify on the trauma and impact of jailing kids so young.

Speaker 6 And in preparation to wow a jury, they hired a photographer to take specialized photos of the jail.

Speaker 3 Their plan was to put VR headsets on jurors so they could feel what the kids did being locked up in a tiny cell.

Speaker 6 But there's a problem with gathering all that evidence.

Speaker 27 That's a ton of damn money.

Speaker 6 Here's Mark.

Speaker 27 I remember getting the expert witness bills and being like, oh my god, you know. And so we'd get the bill and then there'd be another one like a month later for another $10,000 or $15,000.

Speaker 27 So like that $15,000 was just a kick in the balls.

Speaker 3 While the lawyers were bleeding money, the county was raking it in.

Speaker 11 Because the thing is, Rutherford County's juvenile jail wasn't just a place for its delinquent kids.

Speaker 32 It was a place for other counties' kids too.

Speaker 33 as illustrated by an infomercial the county sent out across the state.

Speaker 34 Built in 2008, the Rutherford County Juvenile Detention Center is a 43,094 square foot facility that is located in the heart of Tennessee.

Speaker 4 It's narrated by Judge Davenport and it's called What Can the Rutherford County Juvenile Detention Center Do for You?

Speaker 34 Well for starters There are 64 clean and secure detention beds with 48 of those being in a single occupancy rooms that have a toilet, sink, water fountain, private shower, desk, and intercom system.

Speaker 16 Over drone shots and B-roll of kids in gray and white striped jumpsuits, Davenport makes her pitch to neighboring counties.

Speaker 38 Facility, check.

Speaker 34 Great employees, check.

Speaker 2 You should send your delinquents to Rutherford County's state-of-the-art juvenile jail.

Speaker 34 Please contact us and let us be your partner for the safe custody and well-being of the detained youth of your community.

Speaker 4 In the year after the county stopped using the filter system, after the number of Rutherford County kids in the jail plummeted, the detention center's revenue doubled.

Speaker 41 Rutherford County was still very much in the business of jailing kids, and business was booming.

Speaker 11 A federal judge had ordered the county to stop jailing kids under the filter system, finding it was likely unconstitutional.

Speaker 18 But this was only a temporary injunction, not a definitive ruling, and there seemed to be no real fallout from it, no consequences for any county employees, not even a public apology.

Speaker 43 So to the lawyers, this lawsuit felt like the only avenue to some kind of justice and accountability for what happened, which meant they either had to win the case definitively in a trial, or negotiate a large enough settlement so the kids would get restitution.

Speaker 7 But time time is its own commodity in these kinds of cases, and as the months and then years went on, time worked in the county's favor.

Speaker 18 Their lawyers filed motions to get the case thrown out, and the federal judge held off unruling on these motions, possibly to push the two sides to settle, which just caused more time to slip away.

Speaker 6 And while that's going on, Life happened for Wes, Mark, and Kyle.

Speaker 11 First, Kyle's marriage fell apart.

Speaker 3 Then Mark and his wife moved to Canada where she grew up.

Speaker 8 He could still work on the case from there, but it was a lot harder for everyone involved.

Speaker 49 As for Wes, he'd been sober for over three years until I thought, you know, it won't hurt just to try.

Speaker 24 He got back on Oxie.

Speaker 21 I could just do like just one just today. It'll be fine, you know, I won't mess anything up.

Speaker 24 That relapse actually happened earlier in the case and lasted a few months.

Speaker 37 Mark and Kyle didn't even find out.

Speaker 35 But then he had a second relapse on alcohol and prescription drugs, which was far worse.

Speaker 6 He would end up in an inpatient rehab for four months. Another lawyer had to come in and help out while Wes was gone.

Speaker 38 Then back to Mark.

Speaker 13 His marriage eventually ended, and so did his sobriety.

Speaker 23 He started drinking again.

Speaker 8 The lawyers told me the relapses didn't affect anything.

