The Kids of Rutherford County - Ep. 3

It's Wednesday, Adams.

I see you're trying to distract yourself from your own banal thoughts.

Let me help.

Here's a recording thing made of my latest root canal.

Wednesday, season two, is now playing only on Netflix.

The two attorneys, Wes Clark and Mark Downton, were feeling pretty good.

They'd just gotten a 15-year-old kid out of solitary confinement, and that felt like a big victory against Judge Davenport.

They'd also decided to team up for real, form a firm of their own called Downton Clark.

It had no real office, no business cards, but it did have one very specific goal.

The goal was to get out.

Here's Mark.

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

And they needed the money.

While the work at juvenile court was steady, the pay was low as far as attorneys go.

Court-appointed cases were capped at 50 bucks an hour.

Wes had law school loans and was still living at his mother-in-law's house.

Mark was a little more flush, thanks to a side gig doing document review for higher-paid lawyers, but he also had a kid and mortgages for his house and office.

So they started a private practice that would take civil cases, personal injury, business disputes.

They knew it would take some time to really get established, but they had faith.

They both remember an early case Wes brought in from adult court that seemed promising.

It was a client of mine who his foot was injured during his jail intake process.

He ended up having the foot amputated.

So we filed this lawsuit for like millions of dollars.

And it turned out fairly quickly we learned that like his leg was supposed to be cut off before he ever went into jail.

So that was our first one that we thought we were going to be millionaires.

Instead, they were out of pocket about 400 bucks for the filing fees plus other expenses.

And things only went downhill from there.

So there was like a slip and fall.

And she had fallen down.

Oh my gosh.

We lost a lot of money on that case.

Then we had the sex offenders.

That was a terrible case.

Not a single one of those.

That was terrible.

Not a single one of those worked out.

Most of their cases were duds right out of the gate.

And even the ones that paid out didn't result in much.

One client had so little money, she offered to pay Mark with a homemade painting of Lake Louise.

It's in my bathroom right now.

And it's while they're hustling to find cases outside the juvenile court that Mark and Wes got a call from a lawyer at the ACLU.

asking if they wanted to take on some new clients.

Some kids from a school called Hobgood Elementary.

They'd been arrested for not stepping in to stop a fight.

Wes had been reading about the arrests, and he thought the whole thing was just so absurd.

A bunch of kids arrested on this vague charge of criminal responsibility, a charge that turned out to not even be real.

And a few of the kids were even held in juvenile detention overnight.

It would be a pro bono case, and it meant going back to the Rutherford County Juvenile Court, going back in front of Judge Davenport.

But immediately, Wes was like, yes, absolutely, we'll take it.

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

And more importantly, I was definitely thinking about how we could sue somebody for what happened.

Wes figured they'd sue the police, false arrest, and malicious prosecution.

He began by reviewing the police's take on what happened.

Following the arrests at Hobgood, in an attempt to address all the confusion and the outrage, the police department had conducted an initial audit.

So Wes figured he'd start there with that report.

So I, you know, click that, open it up, and I didn't have high expectations for anything written by the police department, right?

It's always, we've conducted a thorough investigation of ourselves and have found no wrongdoing, is generally how that goes.

But in this particular instance, the conclusion that they did nothing wrong is based on the assertion that they were following.

And let me look here and see exactly

what it says.

Wes reads through the report in front of him.

Yep, there it is.

The line about discussion with DA and court regarding judicial requirement that requires juvenile suspects to be arrested and prohibits department from citing and releasing.

It's jargony, but to Wes, that line said a lot.

You see, in Tennessee, police have a few options when it comes to kids accused of minor offenses, like misdemeanors.

Depending on what happened, they can arrest a kid or maybe just issue a citation with a notification for the kid to show up in juvenile court for a hearing on another day.

Or they can do nothing.

Just send the kid home with a stern talking to.

The police have discretion.

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

Wes was stunned.

So

here we've got a government police agency that pins not just the Hobgoods situation on this judicial policy, but

every single kid in Rutherford County who is charged with a delinquent offense

is arrested and they're subject to this policy.

So immediately,

I feel like I'm onto something, right?

Like I'm not taking crazy pills because literally everyone is getting arrested and it is

not

limited to the cases I've personally handled.

