The two attorneys, Wes Clark and Mark Doughton, 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 Doughton 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.

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. 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.

There was a client of mine who his foot was injured during his jail intake process. He ended up having the foot amputated.

We filed this lawsuit for millions of dollars, and it turned out fairly quickly we learned that his leg was supposed to be cut off before he ever went into jail. That was our first one that we thought 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.

There was a slip and fall and she had fallen down.

Oh, my gosh. We lost a lot of money.

On that case. We had the sex offenders.

That was a.

Terrible case. Not a single one of them. That was terrible. Not a single one of those worked out. Well.

Most of their cases were dudds 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.

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've 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 Ruthford 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.

I clicked that, open it up. I didn't have high expectations for anything written by the police department. 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. 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 sighting 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 sighting and releasing, it seemed to be saying the police had only one option, arrest the kid. Wes was stunned.

Here we've got a government police agency that pins not just the Hobgood 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 gitty like a kid. 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 Ruthford 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. Now finally, he felt like he was on the verge of answering it. From Serial Productions and the New York Times, I'm Maribon Knight, and this is The Kids of Rutherford County. Episode three, would you like to sue the government? 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 because Wesley would have ideas a lot when someone were not very good. 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 down and all that stuff. 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. 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. He spoke to a lawyer he really respected who done some important cases involving police misconduct. A guy named Kyle Mother's Head. Kyle's a good lawyer. He'll tell you so. And that's not all he'll tell you.

I mean, I'm 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 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 green. Five very's. This case was too good to pass up.

I just want it. I want in on that, and I wanted to be part of that and I wanted to have a high-profile case that felt important.

Did it seem like a money maker?

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 Hopkins 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. 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 said even kids accused of the most minor offenses, things like skipping school, smoking cigarettes, or breaking curfew should be, 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 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 and in excess of her jurisdiction, 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 have 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 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 Len Duke just wrote the policies. They got rubber stamped and implemented.

Wes is referring here to Len 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 the 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. 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 any time 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.

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

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

What I did was I sat down in my office and about a third of my files ended up as these people have claims.

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

I was 16, yeah. It was when I was 14 years old. 15 years old. Ninth grade. I was 11, 12. I think I was 11 years old the first time I got arrested.

How old were you?

Seven.

Oh.

My God. I talked to 25 people, now adults, who told me about being arrested or locked up as kids in Ruthford 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 have 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 go towards the door. And then all of a sudden, they come in and they said, Mrs. Motherman, you're under arrest for theft and put your hands behind your back. And I asked him, I said, Man, how long am I going to be arrested for this? He said, For a year for all I like here.

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 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 he sat on you?

Yeah. 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 horseing 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 lessons.

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.

They arrested us and took us to the juvenile detention center. The cop, she said that 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 until 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, almost like a prison, in my opinion. When they took us in, they were just looking at my date of birth and stuff. And they're just like, well, you're very young. A little too young.

Interesting. But they stillto. Yeah, yeah. They still kept you?

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. They mug shot, check you for injuries, that thing.

The intake of it was you have to strip down naked in front of this weird... I don't know the language, weird ass man. He has to watch you naked taking either extremely cold shower or extremely high sour. So you really feel like your integrity is completely taken away from you. Yeah, just ice cold water and just getting sexually humiliated verbally by a large police officer, telling me to spread my cheeks, talking about my penis shrinking. That's gross. Yeah, tell me about it. That was scary at first. They maybe put on the little jumpsuit. And I remember being so little of the jumpsuit didn't even fit me. It was a short sleeve jumpsuit that went past my elbows. I never experienced something like that before at such a young age. So it's like something new to me. And I do a lot of crime and stuff. I was screaming, too, because I didn't know where I was. I didn't even know I was in jail. I feel like I didn't do nothing wrong. I don't deserve to be locked up. I'm just mad. My momma died. I'm sad. I'm hurt. You 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 have to stand in corners. You don't get any books and you're forced to sit up all day long. You can do push-ups, sit-ups. You can work out. But other than that, if you lay down, they'd come yelling. You threatened to yank you up and then put you on lockdown.

Lockdown, you might remember, was the county's term for solitary confinement. Fifteen-year-old Quinterius Fraser was once put on lockdown for eight days straight.

I'm sitting in there just looking.

At myself.

Thinking a lot of crazy, bad thoughts. I wanted to.

Really take my life because.

