The Kids of Rutherford County - Ep. 4
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Bank tok. Com to get started today. Equal housing lender member F. I C. In the spring of two thousand and seventeen, after preliminary injunction hearing, a federal judge ordered ruth ford county to stop using the filter system, their policy for illegally detaining kids. The impact of that decision was massive. The number of canny kids sent to jail dropped by almost eighty percent over the next year, which was good for the kids of rather for county. And that injunction was also good for west and his legal team, who are still pursuing a lawsuit against the county.

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

So west, in the two other lawyers on the case, mark kail, started gearing up for the trial of their careers. They did more the oppositions of jail and court staff and hired expert witness to testify on the trauma impact of jelling kids. So Young in in preparation to ow a jury, they heard a photographer to take specialized photos of the jail.

Their plan was to put V, R. Headsets sungars so they could feel with the kids did, being locked up in a tiny cell. But there's a problem with gathering all that evidence. As a tony day of money, here's mark.

I remember getting the expert witness bills in being, I oh my god, you know? And so we get the bill, and then there be another one, like a month later for another ten or fifteen thousand dollars. So like that fifteen thousand dollars was just to kick in the balls while the lawyers were bleeding money. The county was ragging IT in because the thing is, brothers ford counties juvenile jail wasn't just a place for its, the link in kids who was a place for other counties. Kids too, as illustrated vine, infertile.

The county sent out across the state, built in two thousand eight, the rather for canny juvenile detention singer is a forty three thousand and nine four square food facility that is in the what can the rather ford county juvenile detention center do for you? Well, for stores, there are sixty four claim and secure detention bids, with forty eight of those being in a single occupancy rooms that have a toilet. See water fun, private shower and inner system overdrawn shots and b role of kids and gray and White stripe jump suits.

Dain port makes her pitch to neighboring counties. Great employees check, you should send your links in to rather's d counties, stay to the r juvenile jail. Please contact us and let us be your partner for the safe custody and well being of the the youth of your community.

In the year after the county stopped using the filter system, after the number of ruthful d county kids in the jail plumaged the detention centers revenue doubled. Rather, ford county was still very much in the business of jAiling kids and business was bombing. A federal judge had ordered the county to stop jAiling kids under the filter system.

Finding IT was likely unconstitional tional, 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, sort of the lawyers. This lawsuit felt like the only avenue of some kind of justice and accountants for what happened, which meant they either had to win the case definitively in a trial or negotiate a large enough settled so the kids will get respect tion. But time is its own commodity in these kinds of cases.

And as the months and then years went on, time worked in the country's favor. Their lawyers filed motions to get the case thrown out, and the federal judge held off ruling on these motions, possibly to push the two sides to settle, which just caused more time to slip away. And while that's going on, life happened for west, mark and kao.

First, kal's marriage fell apart. Then mark and his wife moved to canada, where he grew up. He could still work on the case from there, but he was a lot harder for everyone involved. As for west, he'd been sober for over three years until .

I thought, you know, I won't urr he .

got back on oxy.

I can do like just one just today. It'll be fine. You know, I want mess.

Anything up that we lapse actually happened earlier in the case and lasted a few months. Mark and kyle didn't even find out, but then he had a second collapse on alcohol and prescription drugs, which was far worse. He would end up in an impatient rehab for four months.

Another lawyer had to come in and help out while west was gone. Then back to mark, his marriage eventually ended. Inserted his surprise, he started drinking again.

The lawyers told me the real pse didn't affect anything. Mark and kail boss said there was enough of them to pass the work around. Do I totally believe one of this affected the case? I'm not assure. But still they were limping to the finish line. From serial productions and the new york times i'm marble night this is the kid's roths of her county episode four, dedicated public servants.

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Hey, it's john chase and more .

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In the fall of twenty twenty, the lawsuit rolled into its fourth year, and the lawyers were getting increasingly concerned. They'd sunk nearly a one hundred thousand dollars of their own money into the case, and they didn't know how much longer this whole thing could drag on a few more years, maybe more. And what if, in the end they lost?

Kyle, usually so confident, said the decision to sell was a product of fatigue. It's cool in all to be the issue. String lawyers, he told me, but he acknowledged that there's a reason these kinds of cases are often backed by a big firm with the pockets.

By june twenty twenty one, the lawyers in the county had a deal. Here's what they agreed to. First, the preliminary junction against the filter system will become permanent.