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

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

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

That's just Davenport, right?

Davenport, meaning Judge Davenport.

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

Two and a half years earlier, when Wes first started taking cases in Rutherford County, he'd done it because his buddies had told him there's always work in juvenile court.

At the time, he hadn't thought about why that might be, but the longer he worked there, the why seemed like a more and more important question.

And now, finally, he felt like he was on the verge of answering it.

From Cereal Productions and the New York Times, I'm Maribynight, and this is the Kids of Rutherford County.

Episode 3.

Would you like to sue the government?

Let's listen in on a live, unscripted Challenger School class.

They're reviewing the American Revolution.

The British were initiating force, and the Americans were retaliating.

Okay.

Where did they initiate force?

It started in their taxation without representation.

Why is that wrong?

The purpose of a government is to protect individual rights, and by encroaching on individual rights, they cannot protect them.

Welcome to eighth grade at Challenger School.

Learn more at challengerschool.com.

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When Wes found this line about there being a judicial requirement to arrest a kid for any and all infractions, it felt like a smoking gun.

He thought he and Mark finally had what they needed to expose Judge Davenport, the person who oversaw the court and the jail, and also slap Rutherford County with a class action lawsuit, something much larger than just this Hobgood mess.

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

I wasn't very enthusiastic about it.

Mark didn't share Wes's eagerness.

I wasn't enthusiastic at all, you know, because Wesley Wesley would have ideas a lot, and some of them were not very good, you know, and he'd bring them to me and I'd look at them and I'd try to, he'd get very excited and I'd try to calm him down and all that stuff.

And I thought this was another one of those.

Mark felt they had a better chance focusing on a class action lawsuit related to solitary confinement.

They'd already gotten a favorable ruling on that issue.

They should spend their time on that.

So he waved Wes off.

But Wes, he was still convinced.

There's got to be something here.

He figured, if Mark doesn't want to help me, I'll find someone who can.

So he spoke to a lawyer he really respected, who'd done some important cases involving police misconduct, a guy named Kyle Mothershead.

Kyle's a good lawyer.

He'll tell you so.

And that's not all he'll tell you.

I mean, like, you know,

I am a very good-looking man.

I'll just say that to you.

That's how I would describe it.

In juvenile court is actually when I first started being compared compared to Bradley Cooper.

As you can hear, Kyle has a lot of confidence, and for pretty good reason.

For one, he actually does look like Bradley Cooper.

And two, he's won some big civil rights cases in Tennessee.

And even though Kyle told me he found Wes to be, quote, very, very, very, very, very green, five varies.

This case was too good to pass up.

You know, I just, I just want it.

You know, like, I went in on that.

and I wanted to be part of that and I wanted to, you know, have a high-profile case that that felt important.

Did it seem like a moneymaker?

Yeah, but not like massive money, but like good money.

Kyle laid out a plan for Wes.

Let's first file a lawsuit on behalf of one of the Hopkin clients.

Then maybe through discovery in that case, we can find evidence that Judge Davenport really is telling police to arrest all kids in a way that violates state law.

So in July 2016, the lawyers filed a lawsuit, and a few months later, they got their first big round of discovery, an email link to a bunch of documents, internal memos from the judge, the jail, the sheriff's office, and the police.

As they started reading through the documents, they quickly found exactly what they were looking for.

A series of policy memos written by Davenport to law enforcement about arrests.

One memo memo said even kids accused of the most minor offenses, things like skipping school, smoking cigarettes, or breaking curfew, should be, quote, taken into custody and transported to the juvenile detention center.

There was no other option.

No notice to show up in court at a later date.

Nothing.

The police had to arrest kids.

Wes couldn't believe it was written down so starkly, just there, in black and white.

I remember thinking how stupid could you possibly be to put this kind of a thing in writing in simple terms and then send it out to a bunch of law enforcement agencies because it immediately to me

appeared to be illegal

in excess.

of her jurisdiction, you know, borderline criminal because

you're directing law enforcement officers to commit mass illegal arrests of children.

This explained so much why Rutherford County's police were arresting so many kids.

But it didn't explain everything Wes had been seeing.

Remember, for over two years, Wes had been in court, waving around the state's detention statute, complaining that his clients were getting jailed when they shouldn't be.