Speaker 37 Mark and Kyle both said there was enough of them to pass the work around.

Speaker 8 Do I totally believe none of this affected the case?

Speaker 6 I'm not so sure.

Speaker 11 But still,

Speaker 6 they were limping to the finish line.

Speaker 35 From Serial Productions and the New York Times, I am Mirabin Knight.

Speaker 11 This is the Kids of Rutherford County.

Speaker 33 Episode 4: Dedicated Public Servants.

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Speaker 49 In the fall of 2020, the lawsuit rolled into its fourth year, and the lawyers were getting increasingly concerned.

Speaker 48 They'd sunk nearly $100,000 of their own money into the case.

Speaker 6 And they didn't know how much longer this whole thing could drag on.

Speaker 57 A few more years?

Speaker 6 Maybe more?

Speaker 43 And what what if in the end they lost?

Speaker 3 Kyle, usually so confident, said the decision to settle was a product of fatigue.

Speaker 3 It's cool and all to be these shoestring lawyers, he told me, but he acknowledged that there's a reason these kinds of cases are often backed by a big firm with deep pockets.

Speaker 30 By June 2021, the lawyers in the county had a deal.

Speaker 51 Here's what they agreed to.

Speaker 3 First, the preliminary injunction against the filter system would become permanent.

Speaker 3 Second, the county would pay out as much as $11 million in fees and restitution to kids who'd been wrongfully arrested, jailed, or both.

Speaker 30 In the end, because of the statute of limitations, it was determined that only about 1,200 kids would qualify.

Speaker 45 And while $11 million is significant, The guys had made a big concession to get there.

Speaker 14 The process for paying the kids.

Speaker 38 What What they'd agreed to was a claims-made settlement, which meant that each kid who had an eligible claim, that kid had to fill out a bunch of complicated paperwork and send it in themselves.

Speaker 29 The lawyers would help, but it was an arduous process.

Speaker 17 For each valid claim, a kid would receive about $1,000 for a wrongful arrest and $4,800 for an illegal jailing.

Speaker 23 But a recent study of these types of settlements found that only about 9% of eligible claimants ultimately file claims.

Speaker 23 And for this case, the lawyers had allowed the county to keep any money they didn't pay out.

Speaker 51 So in order to make the county really pay the full settlement amount, 11 million, the lawyers were going to have to find these 1,200 kids.

Speaker 6 And what's more, there was a hard deadline.

Speaker 6 The lawyers had just four months to cold call people, cold email people, cold doorknock people, and let them know, hey, put in your claim, get your money, and make the county pay for what they did to you.

Speaker 58 Wait,

Speaker 58 what's in the box?

Speaker 60 There are snacks and drinks and vape pods, eye drops.

Speaker 59 Yeah, I get dry eyes.

Speaker 3 In early October 2021, a little less than a month before the deadline, I took a ride with Wes and Kyle. Wes had just gotten back from rehab.

Speaker 20 He and Kyle were searching for people to file claims.

Speaker 48 They had a printout of a bunch of names and addresses they wanted to hit.

Speaker 10 These were the high rollers of the lawsuit.

Speaker 3 Kids, most of them now adults, with multiple detention claims.

Speaker 32 Meaning, the lawyers believed they were illegally jailed at least three or four times, often more.

Speaker 58 Like Wes discovered that there was someone with 10 claims. There was someone with 10 claims?

Speaker 61 One person.

Speaker 29 Is that the most you've found so far?

Speaker 59 Yes, that's the most event. That's by far the most.

Speaker 40 There are 10 claims

Speaker 29 added up to $48,000.

Speaker 3 So Wes and Kyle started referring to the kid as their grand prize winner.

Speaker 48 It was exciting to think about this young guy answering the door to this news.

Speaker 50 A sudden and unexpected windfall of almost 50 grand.

Speaker 6 We pulled up to the address, a run-down apartment complex, and we decided Wes and Kyle would go in first, then let me know if the grand prize winner was comfortable with me recording.

