The Kids of Rutherford County: A Reporter's Essay

[Jilly_in_VA]

by Meribah Knight

It has been a little over three years since I began my reporting on juvenile justice in Tennessee. Until then, I hadn’t paid much attention to juvenile courts. For a reporter, they’re difficult to cover with any kind of intimacy. They are shrouded in secrecy in a way adult courts are not. The records are sealed. The proceedings are mostly private. And it’s for good reason: The dumb stuff you do as a kid shouldn’t follow you into adulthood.

But this privacy has its downside, because it can shield the adults in charge from accountability. And as I soon found out, juvenile justice in the state does need someone — maybe a reporter — to pay attention.

Tennessee has 98 juvenile courts and even more juvenile judges. Those judges have a lot of discretion, making decisions on everything from whether to take a case to whether a kid should get locked up and for how long. What’s more, in Tennessee, kids have no right to a jury trial. So, there’s really no check to a judge’s authority in a case — they decide how to interpret the facts and the law.

“It’s like the Wild West out here,” one juvenile defense lawyer told me. “Each judge is its own county, some are hard on crime, some are progressive.”

I can tell you from my reporting, he’s not wrong. Along with my colleague Ken Armstrong, I embarked on this story, now a podcast, to try to see inside one county’s juvenile court system, where an all-powerful judge and the jailer she appointed were playing by their own rules and the children were caught in the middle. But I learned about other juvenile justice systems along the way.

https://www.propublica.org/article/the-kids-of-rutherford-county-reporters-essay

Read on. Powerful.