Tennessee law was really clear and narrow about when a a kid could be locked up, generally for only the most serious charges and circumstances.

With the memos, Wes now understood why these kids were being arrested and brought to jail for processing.

But why were the county's juvenile jail staff also locking these kids up instead of sending them home?

Well, Wes found, the answer to that was also written down in black and white.

Come to find out that Lynn Duke just like wrote the policies.

You know, they they got rubber stamped and implemented.

Wes is referring here to Lynn Duke, the woman Davenport appointed to run the jail.

For years, the jail had an informal system for its intake process.

If a jail staffer wasn't sure what to do with a kid, put them in jail or let them go, well, they could call administrators like Duke or even Davenport, who would tell the jail staff what to do with the kid.

Lynn Duke declined to talk to me for this story, but in a deposition, she said the problem with this informal system was that it was exhausting.

Jail staff had just too many questions for administrators like her, especially after work hours.

So in 2008, Duke and her team put together a new intake policy called the Filter System, a quote, guideline jail intake officers could refer to when deciding to keep a kid.

or release them.

It was a two-column chart.

On one side was when to release.

On the other was when to hold, i.e., hold a kid in jail.

But under that section, many of the reasons listed were in direct violation of actual Tennessee law.

For instance, this so-called filter system said kids would be held anytime a victim alleged an injury, even just a scratch.

A kid could get jailed.

The most disturbing category, though, was also the most vague, and it echoed something Wes had heard a lot in Davenport's courtroom.

According to the filter system, any kid would be held if they were considered, quote, a true threat.

That's the line.

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

But nowhere in the jail's manual did it actually say what a true threat was.

There was no definition.

It was up to the ranking jail staff to decide whatever that phrase meant.

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

Wes didn't know just how many kids have been wrongly arrested over the years because the police followed Davenport's memos, or how many kids were wrongly jailed by Linduke's filter system.

So, just to get a sense of how big this could be, he went into his own files to look back at all the kids he'd represented.

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

From what Wes could see, about a third of his old clients were either arrested or detained illegally, some both.

And he was just one lawyer out of a dozen or so who regularly worked at the court.

Plus, Wes had only been there for two years.

The filter system had been on the books for eight.

Davenport had been on the bench for almost 20.

How many kids were caught up in this?

Um, I was 16, yeah.

It was when I was uh 14 years old, 15 years old, ninth grade.

I was like 11 or 12.

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

How old are you?

Seven.

Oh my god.

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

I had gotten to a fight at school.

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

I just ran away.

I ran away.

I spray painted a penis on a wall.

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

I remember sitting on my bed and I hear a knock at the door and I kind of go towards the door and

then all of a sudden they come in and they said, Mr.

Smith, man, you're under arrest for like theft and put your hands behind your back.

And I asked them, I said, man, how long am I going to be arrested for for this?

He said, for a year for all I care.

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

We were just sitting on the couch when all of a sudden we hear a knock at the door and we go to the door and it was the police and they came and they arrested us.

They said it was a noise complaint.

It was why they came.

But then they saw that there were alcohol bottles and no adults present.

So the police arrested Grace and her friends for underage drinking.

And there was Thomas, the fifth grader arrested for truancy.

I didn't want to go to school and my mom drove me up there, like, you got to go to school.

And I got out to walk up to the school and I tried to turn around and run run towards her.

And I remember I was crying.

I was like, I don't want to go here.

I remember the principal, he grabbed me and threw me in a chair and sat on me until the cops came.

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

He literally sat on me and grabbed my hands

until the police showed up.

And then they arrested me that day.

Brandon, a seven-year-old, was horsing around around with his older brothers in a vacant duplex, and they made some holes in the drywall.

Sometime after that, the police came to their house.

My mom said that

they weren't going to take me in,

but since they thought I had

contributed to what was done to the house, they were like, well, he needs to learn his lesson.

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

So they arrested us and took us to the juvenile detention center.

The cop, she said that, you know, in normal instances, she would call our parents and have them come pick us up, but she wanted to teach us a lesson.

So she was going to keep us in there till Monday.

And this was a Friday night.

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

Kind of like almost like a prison,

in my opinion.

When they took us in, they were just looking at like my date of birth and stuff.

And they're just like, well, you're very young.

A little too young.

Interesting.