Speaker 3 All the information they were going off of, the names and addresses, was confidential, so they had to be really careful with what they could share with me.

Speaker 24 So I sat in the back seat of Wes's black sedan until they came back with news.

Speaker 45 What happened?

Speaker 60 Someone is there who says, I've never heard of that person.

Speaker 59 And I've lived here since 2013.

Speaker 61 Lived here since 2013,

Speaker 43 They debated what to do next.

Speaker 50 Should they take another crack or let this one go?

Speaker 24 Ultimately, they decided to move on

Speaker 29 to keep going down their list of plaintiffs.

Speaker 29 As we drove off to the next address, in search of the next kid on the list, I stared out the window, trying to process what just happened.

Speaker 21 That's very sad.

Speaker 55 Did $48,000 just vaporize right then and there?

Speaker 18 At a subdivision of low-income apartments, things didn't go any better.

Speaker 60 Alright, so

Speaker 59 we ended up talking to

Speaker 60 someone who seemed like maybe the apartment manager.

Speaker 58 Yeah.

Speaker 59 And that family was evicted in May.

Speaker 59 No forwarding information. No forwarding information.

Speaker 58 So you know what I mean?

Speaker 2 It started to occur to me that the people who needed this settlement money the most, people who were already struggling financially, who didn't have a stable address, they were the least likely to get what's owed to them.

Speaker 59 So this is it. It's either this place or nowhere.

Speaker 3 In the seven and a half hours we spent driving around Rutherford County.

Speaker 50 We hit a working-class neighborhood.

Speaker 59 Well, Mariba, it ain't looking good so far.

Speaker 29 A quiet cul-de-sac dotted with single-family homes.

Speaker 58 Alright, well,

Speaker 61 nobody answered the door, you know, there's two cars here.

Speaker 59 The house was dark inside.

Speaker 11 And a handful of bum addresses.

Speaker 60 No luck. Mark that is a bad advertisement.

Speaker 25 Like a house number that led to a shed in an empty field.

Speaker 27 There's nothing there but trees.

Speaker 47 And by the end of the day,

Speaker 43 we'd gone to 22 stops and nothing.

Speaker 58 A swing and a miss.

Speaker 3 Not a single person to file a claim.

Speaker 50 My back-of-the-envelope map was that more than $430,000 was left on the table that day.

Speaker 30 $430,000 that kids maybe wouldn't get despite what was done to them.

Speaker 48 In the weeks that followed, I continued to wonder about the grand prize winner, the kid with $48,000 in claims.

Speaker 24 So I kept checking with the guys, asking if they'd gotten any leads on him.

Speaker 30 But nothing.

Speaker 18 They couldn't find him.

Speaker 8 He He was far from the only one.

Speaker 49 Other claimants were just as unfindable to the lawyers, no matter how many public records databases they scrubbed.

Speaker 43 A few had been killed.

Speaker 38 Some were now in prison.

Speaker 20 Wes was shocked at how few people were responding.

Speaker 24 The lawyers didn't give up, though.

Speaker 6 They got students at two local universities to door knock and make calls.

Speaker 3 They did a media campaign, getting stories into the local TV news, the local paper.

Speaker 23 Kyle even went on WGNS, the same radio station Davenport appeared on, to spread the word.

Speaker 21 If you're sitting on a packet from the mail about this, you need to call.

Speaker 58 You need to call.

Speaker 62 Don't leave the money on the table. Ladies and gentlemen, we will be right back and we are paying some bills.

Speaker 6 Finally, the deadline came.

Speaker 22 According to the lawyers, 278 kids got payouts from the county.

Speaker 16 278 kids. That's 23% of the total eligible.

Speaker 18 Wes was happy with this number.

Speaker 6 It was way above average for these kinds of settlements, which again is a dismal 9%.

Speaker 18 But I have to admit, I felt kind of deflated by the outcome.