Second, the county wood pay out as much as eleven million dollars in fees and restitution to kids who ve been wrongly ly arrested, jailed or both. In the end, because of the statute of limitations, IT was determined that only about twelve hundred kids will qualify. And while eleven million dollars is significant, the guys had made a big concession to get there.

The process for paying the kids what they agreed to was a claims made settlement, which meant that each kid who had eligible claim, that kid had to fill out a bunch of complicated paperwork invented in themselves. The lawyers would help. But there was an arduous process for each valid claim.

A kid would receive about a thousand box for a wrong for arrest and forty eight hundred for illegal jAiling. But a recent study of these types of settlements found that only about nine percent of eligible claims ultimately file claims. And for this case, the lawyers had allowed the county to keep any money they didn't pay out.

So in order to make the county really pay the full settlement amount eleven million, the lawyers are going to have to find these twelve hundred kids. And what's more, there was a hard deadline. The lawyers had just four months to cold call people, cold email people called dornoch people, let them know, hey, put in your claim, get your money and make the county pay for what they did. you? why? What's what's about?

There are snacks and drinks and bid pod eye rops. Yeah, I get dress in .

early october twenty twenty one, a little lesson. A month before the deadline, I took a ride with west and kao west had just gotten back from rehab. He and kyle were searching for people to file claims they had to print out of a bunch of names and addresses they wanted to head. These were the high rollers of the lawsuit kids, most of them now adults, with multiple detention claims, meaning the lawyers believe they were illegally jailed at least three or four times, often more .

like west discovered that there was someone with ten claims .

for some with ten claims.

One person .

that's the most.

yes, that's the most event. That's by for the most ten .

claims added up to forty eight thousand dollars. So west and coal started to referring to the kid as the grand prize winner.

IT was exciting .

to think about this Young guy answering the door of this news, a sudden and unexpected windfall, almost fifty grand. We pull up to the address or an an apartment complex, and we decided western coal would go in first. Then let me know if the grand prize winner was comfortable with me recording 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. So I sound in the back seat of western black day on until they came back with news. What was what happen .

um someone is there who says, i've never heard that person is twenty thirteen, twenty thirteen. So they debated .

what to do next should they take another crack or let this one go. Ultimately, they decided to move on, to keep going down their list of playing to. As we drove off to the next address in search of the next kid on the list, I stayed out the window trying to process what just happened. Did forty eight thousand dollars just vapor eyes right? Then in there, at a subdivision of low income apartments, things didn't go any Better.

right? So we ended .

up talking .

to someone who might make the department, and that family was evicted at me. No forwarding information. No forwarding information.

So, you know, IT started to occur to me that the people who needed this settlement money, the most people who are already struggling financially, who didn't have a stable address, they were the least likely to get what's oed to them. So this is.

this place are nowhere .

in the seven and half hours we spent driving around ruth for county, we had a working class neighbor od.

where they looking good so far. The quiet .

called to sack, got IT with single family home, right? Well.

nobody answer the door. You know, two cars. How was the dark?

And in a handful of the no.

like a house number .

that LED to a shed in an empty field.

there's nothing there.

Trees by the end of the day. We gone to twenty two stops and .

nothing went.

Not a single person to file a claim.

My back of the ombo math was at more than four hundred and thirty thousand dollars was left on the table that day. Four hundred and thirty thousand the kids maybe wouldn't get despite what was done to them. In the weeks that followed, I continue to wonder about the grand prize winner, the kid with forty eight thousand dollars in claims.

So I kept checking with the guys, asking if they gotten any leads on in, but nothing, they couldn't find them. He was far from the only one. Other claimants were just as definable to lawyers, no matter how many public record database they scrub. Ed, a few have been killed, some or now in prison. West was shocked that how few people were responding.

The lawyers didn't give up, though. They got students to two local universities to doorknob and make calls. They did a media campaign getting stories into the local T.

V. news. The local paper, ki, I went on w gns. The same radio station dab import appeared on to spread .

the word packet from the mail about this. You need to go.

Don't leave the money on the table. Ladies and gentleman, we will be right back and we are paying. Finally, the deadline came.

According to the lawyers, two hundred and seventy eight kids got payouts from the county, two hundred and seventy eight kids as twenty three percent of the total eligible. West was happy with this number. IT was way above average for these kinds of settlements, which again, is a dimming nine percent.

But I have to admit, I felt kind of deflated by the outcome. I've reported on many lawsuits, but nothing that I got to watch play out until the bitter end. I had no idea about what really came after the flashy headline of kids win eleven million dollars in federal lawsuit, because in the end, rather ferd county paid just a little over five million dollars, less than half the total settlement.

