Memphis residents who head to the polls next week will face a dizzying ballot for mayor. With Mayor Jim Strickland term limited in this city of 600,000, there are 17 candidates running to replace him in this nonpartisan race—a crush of local businessmen and politicians, including a former reality TV judge, two different life coaches, and a former mayor. Despite the crowded field, Oct. 5 will be the only round of voting: Whoever finishes first becomes the next mayor of Memphis, however small their share of the vote. 

Memphis is by far the most populous city in the nation to elect its mayor this way, in a one-round, first-past-the-post election. There is no primary, no runoff, no ranked-choice voting to cull the herd, encourage consolidation, or help clarify the stakes. All other U.S. cities with at least half a million residents have some such mechanism to ensure that the field narrows, or that the winner gets broader support.

This rare voting procedure was set up when a court eliminated runoffs more than 30 years ago to prevent white residents from coalescing to block Black candidates. But the white share of the population has declined considerably since then, rendering that original purpose more obsolete. Voters in this now majority-Black city tried in recent years to change their election rules and adopt ranked-choice voting, a system that could produce winners with wider appeal. But Tennessee Republicans who run the state government adopted a law in 2022 that banned the use of ranked-choice in the state. 

This has left Memphis with a system that risks diluting voters’ power, making it harder for them to elect leaders who represent the preferences and priorities of a large share of the population. 

“There’s still a whole lot of battle fatigue, angst, frustration, anxiety,” says Reverend Earle Fisher, director of the Black Clergy Collective of Memphis, about voters’ mood. “If there’s one thing I’ve heard a million times over the last few months that I wish I had a nickel for every time I heard it is: ‘There’s too many people in this race.’”

He says the danger to democracy is that public officials are getting elected without a mandate, without “50 percent of the people participating saying, ‘I want this person because I believe this person is gonna do the things that the majority of us want to be done.’”

Whoever wins the mayor’s race in Memphis will have to contend with concerns over public safety and economic disinvestment, a shrinking population, and a GOP-run state government that has increasingly interfered in the decisions made by its cities. The election also comes in the wake of Tyre Nichols’ death and other high-profile police shootings that have rocked the city recently, which puts a spotlight on the next mayor’s relationship with the police department and appointments of a police chief.

But in a field that’s this crowded, and where nearly all mayoral contenders say they share the same broad priorities—reduce crime, promote economic investment, and improve housing—it’s been exceedingly difficult for the conversations to go beyond sound bites or to really air out any policy disagreements between any two candidates. 

“Voters don’t really create their own messages. They choose between the alternatives that are put in front of them,” says Jack Santucci, who studies electoral systems as a political science lecturer at Queens College, CUNY. “Especially in a nonpartisan local election, voters are going to have trouble differentiating among the candidates.”

Local media has made decisions about which of these 17 candidates to invite to debates based on how much money they’ve raised and the available polling. 

By those metrics, the leading candidates include Shelby County Sheriff Floyd Bonner, who is touting support from police unions and his long experience in law enforcement, while also  drawing criticism for the high number of deaths in the local jail he oversees. They also include Paul Young, president of the Downtown Memphis Commission, a newcomer to electoral politics who leads the race in funds raised; state Representative Karen Camper, who voted against the law to ban ranked-choice voting while in the legislature; and Shelby County Commissioner Van Turner, a former Memphis NAACP president whose left-leaning platform has earned him the endorsement of Justin Pearson, a lawmaker representing part of the city who was expelled from the state House (and later reinstated) by Republicans earlier this year over a protest for gun control.

Also running is Willie Herenton, who has made fewer appearances at public events, skipped debates, and raised a lot less money. But as the former mayor from 1992 to 2009, the name recognition he garnered over his five terms makes him a frontrunner: In an August poll conducted by Emerson College, Herenton received 16 percent—enough to put him in the lead. A plurality of respondents, 26 percent, remained undecided. 

Even in smaller debates organized by the media, candidates have had limited time to state their cases and have struggled to distinguish themselves. The dynamic has heightened competition, incentivizing attack ads and even jockeying among the candidates over who has the best Christian faith credentials. 

Every possible advantage counts: The next mayor is likely to win with less than 30 percent of the vote, if not less, hardly a mandate from voters to carry out a particular policy vision.

“What we’re facing right now, with so many candidates in the way, is that we could possibly have the next mayor of Memphis elected by 20,000 or fewer votes,” Martavius Jones, chair of the city council, told Bolts.

Tennessee’s other largest city just held its own mayoral race this summer under different rules: Nashville holds runoffs for its local elections, giving the race a much different shape.

There were 12 candidates for mayor during Nashville’s first round of voting on Aug. 3, and the top two vote-getters, Freddie O’Connell and Alice Rolli, received 27 and 20 percent of the vote, respectively. In Memphis, this would have been the end of the road, but in Nashville it paved the way for a 6-week runoff campaign. O’Connell touted his progressive bona fides while Rolli ran with conservative support, a contrast that gave voters a clear choice. During the runoff, O’Connell rallied support from progressive advocacy groups, labor unions, as well as several of the candidates he beat in the first round, and on Sept. 14, won the mayorship with a decisive 64 percent of the vote. 

Republicans in the legislature floated a bill earlier this year to ban runoffs in municipal elections throughout the state. Democrats denounced it as an attempted power-grab in the run-up to Nashville’s election, warning that it would allow a single Republican to beat out a crowd of Democrats in the decidedly blue city. Had the bill passed, the summer’s result would not have changed since O’Connell won both rounds. Still, Rolli, the sole Republican among the major candidates, would have been 7 percentage points from victory rather than the 28 percentage points by which she lost the runoff.

Memphis too used to have runoff elections for its mayoral and city council contest, a system it adopted in the mid 1960s. Because of the city’s racial makeup at the time—63 percent white and 37 percent Black—runoffs worked to preserve white political power and ensured that Black candidates almost never took office. Runoffs were used not only to consolidate votes around just a couple of candidates, but also to shore up racial voting blocs. 

“Blacks could not hope to win citywide races given the traditional level of white polarization and bloc voting,” explains Marcus Pohlmann in his book Racial Politics At a Crossroads, a history of Memphis electoral politics. “Without a runoff, Blacks could have run single candidates in races in which there were several white candidates, and, by giving a candidate a plurality of the vote, have some reasonable possibility of winning.”

Elections continued on this way until in 1991, when a federal judge struck down the runoffs rule, saying that it violated the Voting Rights Act. U.S. District Judge Jerome Turner said the city had to adopt a new plan to “eradicate the minority vote dilution.” 

Mere months later, Herenton was elected as the city’s first Black mayor—by a hair, with only 142 more votes than his opponent, white incumbent Richard Hackett. The contest was decided in one round, and a runoff very well could have reversed the results, Pohlmann writes.

The racial makeup of Memphis has changed considerably since then; the U.S. census’ 2022 estimates show that 63 percent of the city’s population is Black and 24 percent is white. This has largely eliminated the concern of “minority vote dilution” that the 1991 ruling was intended to address. Still, the no-runoffs rule has remained. 

Memphians have devised other informal ways of consolidating the field in intervening years, including holding an unofficial mock election called the Memphis People’s Convention, also known as the People’s Primary. The event was originally put on ahead of the historic 1991 race, and had the effect of galvanizing Black voters around Herenton. 

After a long hiatus, the event was brought back in 2019 by the Black Clergy Collective of Memphis as a way to engage and inform voters, give candidates an opportunity to make their case, and signal who the leading candidates might be. 

“It’s been important for us not to concentrate on individuals or politicians as much as we concentrate on issues and policies that the majority of the people want to see enacted,” says Fisher of theBlack Clergy Collective.

This year, only six candidates registered for the event, which took place in August, and only two candidates—Young, the president of the downtown commission, and Turner, the former Memphis NAACP president—showed up in person. Young won the mock election, though Fisher stresses that many Memphians remain undecided. 

Lexi Carter, chair of the Shelby County Democratic Party, agrees that the People’s Convention this year is less of a political bellwether compared to the first convention in 1991. 

“That was effective then, but I think as the years passed the dynamics changed,” Carter told Bolts. She says that people engaged in 1991 “because it was the first time a Black mayor was ever going to be elected. Whereas now, there are African Americans that fill most of the elected positions [in city government.]” The leading candidates in the race this year are all Black and have some attachment to the Democratic party.