But they still kept you.

Yeah, yeah,

they still kept me.

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

They started doing paperwork intake stuff.

You know, they mug shot, check you for injuries, that kind of thing.

The intake of it was you have to strip down naked in front of this weird.

I'm sorry for the language, weird ass man.

He has to watch you naked taking either an extremely cold shower or extremely hot shower.

So you really feel like your integrity is completely taken away from you.

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

That's gross.

Yeah, tell me about it.

That was scary at first, you know.

They made me put on the little jumpsuit, and I remember being so little, that jumpsuit didn't even fit me.

It was a short-sleeved jumpsuit that went past my elbows.

I never experienced something like that before at such a young age, so it was like something new to me.

And

I was doing a lot of crying and stuff.

I was screaming too, because I mean, I didn't know where I was.

I didn't even even know I was in jail.

I felt like I didn't do nothing wrong.

I don't deserve to be locked up.

I'm just mad.

My mama died.

I'm sad.

I'm hurt.

Y'all should be trying to help me some instead of locking me up.

And that's your cell.

You have toilet, shower, bench, bed, nothing.

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

You don't get any folks.

And you're forced to sit up all day long

and you can do push-ups sit-ups you can work out but other than that if you lay down they come yell at you threaten to like yank you up and then put you on lockdown

lockdown you might remember was the county's term for solitary confinement

15-year-old Quinterius Frazier was once put on lockdown for eight days straight.

Like, I'm sitting in there just looking at myself, thinking a lot of crazy bad thoughts.

Like, I wanted to like really take my life because I'm in there and I'm just cold and I'm just stressed.

And then it got to the point where when I started thinking those thoughts, I would read the Bible because that's all I had was a Bible.

Kids told me about their struggles to get their basic needs met.

Here's Grace, the girl arrested for underage drinking.

While I was there, I started my period and they refused to give me any kind of tampons or pads or anything.

So I basically sat in a bloody jumpsuit for two full days while I was there.

Dylan was 15 years old when he went to jail.

It was the first time he'd ever been in trouble with the law.

I had asked them for my medication.

They weren't going to give me that.

They weren't going to give me my retainer, which, you know, is one thing because that's metal.

But my psychiatrist prescribed medication for my bipolar disorder and my depression.

And so there's just a lot of constant anxiety and stuff.

And so to be in there without this medication, now I'm manic depressive in this cell.

And that's either got you bouncing off the walls or wanting to sleep all day.

And you can't do either of them.

You're stuck in a box.

And so it's a real, it's almost like a four-day panic attack.

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

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

They had us

in shackles from our feet to our arms going into court.

I just remember standing there and I'm pretty sure I had hand, I guess they're not handcuffs if they're around your feet, but shackles.

Oh, the shackles.

Yeah, around our feet.

And our parents were there and all my friends' parents were there.

And they had all four of us come out there.

So obviously just

had been in there for two days and been crying and

looking a mess.

And, you know,

I was just embarrassed.

What do you remember about the judge?

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

Like she treated us like we were beneath her, you know?

That there were kids like us running around the street.

She treated us like we were stunned.

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

Yeah, she told me that I was a minister society.

I was deemed infamous is what she called me.

I think she had a gavel too and hit it and said, you know, you're staying in juvenile, so I see fit to take you out.

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

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

For me, I feel like it was like a dream that never happened, but it actually happened

With two key pieces of evidence in hand, the arrest policy and the filter system, Wes knew they had the makings of a massive lawsuit, just the kind of case he'd been dreaming of.

These policies had been in the books for years, and now seeing just how many of his own clients were affected, it didn't take much imagination to ponder the scope of it all.

Four, five, six thousand kids, maybe, all of whom were now potential plaintiffs.

So I started calling those kids and their parents and just telling them, hey, I'm Wesley, good to talk to you again.

I hope things are going well.

Would you like to sue the government?

When a handful said yes, that they were prepared to be the named plaintiffs for a class action, that's when things got real.

Even Mark, who dismissed all this early on, was by now fully on board.

Like, this was now a huge case.

It was a huge case.

A case that could finally hold the county responsible for its juvenile justice system and make a difference in the lives of the kids there.

But let's be honest, these guys are also plaintiff's lawyers, and they also saw the potential for their lives to change.