Almost three million of that went to the lawyers and administrate of costs. The kids only got two point two million, and the carney got to keep the rest almost six million dollars. The county also admitted no wrongdoing.

I couldn't help thinking of the nine hundred or so kids who didn't get paid, not to mention the hundreds, maybe thousands of others over the years, more even eligible, because the arrests or detentions ons fell outside the statute of limitations. I told west, I found this settlement a little bit heart breaking. West, understandably, found me a little bit annoying.

sure. You know, an audio world, there be a hundred million dollars. And the canny would have to applause the attention center under and do all these things they should have done instead of building, you know, supermax, kid prison, right? Like that's ideal, but there is no mechanism possibility for that to occur. So within the context of what's possible here, I feel like it's a really great outcome.

I understood what is perspective? At least he got some kids paid, but had of those kids feel about IT.

Ah yes, may I made sixteen thousand thousand .

of you met serb in the last episode. He was the kid arrested for taking a blue tue speaker from his grandma when he was a teenager. Zab is now twenty two years old.

What was IT like to get that sixteen thousand dollars? Honestly, I felt really good. But it's it's still sixteen thousand dollars when make up would make up for the the charming experiences that I will fill. Yep.

still remembers this time in G, V, the booking process, the cold shower in front the guard then into a jump suit and into a cell, which was also freezing cold. Lots of people told me how cold the jail was everywhere, just so cold, zebra remembers finally going in front of judge dav import, who he says sent him back to the jail for two more weeks. He remembers that at some point he had anxiety attack.

He remembers calling for a guard, but says IT took two hours for someone to finally check on him. Nearly a decade later is when he got to pay out from the county. He says the money felt like an acknowledgement of what happened to him, but not like an apology, not a recording.

Feel like they just in for the, they could emotional, then save new others .

who have got payouts to his brother, got ta claim. And also one .

of my my great friends got got IT too. wow. Who is that? Or maybe any directions? This was curious pressure. I I know materia we see back.

Quanti ous fraser, the kid from the solitary case in episode two turns out he too was paid by rothfos count y just like ab, he gotten a around sixteen thousand dollars. He's also twenty two years old.

Now he's been in out of the county jail for the last few years, mostly for probation violations demming from cases when he was a juvenile e he's back this time in another set of violations, drinking, smoking weed, not letting his probation officer searches phone. He's been locked up for about a year. It's hard to disentangle what's going on with grantor OS today with what happened to him in the past.

But you ve got a wonder. Several of the kids I spoke to told me they felt going to juv, especially for such minor stuff marked them for the rest of their youth. You don't fit in with the good kids anymore.

You're not a bad kid. Once said, I really am like a bad kid. Now another told me. And so some lived up to that, swapped one identity for another. A number of studies i've read say that kids were arrested and jailed, or more likely to reoffend, more likely to drop out of school and more likely to end up in the adult system. Not too long ago, I had lunch with ontario's mother suka. I asked her where the settlement money is now and he told me its almost gone with no other income quanti as have been spending some of them on his common very and phone calls from the county jail meaning a good chunk of a settlement money had actually gone right back to rutherfurd carney.

Once the lassus wrapped up in the claims that all been submitted, the lawyers were ready to move on. Mark was off in canada, eventually going to rehab for his drinking coal industry. married. I was looking for his next big case in west. He too, had new lawsuits to file other municipalities to sue.

He told me, cases fighting for sex offenders rights, or quote, so hard right now, but I wasn't so ready to move on from radford carney, if I like, I get away with something not just because of the money, but also because the adults in charge still had their jobs. Judge dave import, who oversaw juvenile justice system that had wrongly arrested and jailed over a thousand kids. SHE was about to run for another eight year term.

And lin duke, who put together the filter system, who called the jail a well oiled ed machine. SHE was still the director there going on her twenty first year. I wondered how much could have really changed if all the people running the place were still the same. More on that after the break.

In middle accounting, new jersey talent is here, and you should be here too, because houses that move here thrive here. Visit discover middle c dot com slash drives to find resources available for your growing business. I've circled around this story for years, and in twenty twenty one I published a long article about IT improved a with my colleague, can armstrong.

We wrote about the hub, good arrests, about judge dave imports, directives on arresting kids, about the jay's filter system and its use of solitary confinement. En, and we duggin to how the colney and the state had allowed all this to happen. What we found in our reporting was a troubling lack of overside.