The Shelby Democratic Party has largely stayed out of this race, as they have a policy of not endorsing candidates in non-partisan races such as this one, where most candidates are registered Democrats or have Democratic affiliations. “It’s really a very close race and difficult to predict,” says Carter.

As an alternative to the current system, Memphis has tried to adopt ranked choice voting. This voting method, in which voters rank all candidates in order of preference instead of choosing just one, helps ensure that whoever wins has at least some level of support from most voters. 

Memphis residents first approved ranked choice with 71 percent of the vote in a 2008 referendum. The city didn’t move to implement it until 2017, though, when Shelby County Elections Administrator Linda Philips announced plans to use it in the 2019 elections. But members of the city council raised concerns about whether voting equipment could handle the change, and Tennessee’s election director Mark Goins halted Philips’ plan, issuing an opinion saying that ranked-choice voting violated state law. The Memphis city council put another referendum on the ballot for 2018, this time asking voters whether they wanted to repeal ranked-choice voting, but that referendum failed when 54 percent of voters rejected repeal. 

In 2022, the legislature stepped in to ban ranked-choice voting throughout Tennessee with a law sponsored by Republican state Senator Brian Kelsey, who represents parts of Shelby County. Many Democratic lawmakers who represent portions of Memphis voted against the ban, including Camper, the state Representative who is now running for mayor.

“I voted against the bill because the people of my community were for ranked choice voting. We chose it for ourselves,” Camper told Bolts in an email. 

“The legislature likes to lean on and meddle in the affairs of Memphis and Nashville,” she added. “I believe that this is one more way to override the will of Memphis and Shelby County.”

Fisher, who has supported the adoption of ranked-choice voting in Memphis, says he was disappointed to see the option removed. 

“I wanna do whatever we can do to ensure that whoever is elected to office, the probability of them representing the will of the majority of the citizens is high and not low,” he told Bolts.

With the path to ranked-choice voting now blocked, one prominent local Democrat is proposing another path to reform: introducing partisan primaries. Jones, the city council president, recently introduced an ordinance that, if passed, would put a popular referendum on the ballot in 2024 to set up a system that would have parties nominating candidates before they face a general election. Mayoral elections in Memphis are currently nonpartisan.

Jones says his ordinance is motivated by the size of the mayoral race, though in a city that is as staunchly blue as Memphis, a one-round Democratic primary could still reproduce some of the current system’s crowding issues. Jones says a partisan primary setting would still help condense the field and encourage candidates to adhere to party values.

He also says it’s less complicated and uncertain than petitioning a court to allow them to bring back runoffs. “Some of the feedback that I’ve received from people has been that there are just way too many people in the race,” said Jones. “So just by doing a partisan basis for selecting the mayor, we avoid having to go to court.”

The Shelby County Democratic Party has endorsed the measure. “We would much prefer to have the opportunity to choose our candidate,” Carter told Bolts. “When we have a nominee in advance, we can really get behind one individual and put all of our resources there, instead of dividing our resources between 16 or 17 people.”

Jones’ proposal has not yet been brought up for discussion by the full city council. It’s not likely to come up until after this election is over. 

“It’s a beautiful thing that we have the freedom that anybody who meets the qualifications can get in the race,” said Jones. “I don’t have a problem with that. But when it comes down to making that mayoral decision, let’s make it simple.”

The post With 17 Candidates and Unusual Voting Rules, Memphis Mayoral Race Gets Jumbled appeared first on Bolts.

Then late last month, Tennessee’s elections director effectively shut down the process for restoring voting rights to Moore and hundreds of thousands of others in the state stripped of voting rights due to past felony convictions. 

In a July 21 memo, Tennessee Coordinator of Elections Mark Goins, a former Republican lawmaker, told local election offices that, on top of showing they’ve checked off all the boxes listed in state law, formerly incarcerated people must now also complete a separate process: persuade the governor to issue a pardon, or a local judge to issue an order restoring their rights. These officials can reject a request at their sole discretion, regardless of the criteria a petitioner has met.

It costs $159.50 to ask a judge for such an order in Davidson County, home to Nashville, where Moore resides, adding another financial hurdle to what was already a nearly impassable process.

Moore says he remains determined to work his way through the new process. “I feel like it’d make me a whole citizen again, getting my voting rights,” he told Bolts. Still, he says it felt particularly painful to pass by people at the polls during last week’s mayoral election in Nashville, knowing the state had just made it harder for him to ever again participate. “I’m hurt looking at the people voting, and I wish I could make a local difference in my community,” he said.

“They’re making it near impossible,” he added. “I think it’s by design. Once they open a door, they put out another block.”

Moore is working with Free Hearts, an organization led by formerly incarcerated women that helps Tennesseans regain the right to vote. Dawn Harrington, its executive director, told Bolts that dozens of people have already contacted Free Hearts asking for help since the new rules have put their rights entirely up to the whims of state officials. “What the state of Tennessee is doing is trying to suppress the vote, and be very strategic in suppressing the vote,” says Harrington, who herself had her rights restored in 2020. 

Tennessee’s previous system for restoring voting rights after prison, established in 2006, required people to file a certificate with their local elections office demonstrating that they fulfilled a long list of requirements, which included finishing all parts of a sentence, including probation and parole, paying off any fines, fees, and child support, and getting a corrections officer to sign off. Nearly 500,000 people in Tennessee are disenfranchised—around 9 percent of the state’s adult population. 

With Tennessee’s criminal legal system beset by massive racial inequalities in policing and prosecution, felony disenfranchisement is even higher for Black adults in the state: 21 percent can’t vote because of prior convictions, the highest rate in the nation. 

Advocates for rights restoration stress that these staggering numbers illustrate how tremendously difficult the previous system already was to navigate. According to the Sentencing Project, only 2,034 were able to get their rights restored between January 2020 and September 2022.

“Even under the old procedure, less than one percent of people who had felonies were able to get their voting rights restored because of just a morass of bureaucracy,” says Kathy Sinback, executive director of the ACLU of Tennessee. “What Mark Goins has done is horrifying, but [getting your rights restored] was almost impossible already.” Sinback told Bolts the hurdles the election coordinator added to the process last month are “putting in clearer relief the magnitude of the problem.”

“It puts the final nail in the coffin of democracy,” she said.

With this change, Tennessee joins Mississippi and Virginia as the only states where anyone who loses the right to vote over a felony conviction is presumed to lose it for life; in those states, the only path for relief is an act of clemency that is entirely at the discretion of state officials. (Nine other states permanently disenfranchise some but not all people with felony convictions.) Virginia only joined this group this year due to a new executive policy announced by Governor Glenn Youngkin, a Republican. 

Mississippi’s statute was struck down on Friday by a federal court. The state has not yet indicated whether it will appeal the decision.

The changes move Tennessee’s policy on rights restoration backwards in time. Before 2006, the state required people to secure a pardon or a court order to regain their voting rights, based on the process laid out in a 1981 statute. Then the state adopted the law in 2006, sponsored by two Democratic lawmakers, that meant to make the process less discretionary and listed specific requirements people must meet to be reinstated on voter rolls—the certificate process, detailed above. For the last 17 years, people who wanted to restore their rights needed to navigate cumbersome paperwork and bureaucracy to prove they met the criteria, but they didn’t need an individual court order or action from the governor.

Even with the 2006 reforms, the state maintained harsh standards for who is even eligible to have their rights restored, for instance disqualifying many lower-income people who could not afford to pay off their court debt or who fell behind on child support payments while incarcerated.

And not all Tennesseans were eligible to have their rights restored depending on the specific conviction they received. The process for determining eligibility was so confusing that people needed a three-page flow chart to decipher it.

In practice, many people who were eligible did not bother jumping through the hoops. Bolts talked to numerous Tennesseans who explained that it took them a very long time to access basic information and find people willing to help them understand the state’s process. They say they encountered elections officials who were also unable to answer basic questions, and had to chase down correctional officers to get them to sign the certificate many were unfamiliar with. After Harrington’s release from prison in 2011, for instance, it took her legal assistance and years of efforts—she was convicted in New York so had to get paperwork filed in that state—to fulfill the steps and regain her voting rights in 2020.