I'm in there and I'm just cold and I'm just stressed. 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 tampons or pads or anything. 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 a retainer, which is one thing because that's metal. But my psychiatrist prescribed medication for my bipolar disorder and my depression. There's just a lot of constant anxiety and stuff. To be in there without this medication, now I'm manic-depressive in this cell. 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. 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 staying in there. And I'm pretty sure I had, I guess, they're not handcuffs, they're around your feet, but shackles. Oh, the shackles. Yeah, around our feet. 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 just looking a mess. And I was embarrassed. What do you remember.

About the judge?

She called our parents up and made them.

Stand.

In a.

Single.

File in front of her and said that because of what they were doing as parents, that this was the problem with Rutherford County. She treated us like we were beneath her. That there were kids like us running around the street. She treated us like we were scum. The one thing I remember she said is she said that I was a threat to myself and my society. Yes, 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 that 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.

Because 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 case he'd been dreaming of. These policies have 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, 6,000 kids maybe, all of whom were now potential plaintiffs.

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 see 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.

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 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 dollars, 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 Ruthford County and Judge Davenport have been doing to kids. But for years, Judge Davenport have been telling her own story, and that story held a different power. That's after the break. Wgns, Rue Free Spiral. Good morning to you. Welcome into the action line from WGNS. This morning, we're talking.

About the Rutherford.

County juvenile court system.

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. 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 her chatting with host, Bart Walker III.

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.

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

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. 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 Ruthford 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. We do not have programs for children 11, 10, 9, 8, 7.

And we are locking- Do you have seven-year-olds now? 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. 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. 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 Daven Port 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. The detention center was a vital tool for keeping kids from going down that path.

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. There is no more slap on the wrist. They're going to see some consequence. 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 whet 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 10-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. That is good to see. But 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. You do a very good job. I was.

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. It's what I.

Love doing.

Every.

Day. Well, I know it is. 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. It's pretty clear. The state says exactly when to arrest and jail a kid, and you and the county have what the state says and made up your own rules. But on the other side was Judge Davenpour, who is confident in her own criteria.

Then you look to see if they are a risk to themselves or a risk to the community, and if theres a finding that 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 there are 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. We'll beback. You may say that I'm a dreamer, but I'm nothing more than that. 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 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 quizzes on it 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 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 or the laws. Here's Wes.

It was surreal. 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 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 council 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 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. They simply couldn't. Judge Davenport, she just could not give a straight answer that made any sense about why that statue wasn't being followed. In that context, everyone in the room realized how absurd it was that the statue wasn't being followed. So 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. I remember just feeling my cheeks from the musculature attention of me grinning for the entire time she was trying to give some cohesive explanation for the detention policy. At first I was worried, Is there something we don't know? Is there some brilliant legal strategy they're going to employ here today that we just didn't see coming? Whenever she started talking about the safety of the kids in the community as the standard, I knew that this was it. She was gone down. I remember looking up Judge Waverley Crenshaw is a very imposing intellect and figure. I'm watching him observe her testimony and I remember he held his face with his hand and his elbow was down. He was taking notes. Then at some point, he just set his pin down and put his hands and crossed it in front of him and didn't take any more notes. I was thinking, That's a good sign that 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. We knew that was not what was happening. So the question still remained like, Why do this? What's the benefit? But the answer to that question, I believe, is just power. This bureaucracy that she was the chief administrator over, this is all 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. 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.

I.

Don't know what exactly is in her mind. I just know that that.

Is.

Not a realistic possibility.

I'm not trying to be trying to be trying to tell you. 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.

I remember flinging the phone into the passenger seat and I'm backing up out of the parking lot and I'm trying to use the voice dial to yell at my car to call Mark Down. 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 got his hands on the actual order. We're basically like school children who've just gotten a free holiday or something.

Needless to say, they'd won.

We're screaming. Can you believe that we did it? We did it. Blah, blah, blah. They're so fucked. I think we 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, Maribon Knight, with additional reporting from Ken Armstrong.

The show was produced by Daniel Guimet with additional production by Michelle Navarow. Editing from Julie Snyder and Jen Gwera, along with Sarah Blue Stane and Ken Armstrong at Pro Publica, and my colleague, Tony Gonzalez, at Nashville Public Radio. Additional editing from Monita Batajow and Alex Kahlowitz. The supervising producer for serial productions is Enday Cheubu. Research and fact-checking by Ben F Allen, 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, Alamin, Sumal, and Simone Progas. The art for our show comes from Pablo Delcon. Additional production from Janel Pfeifer: Mac Miller is the executive assistant for Serial. Sam Dolnik is the deputy managing editor of The New York Times. Special thanks to Katie Mingle, Mike Connotay, Aaron Rees, Bianca Geiver, Jordan McCarley, and Rob Robinson. The Kids of Rutherford County is produced by Serial Productions, The New York Times, ProPublica, and Nashville Public Radio.