For example, on the state level, every year the tennessee department of children services inspected the jail. They talked with children, even reviewed the jail's manual, the same one that had the filter system right there in plane side. But the inspectors never flagged IT.

When I spoke with those inspectors, they confirmed that, yes, IT was their job to make sure the detention center was following the law. But obviously I missed the filter system. One told me, or take the carney, we learned the back in two thousand, three, rather, ford carney had hired a consulting firm to come up with proposals for a new juvenile jail.

In their report, the consultants told the carney they were jAiling significantly more kids than other tennessee counties, and they were overusing the jail for kids accused of the most minor offences. The consultants were recommended diverting more kids away from the jail and building a smaller juvenile detention center. The county rejected the firm's advice and instead but one of the largest juvenile jails in the state. IT appeared judge dave import 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. Once we publish the story, I got a lot of attention .

and update now on one tennessee county is pattern, are putting .

children in j report tension, detained three police.

Officers and .

some only for watching the the story went national, and then there were meaningful demands for change. Eleven members of congress read a letter to attorney general mary garland asking for the D, O, J to investigate. Rather's, d county, tennessee, republican governor, called for a review of judge dav import and state lawmakers introduced a resolution to ouster.

Just get off the bench as soon as possible. I hi there. Thank you for joining us today. Late friday afternoon, representative Johnson and I, in a press conference over resume, state senator hini cambell, explained why they took such a drastic measure.

While judges are given judicial discretion to interpret laws, they are not allowed to make up their own laws. The constitutional provision for removing this was january of two thousand and twenty two, and judge dave import was up for reelection that August. I've been wondering if he still planned to run, and all my sources were telling me SHE was.

But the day after that state senator's press conference, SHE issued a statement that red, in part after prayer, thought and talking with my family, i've decided not to run for real election. I am so proud of what this court has accomplished in the last two decades and how is positively affected the lives of Young people and families and ruthful d. county.

After more than twenty years on the bench, judge davin poor was retiring, and suddenly all the calls for investigations, the resolution at all, just start. There would be no disciplinary action. Instead, judge dave import would remain on the bench for another seven and a half months, hear hundreds more cases and leave with their pension intact.

So here's the question, what is change in north for county and what hasn't? While on the change side, local police stopped using dav import arrest policy in the jail, stopped ed using the filter system, which had a huge effect. This past fiscal year, there were just ninety six kids from rothfeder conney jailed, a big difference from peak a fourteen hundred in two thousand and eight, the year the filter system was written into the jail meanie.

In addition, the counties now set up an overside board for the juvenile detention center, taking authority over the jail away from the judge and giving IT to a team of citizens. The board members inspect the jail scrutiny, its policies, and even have the power to hire and fire the director. After the overside board was announced, I reached out to one long time, county commissioner, jeff phillips.

Jeff has been a county commissioner off and on since one thousand nine hundred ninety. He's not on the oversight board, but he helped set IT up. And for more than ten years, he SAT on the public safety committee, which met monthly with the jail director and improved its yearly budgets. I wanted to know what jeff made of the revelations from the lawsuit and what lessons the county was now taking from all this. But as soon as I started in with my first rather innocuous question, he cut me and know.

I know what I know that to say sounds a little suspicious, but but to what? What are you doing? What are you? What are you doing this? I'm just trying to figure out why are, why are you bringing this?

I understood jeff concern rutheford county had gotten knocked around pretty good in the press, and he just wanted the whole thing away. But I explained to him that I was curious from his perspective about what happened and what could have gone differently. You know, so the history isn't doomed to repeat itself. Jeff, got that. But still.

I I just don't know how rehashing all list stuff is is, is, is in the best interest of everybody in in rather for can me 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. We made him stay, let speak IT and and dispose forward and try not to make dozen that begin.

jeff said. The county commissioners, they're just a legislated body. The approved funding provide resources they don't have the knowledge or expertise to rely, oversee the Operations of the justice system. 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. 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 commands.

We are not arguing that I am not and I don't know of any other commissioner that would be arguing that what happened was the right thing to do. We are think we just trying to say, okay, this happened and and we're not we're not saying that you know that IT was our false that had happened IT was anybody's falt that IT happened.

I think IT was a mistake that a was my during the judicial process and that process um there are our mistakes might there like they are everywhere are and we want to aware that, that was happening. And i'm pretty sure that the juveniles detention center was not aware that they were breaking the early or maybe they should have ban. I don't.