“The agencies that oversee the officials that are supposed to issue the certificate never created any training, any guidance,” Blair Bowie, an attorney with the Campaign Legal Center, which sued the state over these rules, told Bolts. “The whole system is scattershot.”

Errors also put people who tried to regain their rights at risk of potential criminal prosecution. The state drew national furor last year when Pamela Moses, a Black activist in Memphis, was sentenced to six years in prison for registering to vote when she was not eligible to. A judge vacated her conviction after The Guardian reported that she had received false advice from state officials, and months later, voters ousted the local prosecutor who had targeted her. 

Last month’s memo from Goins, Tennessee’s elections director, made the rules more complex by piling the 1981 and 2006 statutes on top of each other. It states that people must obtain a pardon or judicial approval as outlined under the 1981 law and follow the certification process laid out by the 2006 law, saying the latter didn’t replace the requirements in the former.

Goins, who did not respond to a request for an interview, has attributed the policy change to a decision issued by the Tennessee Supreme Court in June in a case brought by Ernest Falls, a man with an out-of-state conviction who argued that he should not have to abide by all the requirements laid out in the 2006 law since he had already regained his voting rights in Virginia before moving to Tennessee. 

In ruling against Falls in late June, the court decided that the requirements of the 1981 and 2006 statutes should be combined when it comes to people with out-of-state convictions. Goins’ memo the next month stated that elections officials are now extending the logic of that ruling to people who have been convicted in Tennessee. The memo included a new version of the certificate of restoration, and instructions to also apply for a pardon or court order restoring rights of citizenship. “The application of the holding to other governing statutes requires the same interpretation to those convicted of a felony in both federal and Tennessee state courts,” Goins said. 

Bowie, whose organization helped bring the lawsuit on Falls’ behalf, told Bolts that these instructions are a “total misreading of the law.” She says it’s ludicrous to claim that lawmakers intended for the 2006 reforms to make the process even more burdensome. 

Steve Cohen, the lead sponsor of the 2006 law in the state Senate, told The Tennessee Lookout that this was “absolutely not” what his reform was meant to do. Cohen, who now serves in the U.S. Congress, did not answer a request for comment on the drafting of the 2006 law.

Demetrus Coonrod, a city councilor in Chattanooga who was incarcerated in the 2000s, got her voting rights restored a decade ago through the post-2006 system that only required completing a certificate. But she went on to also petition a court to restore her full rights of citizenship because she also wanted to run for office. She succeeded, one of only 11 people to complete that process in Chattanooga over a three year period. But she knows firsthand how arbitrary those decisions are.

“I was concerned because it felt like a gamble,” Coonrod told Bolts. “A judge can determine his idea of what a person is supposed to do to be productive.” 

People will now be subjected to that same procedure just to regain their voting rights, and Coonrod warns that making people plead for a governor or judge’s forgiveness will make the voting rights process even more haphazard. 

Harrington, whose group helps guide people through the rights restoration process, also warns that the legal fee people must pay to petition the court for such an order will add a tremendous obstacle for the state’s poorer residents to even apply.

“How are you going to charge somebody to restore their right to vote?” Harrington said. 

Dismayed by the new reality, Tennessee advocates want state lawmakers to step in and pass a system for automatically restoring people’s voting rights. Until then, they are also calling on Republican Governor Bill Lee to issue a blanket executive order to grant people pardons. 

Iowa Governor Kim Reynolds, who is also a Republican, issued such an order in 2020 when she restored the voting rights of Iowans once they complete most felony convictions.

“When someone serves their sentence and pays the price our justice system has set for their crimes, they should have their right to vote restored automatically,” Reynolds said at the time.

Since regaining her own voting rights, Conrood says she has devoted herself to helping others in Chattanooga go through the rights restoration process, step by step, “just keeping them empowered enough to complete it.” She shows people her own certificate of restoration to help fight off discouragement. “The hardest part for them was actually believing that it could happen for them too,” she said.

This year, Coonrood helped Nate Shropshire, a Chattanooga resident who had first looked into how to regain his voting rights a few years ago. He finally completed his paperwork and registered to vote this spring—right in time to beat Goins’ memo and avoid its new hurdles, such as the need to pay the court system and get lucky with a magnanimous judge.

Shropshire says he is now eager to exercise his voting rights but also to continue rebuilding his life.

“I just want to be a normal citizen like everybody else and not let my past determine my future,” he said. 

The post Tennessee Puts Voting Rights at the Whims of State Officials appeared first on Bolts.

Soon after Tyre Nichols’s brutal killing by Memphis police officers in January, the chairman of the city’s civilian review board, James Kirkwood, appealed to the city council to strengthen its oversight of police. “If you slap someone on the wrist for something they’ve done wrong, then covered it up and left it alone, they’re going to do it again,” Kirkwood, a pastor and former police officer, told the council, requesting more money, more staff, and more power to conduct independent investigations. 

Instead, what little power the board did have may soon vanish, as the Tennessee legislature draws closer to gutting civilian oversight over police in Memphis and other cities in the state.

Introduced in late January by GOP lawmakers, just weeks after Nichols’s death, Senate Bill 591 and House Bill 764 would dissolve community-led oversight boards in Memphis and Nashville, ending their ongoing investigations by the close of July and precluding the possibility of other cities establishing boards with similar powers. 

“This bill essentially strips away police accountability in our state, at the height of a police killing that was so tragic and brutal,” said Jill Fitcheard, the director of Nashville’s Civilian Oversight Board. “These state legislators want to cut away oversight and police accountability and dwindle it down until it’s nothing.”

The Republican legislature’s latest assault on Memphis and Nashville, the state’s two most populous cities, comes just weeks after its headline-grabbing expulsion of two young Black lawmakers, Memphis’s Justin Pearson and Nashville’s Justin Jones, for leading a gun control protest on the House floor. The state government has engaged in a series of other maneuvers in recent months to interfere with self-governance in Tennessee’s bluer and more diverse cities. 

The new bills would still allow local governments to set up what they call “police advisory review committees,” but local advocates and the Memphis and Nashville boards’ leaders—both former law enforcement officials—denounce these replacements as impotent. They would not be able to conduct independent investigations or take quick action on misconduct, and their members would no longer be appointed by community groups. 

“The new law takes away robust investigative power from the committee and sends it back to internal affairs and the respective local governments,” said Sekou Franklin, a professor of political science at Middle Tennessee State University. “So the police would basically investigate themselves.”

The timing of this legislation stings particularly in Memphis, where advocates had hoped that the national spotlight after Nichols’s killing would spur long-needed changes to the way the city polices and prosecutes its residents, including to the city’s decades-old civilian review process. And it threatens to erase hard-won gains in Nashville, where years of struggle and coalition building led to a successful 2018 voter referendum establishing a board made up primarily of community-nominated members with the ability to issue policy recommendations. 

“This is what the people want,” said Sheila Clemmons Lee, the mother of Jocques Clemmons, whose killing at the hands of a Nashville officer sparked the movement for community oversight there. “If you go back and look, see how many people came out to vote on this, plus the signatures that we had gathered for it—[this new legislation] is just saying that our voices don’t matter.”

In Memphis, renewed attention to police oversight after Tyre Nichols’s murder

Memphis’s Civilian Law Enforcement Review Board (CLERB) has been around since 1994, but it has often been condemned as underfunded and ineffective. In that, it’s hardly an outlier—many civilian review boards across the country, even those with more enumerated powers, struggle to achieve effective oversight of police. Barry Friedman, an attorney and scholar who published a 2022 report on civilian oversight boards, told Bolts in January that most boards are more symbolic than effective. All but six boards lack disciplinary authority. 

In 2020, then-law professor Steve Mulroy wrote an article in Memphis Lawyer urging the mayor to issue an executive order requiring the Memphis Police Department to cooperate with CLERB and ultimately comply with its directives. His recommendations weren’t followed. Two years later, Mulroy was elected district attorney of Shelby County, ousting the incumbent prosecutor on promises of reform, and he now finds himself tasked with dealing with a department whose deep-rooted problems have been exposed to the entire nation. The Department of Justice recently announced a review of Memphis’s policing practices, and they may be considering a comprehensive “pattern and practice” investigation as well.

Mulroy’s office swiftly moved to prosecute the Memphis police officers responsible for Nichols’s death, and he has continued to call for stronger civilian oversight, telling Bolts in February, “we need comprehensive CLERB reform.”