Speaker 38 I've reported on many lawsuits, but nothing that I got to watch play out until the bitter end.

Speaker 30 I had no idea about what really came after the flashy headline of kids win $11 million in a federal lawsuit.

Speaker 16 Because in the end, Rutherford County paid just a little over $5 million,

Speaker 3 less than half the total settlement.

Speaker 51 Almost $3 million of that went to the lawyers and administrative costs.

Speaker 48 The kids only got $2.2 million, and the county got to keep the rest, almost $6 million.

Speaker 7 The county also admitted no wrongdoing.

Speaker 49 I couldn't help thinking of the 900 or so kids who didn't get paid, not to mention the hundreds, maybe thousands of others over the years, who weren't even eligible because their arrests or detentions fell outside the statute of limitations.

Speaker 6 I told Wes I found this settlement a little bit heartbreaking. Wes, understandably, found me a little bit annoying.

Speaker 21 Sure, in an ideal world, there there would be a hundred million dollars, and the county would have to plow the detention center under and do all these things they should have done instead of building, you know, Super Max kid prison, right?

Speaker 21 Like, that's ideal, but there was no mechanism or possibility for that to occur. So, within the context of what's possible here, I feel like it's a really great outcome.

Speaker 3 I understood Wes's perspective.

Speaker 20 At least he got some kids paid.

Speaker 17 But how do those kids feel about it?

Speaker 64 Yes, ma'am. I actually made $16,000 off of it.

Speaker 3 You met Zeb in the last episode. He was the kid arrested for taking a Bluetooth speaker from his grandma when he was a teenager.

Speaker 37 Zeb is now 22 years old.

Speaker 65 What was it like to get that $16,000?

Speaker 64 Honestly, it felt really good, but

Speaker 64 it's still $16,000

Speaker 64 wouldn't make up for the traumatizing experiences I actually felt in the juvenile system.

Speaker 6 Zeb still remembers his time in Juvie, the booking process, the cold shower in front of the guard, then into his jumpsuit, and into his cell, which was also freezing cold.

Speaker 17 Lots of people told me how cold the jail was, everywhere, just so cold.

Speaker 6 Zeb remembers finally going in front of Judge Davenport, who he says sent him back to the jail for two more weeks.

Speaker 3 He remembers that at some point he had an anxiety attack.

Speaker 6 He remembers calling for a guard, but says it took two hours for someone to finally check on him.

Speaker 8 Nearly a decade later is when he got his payout from the county.

Speaker 6 He says the money felt like an acknowledgement of what happened to him, but not like an apology, not a reckoning.

Speaker 64 It kind of felt like they were just paying for the wrongs they did not knowing that they put a lot of emotional abuse on people that didn't deserve it

Speaker 6 Zeb knew others who got payouts too his brother got a claim and also basically one of my my great friends got him got it too

Speaker 65 wow who was that or maybe are you still in touch with him

Speaker 64 yeah I mean he's he's he's in jail now he just violated his community corrections but his name was Quinterius Fraser I know wait I know quinarius Wait, is he back in jail?

Speaker 64 Yeah, maybe he sees really nicely outside.

Speaker 3 Quintarius Frazier, the kid from the solitary case in episode 2.

Speaker 25 Turns out, he too was paid by Rutherford County.

Speaker 3 Just like Zeb, he'd gotten around $16,000.

Speaker 24 He's also 22 years old now.

Speaker 3 He's been in and out of the county jail for the last few years. Mostly for probation violations stemming from cases when he was a juvenile.
He's back this time on another set of violations.

Speaker 8 Drinking, smoking weed, not letting his probation officer search his phone. He's been locked up for about a year.

Speaker 3 It's hard to disentangle what's going on with Guinterius today with what happened to him in the past.

Speaker 23 But you've got to wonder.

Speaker 20 Several of the kids I spoke to told me they felt going to Juvie, especially for such minor stuff, marked them for the rest of their youth.