A long time county official have been pretty clearly that the system was a mistake is significant, a meaningful starting point to some real accountability. But IT wasn't totally clear to me what jeff thought that mistake actually was or who made IT, which brings us to what hasn't changed in rather's d county.

To my mind, if you're willing to admit this policy was a mistake and harmful to kids, theological extension is to hold the people responsible for IT. Well, responsible, have them face consequences for implementing this system that went on for more than a decade. And I was ultimately the mass jAiling of children.

But that has not happened. Like I said, judge dave and poor got to leave on our own terms with no formal punishment for her actions. And lin duke, the woman who implemented and oversaw the filter system SHE, still has her job 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.

And all this has caused the county significant money. But ever since the lawsuit settled, county officials have ranged around her, rutheford county's mayor told the local paper. Miss duke is doing a fine job, and those on the new oversight board have said they have no plans to replace her.

SHE has our support, one board member said in my conversation with commissioner jeff phillips. When I press him on who was responsible for what happened. Did you think he was dab import duke? He was wrest.

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

Why is that important for you to not, do I?

Because I think there are some dedicated public servants out there whose lives have the potential to be rolled because of something that might be said from a negative perspective about them and how they conducted their professional lie. And I just don't think that that's fair.

What strikes me about gifts response is how he in other officials are so willing to extend Grace to do. Can dab import two people who so often refuse to extend that same Grace to the children who came before them?

Recently, I went back to rutherford carney to the juvenile courthouse. It's a brutal beige building that sits across the street from a car dealership and now a new judges in charge travel's lampe, who sailed through the election on the republican ticket. 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.

But that doesn't mean the system is Operating totally fairly. For one, even though a lot of kids are not being jailed by the county anymore, there are some pretty significant disparities in which of them are the year before the filter system was stop, 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. But once the filter has demanded the racial disparities shot up last year, sixty seven percent of the kids locked up from, rather for county were black.

This is in a place where just seventeen percent of the population is black, and appears that the filter system, with its vast overreach, had its own twisted, the segregation effect. Beyond that, the jail continues to house kids from other places. More than forty different counties across tennessee, almost half the state, send their wayward kids to ruth ford county.

And when I took a close look at what's happening to those kids, be out of counting kids, I noticed something. Reading reports from the last few years, I see the jail has been holding some of them for too long. And small charges, true and cy held for two days.

Unruly held for six days, run away seven days. Another run away ten days. All of them clear violations of the law. But the thing is, these are kids to rather colonies with different judges making their own decisions on how long to jail them. Some familiar.

When I asked the state monitor who compiles the report about this, he said, you're always gonna have one somewhere. A judge who tells you, this is my court, and i'm just gonna do what I need to do. When I eventually make my way into the juvenile courtroom, I take a seat in the back, sliding into a long wooden pill.

And I still see what i've always seen, a room full of anxious kids and parents, tired looking attorneys, court staff s streaming in and now it's tuesday, which means it's plea day so a docket full of kids taking plea deals, their charges on the gaming, from possession of marijuana to having a firearm under age. There's a lot of domestic assaults, kids fighting with parents also evading arrest, left burglary. The deals they make are often community service or product, and for many, the promise of the case White from their record, but they gotta fall the program.

No more bad choices. I noticed the courtrooms less colorful. Now, dave import used to have lots of pictures drawn by kids hanging on the walls. I assume he took them with her when he loved. But today, one picture catches my eye, one that wasn't here before. It's a large, almost live sized portrait of judge dave in port IT hangs right next to the bench, peering over the shoulder of the new judge, smiling wide and proud, the mother of radford county.

The kids of radford county is a code some of serial productions, the new york times public car, a nashville public radio IT, was reported by me marber night with additional reporting from can armstrong. The show was produced by danny map, with additional production by Michelle not A O editing from Julie snyder and jen gara along with sera blue stain and can armstrong yet propolis a and my colleague tony consolers at national public radio.

Additional editing from anna bada jo and alex colloid, the supervising producer for serial productions, is N A tube. I research in fact checking by then, fAiling with additional black checking by naomi share sound design, music supervision and mixing by feb. way. The original score for our show is from the blasting company, sin westling is our standards editor and legal review from dana Green, alami suma and Simon focus. The art form show comes from poo delco additional production from genel python mac Miller is the executive assistant for serial sam donny is the deputy managing editor of the new york times special thanks to happy sync and Chris kiser, van holland and pam holland at spotlight productions at the near at times a huge thank you to jeffrey maranda nala m in mehemet boni the kids of rothery conney is produced by serial productions, the new york times, publica and national public radio.