Cardell Orrin, executive director of the Tennessee branch of Stand For Children, has also criticized CLERB for its many shortcomings. He believes many people who file lawsuits against the Memphis police department aren’t even bothering to take their case to CLERB, given its low number of yearly investigations (Memphis looked into just five cases in 2022, to Nashville’s 102.) “Of course, all of that is moot if the state takes away any ability even to have citizen oversight of police departments,” he told Bolts. 

The introduction of the legislation that would abolish existing community review boards had shifted the goalposts: now, instead of pushing for stronger CLERB powers, advocates are left pleading for the preservation of any oversight at all. 

“It’s better to have the structure in place,” Orrin said, noting that CLERB could look very different under a mayor who was more willing to implement policies like the ones Mulroy had proposed. “If you get rid of it you don’t even have the option.” 

“It’s a walk in the wrong direction,” Kirkwood, who spent three decades in the Memphis Police Department before his retirement in 2017, told Bolts of the legislation. If only CLERB were adequately staffed, funded, and empowered to investigate and recommend changes to the department’s practices, “we could really do a whole lot,” he said. “I think our city deserves that.” 

“You give a lot of authority to these men and women when you put this badge on,” Kirkwood reflected. “And they can take freedom, they can take life, they can take peace from individuals. They can cause a lot of harm with the authority that you’ve given them—and that authority needs to always be in a place where it can be checked. Not just by police but also by the citizens.” 

In Nashville, a hard-won civilian oversight board under threat

Before Nashville’s civilian oversight board was established, all complaints about police conduct were routed through the Nashville police department’s Office of Professional Accountability, akin to an Internal Affairs department. Clemmons Lee told Bolts that hundreds of allegations of misconduct and brutality went unaddressed every year, with the office ruling against the vast majority of complainants. “All of these incidents was just scooted to the side,” she said. “You know, it is what it is. It’s just the police. No, it’s not. These are lives we’re talking about.”

In 2017, the death of Clemmons Lee’s son Jocques at the hands of a white police officer renewed long-standing calls for civilian oversight in Nashville. “It was a very brutal fight,” recalled Franklin, who was closely involved. “Our city council didn’t want it…two mayors opposed it. We had to build coalitions with veterans groups, immigrant groups, human rights groups, Jewish groups, Muslim groups.”

As the resulting group, Community Oversight Now, organized, the fatal shooting of another black man—Daniel Hambrick—by another white officer further galvanized the effort. “We knocked on doors, we held town halls and meetings trying to educate people about the Community Oversight Board,” Clemmons Lee told Bolts. “And the people listened.” After a successful petition drive, a measure to establish a civilian oversight board was put on the ballot, and on November 6, 2018, it passed with 59 percent of the vote. 

The result: a robust board with 11 members, seven of whom must be nominated by community organizations or grassroots petitions—one of the most important components of effective civilian oversight boards, according to a 2016 paper by Udi Ofer, who then led the ACLU of New Jersey. The COB also enjoys a number of other qualities that Ofer highlights as critical to the success of such boards, including independent investigatory powers, and the ability to conduct audits and make policy recommendations, many of which the police department has accepted. 

The board lacks some important powers, such as the ability to discipline officers, and it still has its work cut out for it. “Even with all of that taking place we’ve had a slew of police shootings and killings in Nashville, but the COB has probably prevented more police violence,” said Franklin. “A lot of that could be undone.” 

“Once this oversight board is eliminated and [if] there’s no legal action—It will probably take decades to do something significant around police reform in the city of Nashville,” he added.

The Tennessee legislature continues to target its major cities

Nashville’s board has been under threat since before it was established. The city’s police union first took issue with the number of signatures on the petition, then sued to overturn the 2018 referendum’s results, in a case that they appealed all the way to the Tennessee Supreme Court. They lost each time.

“We faced so many different hurdles,” Franklin said. “And then—the one avenue that they have access to that we don’t have is state lawmakers.” 

In 2019, the Tennessee legislature took up the fight, removing subpoena powers from the board. (Now, only the city council can compel witnesses to testify on behalf of the boards). In 2021, it required board members to complete a police academy course or risk losing their voting power. Pretty much since its inception, Fitcheard said, Nashville’s board has been “plagued with this cloud of legislation takeover.”

The new bills’ sponsors, Republican Representative Elaine Davis and Republican Senator Mark Pody, neither of whom represent either Memphis or Nashville, have said they want to standardize oversight procedures across the state. But Pody has also said that police feel like they are “under a microscope” under the current system. And both Pody and another supporter have made vague claims about oversight board members abusing their power but have not provided specifics. In a recent senate committee hearing, Senator Richard Briggs, a Republican from Knoxville, alleged that Tennessee Bureau of Investigations (TBI) Director David Rausch had told him that board members were interfering with crime scenes and that the bill would allow the TBI to “gather all the evidence without it being interfered with or contaminated by these outside boards.” 

“It startled me,” Fitcheard told Bolts, to hear these allegations repeated by multiple sources given that no one had ever contacted her about them. “It was just fabricated, it’s not true.” Her lawyer reached out to Rausch asking for specifics, but received no response. 

Bolts reached out to Pody, Briggs, and TBI Director Rausch to inquire about these allegations and request any available evidence that the events described took place. Pody and Briggs’ offices did not respond. Rausch’s office confirmed that a conversation between Briggs and Rausch took place, but would neither confirm the content of the conversation nor offer a response to any of Bolts’ other questions. 

This legislation is progressing through a legislature that has been especially zealous in intervening in the local governance of its major cities, actions that one Nashville lawmaker called an “attack on democracy” in an interview with Bolts last month. This move comes on top of a recently-passed bill cutting the size of Nashville’s metro council by half, and a tabled bill that would have ended runoffs in local elections, which could have hampered Democratic candidates in the majority-liberal Nashville and Memphis. 

“How far can a state body go before it clearly starts to infringe upon the rights of the citizenry in localities?” Orrin asked. “And, you know, that’s a question at some point for the courts to decide.” (Nashville is currently suing over the attempt to halve its council). 

This state-level preemption of local governments isn’t unique to Tennessee. The Local Solutions Support Center, a national organization that aims to strengthen local democracy, has tallied over 600 preemptive bills across all 50 states that it deems “abusive”—instances of states using their power to overrule local governments and shut down legislation around such issues as abortion, housing, voting rights, and now, police oversight. LSSC attributes much of this push to the American Legislative Exchange Council, the right-wing group of lobbyists and legislators known for replicating identical legislation in states across the country. (ALEC, for instance, is behind many of the country’s critical infrastructure laws, which Bolts reported on earlier this month.) 

The Tennessee legislature’s actions also appear to be largely retaliatory. The expulsion of Pearson and Jones, the lawmaker duo dubbed “The Justins,” came after the two young lawmakers led a gun control protest in the wake of a mass shooting in Nashville. Nashville politicians have complained that the bill targeting the council is a response to local lawmakers’ refusal to host the 2024 Republican convention. To Orrin, the timing of the civilian oversight legislation, introduced so soon after Tyre Nichols’s death, felt like a deliberate attempt to shut down the police accountability that Memphis residents were demanding. “Clearly it was because of the questions that were raised,” he said. 

The bill that would abolish civilian oversight of police is now on the verge of becoming law. It has already passed the Senate 26-5 and is currently moving through House committees. If the bill passes the House, where Republicans enjoy a large majority, it would head to the desk of Tennessee’s governor, Republican Bill Lee, who has signed the bills weakening the state’s oversight boards in past sessions.

“They’ll continue to get away with murder”

Activists don’t have to look far for evidence of what may soon change with the bill’s passage. The legislation would authorize cities to retain some police committees—whether they choose to convert their existing stronger boards within 90 days to fit the bill’s far weaker requirements, or create a new body later on. And its sponsors say that they are modeling these new bodies off of Knoxville’s existing police review committee.

Kirkwood and Fitcheard both said that Knoxville’s model, which was established in 1998, is outdated and insufficient to the task. “Policing has changed greatly since then,” said Fitcheard. Moreover, she said, “They haven’t been funded well.” She added, “Up until the last few years, it just had one person reviewing complaints. So how effective is that?” (Nashville’s board receives over $2 million annually and has several full-time staff). 