We did think that we were going to make more money than we'd ever made on anything because it was such, it seemed so obvious to us that this was a gross deprivation of the civil rights of thousands of children, and how could that not be worth millions of dollars?

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

The guys now knew, with all their hard evidence, that they had a powerful story to tell in court about the illegal things Rutherford County and Judge Davenport had been doing to kids.

But for years, Judge Davenport had been telling her own story, and that story held a different kind of power.

That's after the break.

Let's listen in on a live, unscripted Challenger School class.

They're reviewing the American Revolution.

The British were initiating force and the Americans were retaliating.

Okay.

Where did they initiate force?

It started in their taxation without representation.

Why is that wrong?

The purpose of a government is to protect individual rights and by encroaching on individual rights, they cannot protect them.

Welcome to eighth grade at Challenger School.

Learn more at challengerschool.com.

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WGNS, Rufreesboro.

Well, good morning to you.

Welcome into the action line from WGNS.

This morning we're talking about the Rutherford County Juvenile Court System.

And Judge Donna Scott Davenport is our guest this morning.

Good morning to you.

Good morning, Bart.

Good to have you with us today.

Thank you.

Always.

Judge Davenport wouldn't talk to me, so I wasn't able to ask her directly any of my questions, which were all variations of the same question.

Why?

Why order law enforcement to arrest children when they shouldn't?

Why allow jail staff to lock them up when they shouldn't?

But there was a place where for 10 years, Judge Davenport shared many of her views on all things juvenile court.

WGNS Radio, Rutherford County's good neighbor station.

On the first Tuesday of every month, she could be heard chatting with host Bart Walker III.

And it's a sunny day out there.

It is.

Even though if we got a little snow coming in, that's okay.

We're always open for business down on South Church Street.

Well, of course, tomorrow.

I've listened to 70 hours worth worth of these radio broadcasts.

And in the process, I've come to understand something of Judge Davenport's worldview, a worldview with a healthy dose of nostalgia for a simpler time.

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

A time when society had better values.

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

Back before things like cell phones and video games infiltrated kids' lives.

And every year, whatever would be new with the video games, and now we've got the phones and the games.

With that comes increasing aggression.

And I've been here so long that I do see the increase of our violence.

The main thing that I...

During the years Davenport had this radio segment, juvenile crime in Rutherford County was actually on the decline.

But statistics be damned.

According to Judge Davenport, things were getting worse every year.

And she was seeing younger and younger kids coming into her courtroom.

We are having younger children that need assistance.

And we do not have programs for children 11, 10, 9,

8, 7.

And we are locking up.

I've locked up one seven-year-old in 13 years, and that was a heartbreak.

But eight and nine-year-olds and older are very common now.

That's scary.

Yes.

I mean, that sounds like kindergarten kids on your name.

Part of the problem was parenting.

Judge Davenport said many parents were simply unwilling to do what was necessary to keep their kids safe.

You need to be

monitoring what they do.

Do not let them lock their bedroom door and not allow you in.

And some parents, they'll say, well, what do you want me to do?

Well, take the door off the hinges.

Oh, well, that's a good idea.

Well, they don't need to be driving.

Well, disable the car.

Take the car keys.

Don't have your keys out where they can take them.

Common sense.

We need a department of common sense.

Listening to these radio segments, it sounded to me that Judge Davenport saw herself as part of that department of common sense, waging a battle against the decline in civility and morals, the increase in entitlement and aggression.

And the detention center was a vital tool for keeping kids from going down that path.

And they know if they break the law, there's going to be a consequence.

And they're going to be detained, possibly.

They're going to be held for a while, and they are going to be held accountable for their actions.

And there is no more slap on the wrist.

They're going to see some consequence.

And I'd like to think that that's part of it, and that we will use our facility to detain children.

Davenport bragged about the detention center all the time, the great staff there, the great programming, how state-of-the-art it was.

She called it a dream come true and even opened it up for tours.

You have an open house coming up soon.

Yes, well, you know how we're always excited about our open house, and you can bring your family.

We do like to wet your whistle there and give you a little piece of cake.

We'll have two tours.

As for the kids who are held in the jail, Davenport liked to refer to them as hers, as in, I'm seeing a lot of aggression in my nine- and ten-year-olds.