Speaker 26 You don't fit in with the good kids anymore.

Speaker 23 You're now a bad kid, one said.

Speaker 33 I really am like a bad kid now, another told me.

Speaker 3 And so some lived up to that, swapped one identity for another.

Speaker 50 A number of studies I've read say that kids who are arrested and jailed are more likely to reoffend, more likely to drop out of school, and more likely to end up in the adult system.

Speaker 3 Not too long ago, I had lunch with Quintarius' mother, Sharika.

Speaker 6 I asked her where the settlement money is now, and she told me it's almost gone.

Speaker 47 With no other income, Quintarius had been spending some of it on his commissary and phone calls from the county jail, meaning a good chunk of his settlement money had actually gone right back to Rutherford County.

Speaker 6 Once the lawsuit wrapped wrapped up and the claims had all been submitted, the lawyers were ready to move on.

Speaker 39 Mark was off in Canada, eventually going to rehab for his drinking.

Speaker 3 Kyle had just remarried and was looking for his next big case.

Speaker 10 And Wes, he too had new lawsuits to file, other municipalities to sue.

Speaker 3 He told me cases fighting for sex offenders' rights are, quote, so hot right now.

Speaker 11 But I wasn't so ready to move on from Rutherford County.

Speaker 45 It felt like it got away with something.

Speaker 3 Not just because of the money, but also because the adults in charge still had their jobs.

Speaker 45 Judge Davenport, who oversaw a juvenile justice system that had wrongfully arrested and jailed over a thousand kids, she was about to run for another eight-year term.

Speaker 41 And Lynn Duke, who put together the filter system, who called the jail a well-oiled machine.

Speaker 15 She was still the director there, going on her 21st year.

Speaker 37 I wondered, how much could have really changed if all the people running the place were still the same?

Speaker 12 More on that after the break.

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Speaker 12 I've circled around this story for years, and in 2021, I published a long article about it in in ProPublica with my colleague Ken Armstrong.

Speaker 12 We wrote about the Hobgood arrests, about Judge Davenport's directives on arresting kids, about the jail's filter system and its use of solitary confinement.

Speaker 30 And we dug into how the county and the state had allowed all this to happen.

Speaker 6 What we found in our reporting was a troubling lack of oversight.

Speaker 9 For example, on the state level, every year the Tennessee Department of Children's Services inspected the jail.

Speaker 3 They talked with children, even reviewed the jail's manual, the same one that had the filter system right there in plain sight. But the inspectors never flagged it.

Speaker 6 When I spoke with those inspectors, they confirmed that yes, it was their job to make sure the detention center was following the law.

Speaker 3 But obviously, I missed the filter system, one told me.

Speaker 23 Or take the county.

Speaker 3 We learned that back in 2003, Rutherford County had hired a consulting firm to come up with proposals for a new juvenile jail.

Speaker 3 In their report, the consultants told the county they were jailing significantly more kids than other Tennessee counties, and they were overusing the jail for kids accused of the most minor offenses.

Speaker 30 The consultants recommended diverting more kids away from the jail and building a smaller juvenile detention center.

Speaker 5 The county rejected the firm's advice and instead built one of of the largest juvenile jails in the state.

Speaker 43 It appeared Judge Davenport and the people who reported to her were allowed to run this system the way they wanted because either the oversight just wasn't there or nobody seemed to mind what they were doing.

Speaker 49 Once we published the story, it got a lot of attention.

Speaker 62 An update now on one Tennessee county's pattern of putting children in jail.

Speaker 50 According to a scathing ProPublica report, a Tennessee county.

Speaker 40 Rutherford County, Tennessee, jail.

Speaker 27 Three police officers went to an elevator.

Speaker 21 One juvenile court judge in Rutherford.

Speaker 6 11 children were arrested. Some only for watching the fight.

Speaker 42 The story went national, and then there were meaningful demands for change.

Speaker 6 11 members of Congress wrote a letter to Attorney General Merrick Garland asking for the DOJ to investigate Rutherford County.