According to the bill’s most recent version, the new boards would need to have members who are appointed by the mayor rather than community residents. They would not be allowed to investigate any incidents that occurred before Jan. 1, 2023, meaning that some currently open cases would never receive any conclusion or closure. And even for incidents after that date, obstacles to accountability would accumulate. 

The committees would be prohibited from taking up cases before all other avenues—Internal Affairs investigations, civil suits, and criminal cases—were completed. Given the yearslong delay this would entail, Kirkwood told Bolts, “a complainant probably would walk away.”

And when a committee does complete an investigation, it would boomerang back to the local police department’s Internal Affairs. In Nashville, the office is run by a woman who, in her previous job as an assistant DA in Nashville, failed to disclose potentially exculpatory evidence in a murder case against a teenager—in this case, that a central witness for the prosecution was arrested with the murder weapon in his possession. 

Clemmons Lee contemplated a future Nashville without its civilian oversight board. “It’s gonna get worse,” she said. “They’ll continue to get away with murder after murder after murder after murder.”

The post “Our Voices Don’t Matter”: Tennessee Moves to Gut Police Oversight appeared first on Bolts.

The conservative politicians in charge of Tennessee’s state government have relentlessly aimed in the last year to diminish the political power of the state’s most populous and liberal-leaning city by curtailing Nashville’s representation in Congress, shrinking the size of its Metro Council, investigating the operations of its district attorney, and now attempting to interfere in its electoral processes.   

Most recently, Republican state Representative Jason Zachary and Senator Brent Taylor proposed a bill that would, if passed, ban runoffs in all municipal elections within the state. 

For solidly-liberal Nashville, the bill’s passage could have meant an upheaval for the upcoming mayoral election this August. The city’s elections are nominally nonpartisan, but Democrats have consistently won the mayor’s office for decades. Runoffs are common in the city’s mayoral elections, where the vote is often split between several Democrats and a few Republicans. Traditionally, after a consolidated voting bloc emerges following eliminations in a first round, a Democrat carries the mayoral election handily. The elimination of runoffs in Nashville’s mayoral elections would have opened the door for a Republican to win the position based on a plurality, even if the majority of votes go to Democrats.

Senate Bill 1527 was initially filed with placeholder language, but just before a hearing in the Senate’s State and Local Government Committee on March 14, Taylor brought two amendments explicitly banning local runoff elections. The entire bill was tabled before the amendments were approved and it has been deferred to the committee’s first 2024 convening, where it’s likely to resurface.  

But even though this year’s election remains unaffected by this proposed change, candidates for mayor, Democratic legislators, and local activists within Nashville have been loud in their opposition to the measure, and remain wary of similar moves being made in the 2024 session and beyond.

They point to the proposal as part of an alarming trend of conservative legislative attacks that threaten Nashville’s ability to be represented earnestly, and demonstrate a new approach for red states to skirt the voting rights of resistant communities in blue localities. They warn that this pattern, which has begun to reverberate throughout the region, signals a new era for voter suppression in the Deep South.

“This is not an isolated incident. This is an abuse of power,” said Senator Charlane Oliver, a Democratic lawmaker who represents Nashville. “This is about control.”

Before it was delayed, SB 1527 had amassed significant support among Tennessee Republicans, including vocal backing from state party chair Scott Golden, who claimed that the bill’s passage would “get local races in line with the rest of the state.” Taylor, one of the bill’s sponsors, had pointed to the state’s troubled history as a reason for advancing the legislation. “Runoffs are a relic of the Jim Crow South. They were designed to prevent minorities from winning elections,” Taylor told the Nashville Banner.

Taylor is right in pointing out this history—runoffs were initially introduced in Southern states as a way to prevent Black voters from winning elections based upon pluralities, with the runoff stage therefore allowing white majorities to consolidate behind a single, often anti-civil rights, candidate. However, scholars have pointed to Black voters’ integration into the political system to argue that the era’s context matters, and that in most contemporary elections—and in Tennessee’s in particular—this runoff disadvantage no longer seems to occur. Runoffs today are common in local elections throughout the state, especially in its three largest cities of Nashville, Memphis, and Knoxville. All three cities currently have Democratic mayors.

Senator Jeff Yarbro, a Democrat who represents Nashville in the legislature—and who recently announced his candidacy for mayor—sees this bill as undermining the city’s elections, especially considering that Nashville is Tennessee’s most racially diverse city. “The problem with this bill, like so many election bills in recent years, is that there’s an attempt to change the outcomes of local elections, as opposed to changing the process,” he told Bolts. “This bill seems aimed at achieving partisan ends more so than democracy.”

“Any bill that is designed to eliminate an entire election procedure, by design, is voter suppression,” said Oliver. She recently won her seat in the state senate after a notable career as a voting rights and racial justice activist, co-leading The Equity Alliance. In the legislature, her experience as an organizer has shaped her perspective. “These efforts to stifle opposition and silence voices are an attack on democracy.”

SB 1527 comes on the heels of a number of legislative measures that would increase the state government’s authority over Nashville’s local proceedings and hamstring the city’s ability to elect officials that align with the city’s political makeup. 

In the 2020 presidential election, Democratic nominee Joe Biden got nearly twice as many votes as Republican Donald Trump in Davidson County, which contains Nashville. Shortly after, in the 2020 redistricting cycle, Tennessee Republicans eliminated Nashville’s congressional seat, splintering the city into three new congressional districts, all favoring the more conservative rural communities outside of the city. The 5th District, which contains the largest chunk of the city, is currently represented by U.S. Representative Andy Ogles, who is the first Republican to represent Nashville in Congress since 1875. 

In early March, Governor Bill Lee signed into law a reduction of Nashville’s city council size, cutting the council in half from 40 members, to 20. The measure, which sped through the legislature, does not name Nashville explicitly, but was still designed to target the city, which is the only one that currently has more than 20 members. It also overrides a 2015 referendum in which Nashville residents voted overwhelmingly to maintain the size of the Metro Council. The city government immediately sued to have it blocked, but if it is allowed to stand, it will impact the upcoming city council elections, also taking place this August. 

Additional bills currently moving through the legislature would eliminate funding for Nashville’s convention center and offer authority to state officials to oversee the Nashville airport. 

At the same time, state Attorney General Jonathan Skrmetti, a Republican, has opened a criminal investigation into the actions of Glenn Funk, the Democratic District Attorney of Davidson County over whether his team violated state wiretapping laws with cameras that were placed around the office. This investigation comes months after Funk said that he would not prosecute abortion after Tennessee’s abortion ban took effect in the wake of the Dobbs decision. 

“This is a coordinated attack,” said Oliver. “We have to sound the alarm. And this isn’t just an attack on Nashville—if you can do it to Nashville, who’s next? Memphis?” 

The actions of Tennessee politicians follow a pattern of other states with conservative legislatures using their authority to exert control over the policies of growing liberal cities and counties. This happens by way of preemption, a doctrine that allows state governments to restrict or overrule the powers of local governments. Preemption has at times been used to maintain equality and uniformity of application of environmental or labor laws, for instance. But states have more recently wielded preemption as a political tool to strip municipalities of their autonomy and representation—blocking local ordinances dealing with everything from housing and minimum wage to immigration and, since the fall of Roe v. Wade, abortion access and reproductive rights.

“Unfortunately, what Nashville is facing is not unique,” said Marissa Roy, the legal team lead at the Local Solutions Support Center, a national organization working to strengthen local democracy and combat abuse of preemption. “Increasingly, state preemption has aimed at ideological outcomes without considering the long-term consequences for local governance.” Roy points to a bill being considered in Florida that would allow companies to sue local governments over measures they disagree with, and another in Texas that would wrest away local governments’ regulatory powers over agriculture, labor, and other areas. 

“Preemption is both bad governance and anti-democratic. Laws that reduce the size of the Nashville City Council, for example, impede more community-based representation,” she added. “Ultimately, these laws undermine the will of voters, who should be the ones to choose their representatives and vote for the policy platforms they support, without the risk of state reversal through preemption.”

In southern states in particular, preemptive legislation has taken aim at voting and criminal legal systems. In Mississippi, the legislature is considering a bill to create a separate court system for the city of Jackson, empowering white state officials to oversee criminal proceedings in a city that boasts one of the highest percentage of Black residents in the country. In Missouri, conservative legislators are attempting to strip St. Louis’s control of their metro police force, instead shifting authority to the state’s governor. 