In fact, her role as a stand-in parent was pretty explicit.

Absolutely.

In watching you, you act like a proud parent.

Well, I've been called the mother of the county.

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

That's fine.

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

We just wanted to call in and tell Judge Davenport how much we appreciate her and wanted to thank her for everything she does.

You're a very good judge.

You're very fair.

Kyle.

You're doing a very good job.

I'm really impressed.

This is Butch Campbell.

I just want to say thank you for your years of leading the young people of this county.

You've done a heck of a job.

Well, it's what I love doing every day.

Well, I know it is.

Thank you.

It's like in one reality, there were the lawyers, Wes and Mark, and now Kyle, who were saying, the way you've been running this operation is against the law.

And it's pretty clear.

The state says exactly when to arrest and jail a kid.

And you and the county have ignored what the state says and made up your own rules.

But on the other side was Judge Davenport, who is confident in her own criteria.

And then you look to see if they are a risk to themselves or a risk to the community.

And if there is a finding that they're a risk, then we can hold them.

We don't use our facility as punishment.

We use that only as detainment if they're a risk to themselves or a risk to our community.

If they pose a risk to themselves or this community, we will utilize our detention facility.

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

Hey, stay with us.

We're going to check on the weather.

I'll be back.

You may see that I'm a dreamer.

But I'm not the older.

In the spring of 2017, nine months after Wes, Mark, and Kyle filed their lawsuit, they got their chance to put the two versions of reality side by side in a different courtroom.

where a different judge presided.

It was a preliminary injunction hearing, where they would present all the evidence and say to a federal judge, Hey, while we know this lawsuit is still going to take a while to resolve, in the meantime, Rutherford County is illegally arresting and jailing kids.

Can you force their hand?

Make them stop using these policies immediately?

The attorneys had uncovered a hefty bit of evidence to present, the memos outlining the arrest policy, the jail's manual laying out the filter system.

There was also some striking striking data from the county and the state that they found too, from just a few years before.

It suggested that Rutherford County had been jailing kids at 10 times the state average.

They also had depositions.

Judge Davenport in a deposition told the lawyers that when she'd issued her arrest memos, it was never her intention to take away police discretion.

But a sheriff's deputy in his own deposition said essentially, well, that's how his department interpreted Davenport's memos.

It was why they arrested kids for even the most minor offenses.

It's our policy to obey court orders and not be in contempt of juvenile court, the deputy told the lawyers.

Jail staffers testified that they were trained on the filter system, that they could be quizzed on it when up for a promotion or disciplined for not applying it as written.

One said, we were told, when in doubt, hold them, because it's better to hold a kid that should have been released than release a child that should should have been held.

Now, inside the stately halls of Nashville's federal courthouse, the federal judge would weigh the lawyer's evidence and he would decide what reality they were living in.

Judge Davenport's or the laws.

Here's Wes.

It was surreal.

Like, I remember I'm

waiting outside the courtroom before the hearing is to begin.

And the county's lawyers are there and a couple of the other witnesses are there and then suddenly Judge Davenport walks up and I'm like oh my god there she is and it was such a different context from how I had previously encountered her and like she was here to have to give an accounting for

the policies that she had implemented at this place.

And so

I was at the counsel table and I only examined one of the witnesses during that hearing, partially because Kyle was not impressed with my deposition skills.

But I watched as he examined Duke.

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

As he examined Duke and Judge Davenport.

And in that really thorough, meticulous way, like he wouldn't let them avoid a question.

And if they tried to just talk around his questions, he would just ask it again and nail them down to the reality of

what they had been doing here and of the reality that this two pages of statutory mandate that I had been carrying on about years before that,

they now had to explain why they weren't following it.

And they simply couldn't.

Judge Davenport, she just could not give a straight answer that made any sense about why that statute wasn't being followed.

And

in that context,

everyone in the room realized how absurd it was that the statute wasn't being followed.

So it was just, it was the inverse of the

review of the statute in the juvenile court.

Yeah, dig into that a little more.

So you'd spent years waving the statue around,

telling her you're not following it.

And now

she's on the witness stand in a federal court

and she's having to explain why she didn't follow it.

Yeah,

it was so satisfying.

I remember grinning.