Speaker 3 Tennessee's Republican governor called for a review of Judge Davenport, and state lawmakers introduced a resolution to oust her, just get her off the bench as soon as possible.

Speaker 68 Hi there, thank you for joining us today.

Speaker 68 Late Friday afternoon, Representative Johnson and I filed in a press conference over Zoom.

Speaker 8 State Senator Heidi Campbell explained why they took such a drastic measure.

Speaker 68 While judges are given judicial discretion to interpret laws, they are not allowed to make up their own laws. The constitutional provision for removing judges.

Speaker 30 This was January of 2022 and Judge Davenport was up for re-election that August.

Speaker 3 I'd been wondering if she still planned to run and all my sources were telling me she was.

Speaker 3 But the day after that state senator's press conference, she issued a statement that read, in part,

Speaker 33 After prayerful thought and talking with my family, I've decided not to run for re-election.

Speaker 31 I am so proud of what this court has accomplished in the last two decades and how it has positively affected the lives of young people and families in Rutherford County.

Speaker 15 After more than 20 years on the bench, Judge Davenport was retiring.

Speaker 6 And suddenly, all the calls for investigations, the resolution, it all just stopped. There would be no disciplinary action.

Speaker 6 Instead, Judge Davenport would remain on the bench bench for another seven and a half months, hear hundreds more cases, and leave with her pension intact.

Speaker 3 So here's the question.

Speaker 23 What has changed in Rutherford County, and what hasn't?

Speaker 6 Well, on the change side, local police stopped using Davenport's arrest policy, and the jail stopped using the filter system, which had a huge effect.

Speaker 3 This past fiscal year, there were just 96 kids from Rutherford County jailed. A big difference from from its peak of 1,400 in 2008, the year the filter system was written into the jail's manual.

Speaker 25 In addition, the county has now set up an oversight board for the Juvenile Detention Center, taking authority over the jail away from the judge and giving it to a team of citizens.

Speaker 6 The board members inspect the jail, scrutinize its policies, and even have the power to hire and fire the director.

Speaker 30 After the oversight board was announced, I reached reached out to one longtime county commissioner, Jeff Phillips.

Speaker 3 Jeff has been a county commissioner off and on since 1990.

Speaker 22 He's not on the oversight board, but he helped set it up.

Speaker 26 And for more than 10 years, he sat on the public safety committee, which met monthly with the jail's director and approved its yearly budgets.

Speaker 25 I wanted to know what Jeff made of the revelations from the lawsuit.

Speaker 7 and what lessons the county was now taking from all this.

Speaker 3 But as soon as I started in with my first rather innocuous question, he cut me off.

Speaker 64 And

Speaker 69 I know what I'm about to say sounds a little suspicious, but to what end? What are you doing?

Speaker 69 Why are you doing this? I'm just trying to figure out

Speaker 69 why are you bringing this up?

Speaker 3 I understood Jeff's concern.

Speaker 23 Rutherford County had gotten knocked around pretty good in the press, and he just wanted the whole thing to go away.

Speaker 6 But I explained to him that I was curious from his perspective about what happened and what could have gone differently, you know, so that history isn't doomed to repeat itself.

Speaker 6 Jeff got that, but still.

Speaker 6 I just don't know how rehashing all this stuff is

Speaker 69 is in the best interest of everybody in Rutherford County to go back and say over and over and over again that these kids were treated unfairly. It appears that all of them were treated unfairly.

Speaker 69 We made a mistake. Let's fix it and just move forward.
Why not to make those mistakes again?

Speaker 6 Jeff said the county commissioners, they're just a legislative body. They approve funding, provide resources.

Speaker 3 They don't have the knowledge or expertise to really oversee the operations of the justice system.

Speaker 6 That's the point of the new oversight board, to staff it with local citizens who hopefully have professional skills they can bring to bear.