“The playbook has always been there,” said Oliver. “The Southern strategy never left.”

In Nashville, these legislative attacks on enfranchisement and political autonomy go hand in hand with efforts to change local identity, and have tangible impacts within the community. In early March, following the governor’s signature on a bill banning public drag performances and gender-affirming healthcare for minors, white supremacists unfurled a banner in Nashville’s city center displaying a swastika and transphobic slurs, explicitly thanking Lee for “[securing] a future for white children.” 

Sharon Hurt, an at-large council member for the city of Nashville, and current candidate for mayor, traces the city’s current tension in its relationship with the state, back to the Nashville Metro Council’s decision last year to reject state GOP officials’ bid to have Nashville host the 2024 Republican National Convention. 

“They’re using their power because they’re upset that we did not vote to bring the Republican National Convention here,” said Hurt. “They felt like Democrats were denying Republicans from coming [to Nashville]. They’re now attacking us to show the power that they have.”

As Nashville continues to grow both in population and in national profile, the tension surrounding efforts to court the 2024 Republican National Convention highlights both the state’s interest in shaping Nashville’s image as a major conservative urban center, and local leaders’ and activists’ united resistance against this portrayal. Nashville has a history of being a locus of progressive activism in the South—going back to John Lewis and Diane Nash’s infamous 1960 lunch counter sit-ins. 

“Cities develop their own political cultures,” Yarbro said, “and Nashville is conditioned to have these wide-open debates that ultimately turn into coalition-building exercises… That’s really conducive to good politics and the kind of coalition-building that a mayor needs, not just to win a runoff election, but to lead a city. [However], there’s a dangerous national trend to advance minoritarian politics, where a cohesive minority can achieve disproportionate political power and control.”

Looking ahead to the upcoming mayoral election, recently spared from the threat of eliminated runoffs, Hurt sees the time between now and 2024’s legislative session—the period in which SB 1527 could resurface—as an opportunity to convince the legislature to change course. 

“It gives us time to change their perspective,” said Hurt, emphasizing that the change will only occur if the Nashville community puts up a fierce fight between now and then. “One thing that I love about Nashville is that in the most catastrophic and challenging times, is when the best of our city comes out. This bill may be a divisive move, but it is not our destiny. There is hope. I don’t care how bleak it looks.”  

Nashville’s representatives fear that more hits may be coming but say they’ll keep speaking loudly against these moves by the state government, urging organizing efforts, and looking for allies in the court system. 

“When you’re outnumbered [in the legislature], there’s really not much you can do other than speak out in hopes that the courts will step in,” said Oliver, who is one of only six Democrats in the 33-member Senate. Oliver and other Senate Democrats are vocal on social media about these bills—often posting direct clips and videos from committee hearings to emphasize the state of play. 

“We have to begin to really start to talk to one another and strategize together to fight these bills off from a selfless place,” she said, “because if it’s not me tomorrow, it’s you today.”

The post How the Tennessee GOP is Trying to Mute Music City appeared first on Bolts.

Two weeks after Tyre Nichols died from the injuries he sustained at the hands of a number of police officers in Memphis, Tennessee, something unusual happened: Shelby County District Attorney Steve Mulroy charged five of the officers with murder. This was statistically notable: of the nearly 1,200 people killed by police in 2022, criminal charges were subsequently filed against just 9 officers. Even those rare instances usually take longer and require sustained public pressure. 

Mulroy’s swift charges have encouraged onlookers in Memphis and across the United States. “It made a difference,” said Raumesh Akbari, a state senator from Memphis. “It made the community feel like there would be some level of accountability—and punishment, to be perfectly honest with you—for the murder of Tyre Nichols.” 

Akbari was a strong supporter of Mulroy’s successful bid for DA last year, when the Democrat ran as a reformer against incumbent Republican Amy Weirich, who was long denounced by local organizers for racially discriminatory practices and egregious abuses of power. “A lot of times people are not paying attention to the full scope of a position like the DA,” Akbari told Bolts. “I mean, it has the potential to completely impact hundreds of thousands of people throughout the city.” 

But the real test of Mulroy’s tenure as Shelby County DA is what he does next—how he confronts a deep and abiding legacy of police misconduct and brutality in Memphis.

In conversation with Bolts over the last week, local organizers as well as advocates who have worked on policing elsewhere called for a variety of changes, such as using the DA’s pulpit to encourage fewer police stops and reopening old cases involving the SCORPION police unit, which has been disbanded after public outcry and accusations that its deadly violence towards Nichols was merely an extreme example of a brutal status quo. These are moves that prosecutors in other parts of the country have implemented in the wake of police misconduct.

Mulroy told Bolts in a wide-ranging interview on Monday that he was open to some of these demands and to talking about them with community groups. The death of Tyre Nichols, he said, has “highlighted the need for us to have a broader conversation about police reform—and I think given a renewed sense of urgency about having that conversation.” He has implemented some proposals put forth by progressive groups since coming into office, such as creating a new Justice Review unit to root out wrongful convictions, though he said he had not made any definite decisions on a number of policy initiatives Bolts queried him about.

The DA said, however, he has no plans to direct his office to reopen past cases where people were convicted based on the work of one of the officers now under indictment or other SCORPION officers. The release of video footage of Nichols’s death in late January showed that the initial police reports of how he was stopped and what followed were wildly inaccurate. (Editor’s note: Mulroy announced on Feb. 9 that he would review any past cases and convictions involving work conducted by the officers he charged.)

Somil Trivedi, an expert on police accountability who currently works as the chief legal and advocacy director at Maryland Legal Aid, says that there’s a “naturally symbiotic relationship” between prosecutors and police that stands in the way of DAs taking steps to curb misconduct. Prosecutors have to “rely on the same police for his day job” that they need to also hold accountable. 

Trivedi stressed that Mulroy is one of just a handful of elected DAs around the country who has cultivated a sense of independence from their police forces. “The community shouldn’t have to wonder, when there’s a police shooting or police violence, what’s going to happen—-and right now they do,” Trivedi added. 

Mulroy must also navigate the threat of backlash from the police he has attempted to hold accountable and from statewide officials in Tennessee’s conservative political climate, as well as the legacy of racial injustice and police impunity his office has contributed to, which he must now work to transform. 

“We understand that he inherited this,” said Tikeila Rucker, an organizer with Memphis For All, an organization that supports social justice issues. “It won’t be overnight that we’re out of this space.”

“We’ve been asking for these things for years and had some of these things been implemented,” she added, “it could have been a preventive measure.”

In March 2022, Rucker and four other Memphis-based advocates penned a letter to the Shelby County Board of Commissioners, calling for an independent racial equity audit of Weirich’s office. “Race discrimination in our legal system—from how Black people are prosecuted and punished more harshly, to how Black crime victims are dismissed and disregarded—is a crisis that can no longer be ignored,” they wrote. “It is a crisis that threatens public safety on the whole.” 

The group cited Weirich’s office’s prosecution of a Black woman, Pamela Moses, for registering to vote while she was barred due to a felony conviction, which resulted in Moses receiving a six-year sentence. (A judge later overturned the ruling.) It also highlighted Weirich’s treatment of Black children, noting that her office prosecuted more children in adult court than every other Tennessee DA combined—and that between 2018 and 2020, 98 percent of those children were Black. In 2012, the year after she took office, the U.S. Department of Justice had imposed a consent decree on Shelby County owing to longstanding patterns of racial discrimination against Black kids; a monitor later said the county “actively resisted compliance.” 

Weirich did not respond to a request for comment from Bolts for this story.

Local officials over the years have pointed to the threat of violent crime to justify a slate of punitive measures, including the adult prosecution of children, but also ramping up policing and creating elite groups like the SCORPION unit, whose officers terrorized Memphians well before they came into contact with Nichols.

But for critics of those policies, these “tough-on-crime” decisions were only fueling the problem. “A lot of the issues that we’re dealing with on the back end is because we fail to properly handle juvenile crime,” Akbari said. “We have juveniles who become adult offenders…we have to look at the real systemic issues of poverty, lack of education.”