Like, I remember just feeling my cheeks from

the

musculature tension of me grinning for the entire time she was

trying to give some cohesive explanation for the detention policy.

And at first, I was like worried, is there something we don't know?

Is there some like brilliant legal strategy they're going to employ here today that we just didn't see coming?

And whenever she started talking about the safety of the kids in the community as the standard, I knew that like

this was it.

She was going down.

And I remember looking up at Judge Waverly Crenshaw is a very

imposing intellect and figure.

And I'm like watching him observe her testimony.

And I remember he held his face with his hand and like his elbow was down.

He was taking notes.

And then at some point, he just set his pen down and put his hands and crossed them in front of him and didn't take any more notes.

And I was thinking, that's a good sign that, you know, he's already made up his mind as to the testimony that's being presented by this witness.

Up until now, had you

ever contemplated what Davenport's motivations were?

Yes.

And we knew that it was not that she was somehow pocketing money off of any of this.

Like, we knew that was not what was happening.

So the question still remained, like,

why do this?

You know, what's the benefit?

But

the answer to that question, I believe, is just power.

That

this bureaucracy that she was the chief administrator over,

this was all kind of wrapped up in her identity.

Do you think she didn't understand the statute, or do you think she cared more about power than the statute?

I think that it is impossible for her not to have understood the statute because I explained it to her on dozens and dozens of occasions.

And I don't think she's dumb.

I don't think she's an idiot.

It doesn't take

170 IQ

to understand how that statute applies in that context.

And

I don't know what exactly is in her mind.

I just know that that is

not a realistic possibility.

The hearing lasted only one day, and then the lawyers waited for a decision.

If Judge Crenshaw rejected their request for an injunction, that could kill the entire case.

It would mean the lawyers were out months of work and thousands of dollars.

Even more, Rutherford County would likely continue to jail kids at an extraordinary rate.

It took about a month until one day, having just finished a medical appointment and sitting in his car in the parking lot, Wes got a notification.

The judge's ruling was in.

Only Wes couldn't read the order on his phone.

So I remember flinging the phone into the passenger seat, and I'm like backing up out of the parking lot.

And I'm trying to use the voice dial to yell at my car to call Mark Downton.

And I'm just dying to get back to my office so I can actually open the order up and see for myself.

But Mark picks up, and he's already, you know, he's got his hands on the actual order.

And we're basically like school children who've just gotten a free holiday or something.

I mean, needless to say, they'd won.

We're screaming like, can you believe it?

We did it.

We did it.

Blah, blah, blah.

You know?

They're so fucked.

I think we've probably said that two or three times at least.

They are so fucked.

Judge Crenshaw found that the kids were, quote, suffering irreparable harm every day through Rutherford County's illegal detention of them.

He ordered the county to stop using the filter system immediately.

He also said the arrest policy likely violated state law, but he ruled it wasn't a constitutional issue, so it was out of his hands.

That said, police departments in the county eventually stopped following Davenport's policy anyway.

For Wes, he told me, Judge Crenshaw's ruling was the best thing he'd ever read in his entire life.

For so long, he'd complained about Judge Davenport and what her court and detention center were doing to children.

The arrests, the jailings, and for so long, he felt like he'd failed.

Failed to get anyone to see what he did.

Now, finally, his reality had prevailed.

What had been happening to the kids in Rutherford County was wrong.

The next step in the lawsuit was to make the county pay for it.

That's on the last episode of the Kids of Rutherford County.

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

It was reported by me, Maribyn Knight, with additional reporting from Ken Armstrong.

The show is produced by Danunki Met, with additional production by Michelle Navarro.

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.

Additional editing from Anita Battajo and Alex Kolowitz.

The supervising producer for serial productions is Nday Chubu.

Research and Fact-Checking by Ben Phelan, with additional fact-checking by Naomi Sharp.

Sound design, music supervision, and mixing by Phoebe Way.

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

Susan Westling is our standards editor, and legal review from Dana Green, Alamine Sumar, and Simone Progas.

The art for our show comes from Pablo Delcon.

Additional production from Janelle Pfeiffer.

Mac Miller is the executive assistant for serial.

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

Special thanks to Katie Mingle, Mike Camate, Aaron Rees, Bianca Gaver, Jordan McCarley, and Rob Robinson.

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