Speaker 6 He said that as soon as the revelations came out about what's been happening in the court and the jail, the county really has tried to make amends.

Speaker 6 We

Speaker 69 are not arguing that, at least I'm not, and I don't know of any other commissioner that would be arguing that what happened was the right thing to do.

Speaker 69 We're just trying to say,

Speaker 69 okay, this happened. And

Speaker 69 we're not saying that

Speaker 69 it was our fault that it happened or it was anybody's fault that it happened. I think it was a mistake that was made during the judicial process.
And that process,

Speaker 69 there are mistakes made there like there are everywhere.

Speaker 69 And

Speaker 69 we weren't aware that that was happening. And I'm pretty sure that the Juvenile Detention Center was not aware.
that they were breaking the law either. Maybe they should have been.
I don't know.

Speaker 6 A longtime county official admitting pretty clearly that the system was a mistake, it's significant, a meaningful starting point to some real accountability.

Speaker 9 But it wasn't totally clear to me what Jeff thought that mistake actually was or who made it.

Speaker 3 Which brings us to what hasn't changed in Rutherford County.

Speaker 6 To my mind, if you're willing to admit that this policy was a mistake and harmful to kids, then the logical extension is to hold the people responsible for it. Well, responsible.

Speaker 13 Have them face consequences for implementing this system that went on for more than a decade and was ultimately the mass jailing of children.

Speaker 29 But that has not happened.

Speaker 6 Like I said, Judge Davenport got to leave on her own terms, with no formal punishment for her actions.

Speaker 24 And Lynn Duke, the woman who implemented and oversaw the filter system, she still has her job.

Speaker 3 Despite the fact that the jail she runs has now been forced to comply with two federal injunctions, one over the filter system and the other over its use of solitary confinement.

Speaker 7 And all this has cost the county significant money.

Speaker 37 But ever since the lawsuits settled, county officials have rallied around her.

Speaker 2 Rutherford County's mayor told the local paper, Ms.

Speaker 43 Duke is doing a fine job.

Speaker 23 And those on the new oversight board have said they have no plans to replace her.

Speaker 49 She has our support, one board member said.

Speaker 6 In my conversation with Commissioner Jeff Phillips, when I pressed him on who was responsible for what happened, did he think it was Davenport?

Speaker 23 Duke?

Speaker 28 He was resolute.

Speaker 69 You get this really clear. I am not going to mention names and I'm not going to point fingers at anybody else.
I'm just not going to do that.

Speaker 30 Why is it important for you to not do that?

Speaker 69 Because I think there are some dedicated public servants out there

Speaker 69 whose lives have the potential to be ruined because of something. that might be said from a negative perspective about them and how they've conducted their professional life.

Speaker 69 And I just don't think that that's fair.

Speaker 6 What strikes me about Jeff's response is how he and other officials are so willing to extend grace to Duke and Davenport, two people who so often refuse to extend that same grace to the children who came before them.

Speaker 44 Recently, I went back to Rutherford County to the juvenile courthouse.

Speaker 57 It's a brutalist beige building that sits across the street from a car dealership.

Speaker 29 And now, a new judge is in charge, Travis Lampley, who sailed through the election on the Republican ticket.

Speaker 14 When I asked him what needs to change, he said, this county needs a judge that will follow the statutes, which he seems to be doing.

Speaker 49 But that doesn't mean the system is operating totally fairly.

Speaker 37 For one, even though a lot of kids are not being jailed by the county anymore, there's some pretty significant disparities in which of them are.

Speaker 24 The year before the filter system was stopped, the racial disparities of the kids arrested were pretty aligned with the rest of the country, where a disproportionate number of kids locked up were black.

Speaker 17 But once the filter system ended, the racial disparities shot up.

Speaker 3 Last year, 67% of the kids locked up from Rutherford County were were black. This is in a place where just 17% of the population is black.

Speaker 6 It appears that the filter system, with its vast overreach, had its own twisted desegregation effect.