And they felt frustrated in their warnings about the effects of ramping up police presence. “[We had been speaking] about police brutality for years, but it was falling on deaf ears,” Rucker told Bolts.

In 2021, local groups organized themselves into a coalition called the Justice and Safety Alliance. Their goal was to propose alternatives and act as a counterweight to the Memphis Crime Commission, an influential private organization which advocates largely for tough on crime policies, including expanding the number of police in Memphis, and whose board includes public officials. (In 2020, The Marshall Project sued to get the commission to turn over documents about funds it had received and passed on to law enforcement, calling it the “functional equivalent” of a state agency). 

Cardell Orrin, executive director of the Tennessee branch of Stand the Children, which is part of the Justice and Safety Alliance, says the Memphis Crime Commission exemplifies the intimate connections between police and prosecutors. The group has traditionally played kingmaker for DA hopefuls, Orrin said; it has also funneled donations to law enforcement and influenced police policy, for instance by hiring Ray Kelly, the former NYPD commissioner and stop-and-frisk defender, whose recommendation that the Memphis Police Department expand its gang unit was taken up by the department. 

Mulroy told Bolts he had accepted the commission’s invitation to sit on its board but left the door open to leaving, adding that he opposed many of their favored policies and had advocated for adding criminal justice reformers on the commission.

“It’s just somewhat insidious,” Orrin said of the commission’s role in local politics. For a long time, he added, “there wasn’t a coalition or partnership of organizations that represented the perspective that we had.”

During the 2022 DA race, the alliance released a platform that included several measures that could improve police accountability, including greater data transparency and the establishment of a conviction integrity unit to reexamine old cases that may be based on shaky or insufficient evidence. It also demanded the publication of a Do Not Call list, or Brady list, that lists officers with documented issues of bias or dishonesty so that prosecutors cannot bring cases based on these officers’ casework or testimony. 

In running against Weirich, Mulroy echoed the themes of these local organizations, telling Bolts last year that he wished to confront the “demonstrated recent history of racial discrimination in our justice system.” Buoyed by national attention on Moses’s prosecution and by the light it cast on the punitive and racially unequal status quo of prosecution in Shelby County, he won handily with 56 percent of the vote. 

Since then, Mulroy has made good on some of these goals. He established a new chief data officer role within his office and says he plans to create a public data dashboard in the model of those created by other progressive DAs. He has also kept his promise to implement a conviction review board—a move that had a hand in his recent decision to charge the five officers who fatally beat Tyre Nichols with murder. 

“I’ve tasked my justice review unit not only with looking back over past cases to see if there have been wrongful convictions or wrongful sentences, but they’re also now advising me on prosecutorial recommendations in these officer-involved fatality cases—the same independence from law enforcement and separateness from the rest of my office that brings objectivity to the wrongful conviction and wrongful sentence analysis,” the DA told Bolts. 

Mulroy said, however, that he had no plans to direct the unit to review past convictions that resulted from arrests made by SCORPION, even as their validity may be in question in the wake of revelations about the unit’s pattern of behavior towards civilians and its subsequent disbandment. “I haven’t decided to do any kind of broad-based comprehensive review of every case that might have had any involvement with the SCORPION unit,” he told Bolts. 

Mulroy said he also has no such plan in place for past cases that involved testimony or reports made by the five officers he charged with murder: “I don’t right now think that’s necessary.” 

(Editor’s note: On Feb. 9, Mulroy shifted the position he had shared with Bolts days earlier, announcing that his office would review all the cases involving these officers. His office still indicated no plan at that time to undertake a proactive review of SCORPION cases.)

Trivedi wants to see a review of past cases that involved the SCORPION unit. “There’s absolutely no reason why it shouldn’t be done every time a police officer is found to have committed misconduct,” he said. “Just like there are habitual offender police who are caught either lying or giving un-credible testimony on the stand, which is why we need a Brady list—we all know that there are officers who are habitual rule breakers in the streets and use excessive force.” 

There are precedents for such revisitation: Just a few months ago, Manhattan DA Alvin Bragg and Brooklyn DA Eric Gonzalez said they would clear hundreds of cases that involved the testimony of police officers who faced allegations of lying or misconduct, calling them unreliable witnesses. 

Some progressive prosecutors have also chosen to reopen old cases of police killings in which their predecessors had opted not to file charges. Chesa Boudin did so in San Francisco before he was recalled; across the bay, new Alameda DA Pamela Price recently announced she would look back into eight police killings and in-custody deaths. HuffPost has reported on the demands of some families in Memphis for new investigations into the deaths of their loved ones at the hands of police officers.

Mulroy told Bolts that his conviction review board would focus on current and future police killings rather than looking back into ones that occurred under his predecessor.

Rucker said that activists were also responding to Nichols’s killing by demanding that the police end pretextual traffic stops, a common practice for the SCORPION unit. Though this power technically lies with the police, a few elected prosecutors around the country (notably in Minnesota and Vermont) have put their police forces on notice that they will not charge crimes that result from certain traffic stops, citing the many ways that racial bias that can factor into decisions about which motorists to stop. 

Mulroy said that he was open to the idea but hadn’t made up his mind yet on whether to proceed or which types of stops might qualify. “There’s a city council ordinance being considered that would deal with things like broken tail lights and tinted windows being too dark,” he told Bolts. “By the same token, those are the kinds of things that I would probably be looking at.” 

Orrin worried that bolder action from Mulroy on this front could run afoul of not only the mayor and crime commission, who could accuse him of fostering lawlessness, but also the conservative state government. Republican leaders in Tennessee and other southern states have attempted to preempt progressive prosecutors’ initiatives before. In 2021, Tennessee passed a law allowing for the temporary removal of elected prosecutors who state their intention to avoid prosecuting certain categories of crime. Now, the Georgia legislature is mulling over a bill that would facilitate the ouster of DAs who do the same. 

Orrin regretted that the state’s Republican leadership “has shown the willingness to impose its will on localities.” He added, “DA Mulroy is trying to walk a fine line of living in his progressive reform values, and also dealing with the reality that if he gets too far over his skis, or if they want to, the state can step in and potentially try to harm him.”

Rucker said she hoped Mulroy could heed the calls from the community and use his platform to try to get other elected officials on board with systemic change—so that no one else would have to go through what Tyre Nichols’s family has endured. 

“The hope is that this propels us forward in a direction that we have already been trying to go as relates to criminal justice reform here in Memphis, [that] it does not disappear or dissipate once all the cameras are gone,” she said. “Because we are still here suffering.”

The article was updated on Feb. 10 to reflect new announcements made by Mulroy about his office’s approach to past cases involving the SCORPION unit. 

The post The New DA of Memphis Wants to Break with the Past, to a Point appeared first on Bolts.

Shelby County has been notorious for punitive practices that leave people languishing in jail for years without a conviction and fuel harsh youth prosecution, largely against Black residents. Local advocates have fought for years to change the system. The county was under federal monitoring by the U.S. Department of Justice for violating the rights of Black children between 2012 and 2018. In 2018, a DOJ report found continued violations and discrimination in juvenile courts, and characterized the policies of the district attorney’s office as a “toxic combination for African-American youth.”

The local officials who oversaw that system, District Attorney Amy Weirich and Juvenile Court Judge Dan Michael, were both ousted on Thursday. The winners, Steve Mulroy in the DA race and Tarik Sugarmon in the juvenile judge race, ran on reform agendas and secured eight-year terms.

Mark Ward, a local criminal court judge, also appears to have lost his re-election bid. Ward sparked an outcry earlier this year for sentencing Pamela Moses, a Black activist who was erroneously told by a state agency that she was eligible to register to vote, to six years in prison. That case was prosecuted by Weirich’s office, and Moses decried the aggressive charges as a scare tactic.

“I’m very excited,” Raumesh Akbari, a Democratic state senator from Memphis who champions criminal justice reform, told Bolts as she was leaving Mulroy’s victory party. “I think it’s a new day in Shelby County, with a new district attorney and new juvenile court judge, and it’s gonna be a totally different approach to how we handle the criminal justice system in Shelby County.” 

Weirich, a Republican, won her last DA race, in 2014, by a nearly two to one margin. While Shelby is a blue-leaning county, Tennessee holds general elections for local offices over the summer, and the resulting lower turnout can scramble expectations. But on Thursday, Mulroy, a Democrat, defeated Weirich by a margin of 56 to 44 percent. In the nonpartisan race for juvenile judge, Sugarmon won by 10 percentage points, in a rematch of the race he lost in 2014.