Speaker 3 Beyond that, the jail continues to house kids from other places.

Speaker 7 More than 40 different counties across Tennessee, almost half the state, send their wayward kids to Rutherford County.

Speaker 17 And when I took a close look at what's happening to those kids, the out-of-county kids, I noticed something.

Speaker 24 Reading reports from the last few years, I see the jail has been holding some of them for too long on small charges.

Speaker 25 Truancy, held for two days.

Speaker 10 Unruly, held for six days.

Speaker 45 A runaway, seven days.

Speaker 18 Another runaway, ten days.

Speaker 6 All of them, clear violations of the law.

Speaker 3 But the thing is, these are kids from other counties with different judges making their own decisions on how long to jail them.

Speaker 6 Sound familiar?

Speaker 6 When I asked the state monitor who compiles the reports about this, she said, you're always going to have one somewhere, a judge who tells you, this is my court.

Speaker 43 And I'm just going to do what I need to do.

Speaker 30 When I eventually make my way into the juvenile courtroom, I take a seat in the back, sliding into a long wooden pew.

Speaker 31 And I still see what I've always seen.

Speaker 30 A room full of anxious kids and parents, tired-looking attorneys, court staff streaming in and out.

Speaker 37 It's Tuesday, which means it's plea day, so a docket full of kids taking plea deals.

Speaker 30 Their charges run the gamut, from possession of marijuana to having a firearm underage.

Speaker 8 There's a lot of domestic assaults, kids fighting with parents, also evading arrest, theft, burglary.

Speaker 29 The deals they make are often community service or probation, and for many, the promise of expungement, the case wiped from their record, but they gotta follow the program.

Speaker 9 No more bad choices.

Speaker 17 I noticed the courtroom is less colorful now.

Speaker 24 Davenport used to have lots of pictures drawn by kids hanging on the walls.

Speaker 23 I assume she took them with her when she left.

Speaker 6 But today,

Speaker 29 one picture catches my eye, one that wasn't here before.

Speaker 29 It's a large, almost life-size portrait of Judge Davenport.

Speaker 25 It hangs right next to the bench, peering over the shoulder of the new judge, smiling wide and proud.

Speaker 41 The mother of Rutherford County.

Speaker 30 The Kids of Rutherford County is a co-production of Serial Productions, The New York Times, ProPublica, and Nashville Public Radio.

Speaker 30 It was reported by me, Maribyn Knight, with additional reporting from Ken Armstrong. The show is produced by Danielle Guimet, with additional production by Michelle Navarro.

Speaker 38 Editing from Julie Snyder and Jen Guerra, along with Sarah Bluestain and Ken Armstrong at ProPublica, and my colleague, Tony Gonzalez, at Nashville Public Radio.

Speaker 43 Additional editing from Anita Battajo and Alex Kolowitz.

Speaker 40 The supervising producer for serial productions is ND Chubu.

Speaker 30 Research and fact-checking by Ben Phelan, with additional fact-checking by Naomi Sharp.

Speaker 40 Sound design, music supervision, and mixing by Phoebe Wang.

Speaker 29 The original score for our show is from The Blasting Company.

Speaker 30 Susan Westling is our standards editor and legal review from Dana Green, Alamein Sumar, and Simone Prokas.

Speaker 6 The art for our show comes from Pablo Delcan.

Speaker 30 Additional production from Janelle Pfeiffer.

Speaker 10 Mac Miller is the executive assistant for serial.

Speaker 40 Sam Dolnick is the deputy managing editor of The New York Times.

Speaker 30 Special thanks to Kathy Sinback and Chris Kleiser, Ben Holland, and Pam Holland at Spotland Productions.

Speaker 43 At the New York Times, a huge thank you to Jeffrey Miranda, Nina Lassam, and Mahima Chablani.

Speaker 35 The Kids of Rutherford County is produced by Serial Productions, The New York Times, ProPublica, and Nashville Public Radio.