The DA race is one of the first elections to take place in the wake of the U.S. Supreme Court’s Dobbs decision overturning federal protections for abortion rights. A ban on abortions is now in effect in Tennessee, which Mulroy pointed to as a critical issue for the campaign. He attacked Weirich for lobbying on behalf of a “fetal assault” bill in the past, and vowed that prosecuting abortion cases would be a “very low priority” for his office. He has not outright ruled out such charges, saying in part that taking a blanket stance may trigger retaliation by GOP politicians; on the same day as Mulroy’s win, the governor of Florida indefinitely suspended a local prosecutor who said he would not prosecute abortions.

Akbari told Bolts that she thinks abortion “definitely made a difference” in the race, noting that Tennesseans voted just two days after Kansas rejected an effort to erode abortion rights. “This is a big deal that impacts women and families across this country.”

The DA race also unfolded in the wake of the prosecution against Moses. Faced with the state’s extremely strict and complicated felony disenfranchisement laws, Moses had received written guidance from a state agency that she was eligible to get her voting rights restored, but when she acted on that guidance that turned out to be erroneous, Weirich’s office threw the book at her andWard sentenced her to six years in prison after accusing her of “tricking” the probation’s office. After The Guardian’s Sam Levine revealed holes in the case, Ward overturned the conviction and Weirich dropped the charges.

“I think the goal was to scare people, but it could boomerang,” Moses told Bolts in March after being released from prison. Ward and Weirich both lost their races on Thursday.

In voiding Moses’s conviction in February, Ward faulted Weirich for failing to disclose evidence that Moses had been told by a probation officer she was eligible to vote. Weirich’s office has drawn attention from the Tennessee Board of Professional Responsibility and from the media for withholding evidence in the past, including in a New York Times Magazine investigation in 2017.

Local and national advocates told Bolts that the case against Moses was a window into other patterns of harsh and unequal treatment in Shelby County as well. They fault the DA’s office and local judges for overcharging defendants, imposing a harsh “trial penalty,” and for ramping up pretrial detention. Human rights organizations have denounced local bail practices as discriminatory and unconstitutional, and a report released last year by a court-appointed inspector documented that people are held pretrial in the county jail “for months or years.”

Mulroy ran for DA on planks associated with criminal justice reform, including working to reduce pretrial detention and decreasing  the volume of prosecutions for lower-level charges like drug possession. He told Bolts in a phone interview this spring that the DA’s office should not have prosecuted Moses and that, as DA, he would try to counter any chilling effect felt by residents who are unsure about their voter eligibility.

Mulroy said that he wanted to confront the “demonstrated recent history of racial discrimination in our justice system,” telling Bolts that, “I think any district attorney should make it a high priority to try to reduce the obvious and blatant racial disproportionality in our criminal justice system. That goes double for somebody in Shelby County.”

“Excessive bail and excessive seeking of pretrial detention, along with adult transfer of juvenile cases, have a hugely disproportionate minority contact rate,” he added.

The disparities in prosecution and sentencing extend into the electoral realm due to felony disenfranchisement rules. 21 percent of Black Tennesseans were stripped of the right to vote in 2020, compared to 7 percent of other adults, which barred thousands of Shelby County residents from voting on Thursday. 

Weirich seized on her opponent’s commitments to say he would endanger safety in Shelby County, and she ran a campaign centered on promises of law and order. “I believe violent offenders should go to prison,” she wrote on Facebook last week. “If you do too, please vote for me.”

“The most dangerous words in Shelby County would be ‘DA Steve Mulroy,’” that statement also said.

But Weirich’s critics scoffed at the implication that her policies were more effective to bring public safety, and point out that violent crime and murders have increased since she came into office. “If what they’re doing, this tough on crime stance was working, then there wouldn’t be a need to have reform,” Akbari said. “It’s not. It’s costing states, cities and counties an exceptional amount of money. Lives are destroyed by it, communities are destroyed by it.” 

The county’s treatment of Black children was a central theme in Mulroy and Sugarmon’s campaigns. Besides the DOJ’s 2018 report on systemic rights violations, local advocates from organizations such as Memphis for All and Just City have assailed continued disparate treatment, and earlier this year they demanded a racial equity audit of local decisions. Data released by the county shows, for instance, that Black youths were held in pretrial detention nearly three times as often as white youths in 2021. And nearly every single minor who gets prosecuted as an adult, facing far tougher sentences, is Black; the raw numbers are high, too, as Shelby County prosecutes far more children as adults than other counties.

In Tennessee, the DA seeks a child’s transfer into adult courts, and the juvenile court judge then decides on the transfer. This judge also gets to appoint the magistrates who hear the cases.

Michael, the juvenile court judge who lost his re-election bid on Thursday, resisted the federal monitoring, calling for it to end until Trump administration officials granted his wish and ended the oversight in 2018. He defended his record against critics during the campaign. “It’s a very, very difficult decision to make,” he said of his decisions to transfer children into adult court. 

Sugarmon, the victorious candidate against Michael, has called for the DOJ to resume its monitoring. He told MLK50 that he would allow fewer children to be transferred into adult court, and that he wants fewer children to be prosecuted in the first place. Black children were nearly five times more likely than white children to have cases referred to the juvenile court in 2021.

Mulroy echoes Sugarmon on the issue. “I think we also need to call for the U.S. Justice Department to resume its monitoring of our juvenile court,” he told Bolts. 

The incoming DA has not ruled out seeking adult prosecutions of minors, though he told the Daily Memphian, “we would create a strong presumption against transfer. Absent some very, very severe circumstances, adult transfer needs to be a last resort.” 

To Akbari, the election results prove that local residents are looking for a change from the status quo. “It’s easy to just throw somebody in jail. It’s hard work to actually do reform and get to the root of what causes crime, and to make sure that juvenile offenders do not become adult offenders,” she said. “And I think this vote proves that people are ready for something different. You can’t keep doing the same thing and expecting different results.”

The post Memphis Ousts DA and Judge Who Oversaw Its Notoriously Harsh Court System appeared first on Bolts.

Still, Moses believed she was eligible to have her rights restored. She sought guidance from the probation office and received written confirmation that she was indeed eligible. But Tennessee’s rules for restoring voting rights are so dizzyingly complicated that even state workers get it wrong. In fact, Tennessee had banned Moses from voting for life. And after Moses followed a probation officer’s bad guidance and tried to register to vote, prosecutors threw the book at her.

Shelby County DA Amy Weirich took Moses to trial for illegally registering to vote, and then trumpeted her conviction and sentence when a Memphis judge sent Moses to prison for six years in January. The case sparked an outcry after The Guardian revealed that the state had given Moses faulty guidance and had already identified its error at the time of the conviction. The judge pointed to prosecutors’ failure to disclose evidence showing that Moses had been misled to order a new trial and Weirich then announced that she would drop the charges. 

“Nobody, including Pam Moses, should ever face criminal charges for attempting to restore their voting rights,” Tikeila Rucker, an organizer with the group Memphis for All, told Bolts. “How or why DA Weirich sent a community activist, advocate, and voting rights activist to jail for six years is incomprehensible.”

To Rucker, Moses’s prosecution was an effort to suppress democracy in the county’s Black community. “Moses is an example to the people: don’t you have the audacity to fight for change, to be the change, to step up against authority,” Rucker said. “That right there is the subliminal message.”

Moses also believes that she was targeted due to her race, political beliefs, and public activism on behalf of Black Lives Matter. “I think that the goal was to scare people,” she told Bolts shortly after being released in March, “but it could boomerang.”

Whether the aggressive prosecution of Moses boomerangs for Weirich will be tested on Thursday, when voters will decide whether to keep her in office.

Weirich, a Republican, faces Democratic nominee Steven Mulroy, with the winner securing an eight-year term. Although Shelby County leans blue, Tennessee holds the general election for county offices over the summer, and lower turnout could scramble expectations. In addition, many residents like Moses remain barred from voting.

Mulroy, who beat two other Democrats in the party’s primary in early May, is a fixture in local politics, having served as a county commissioner from 2006 to 2014. Now a law professor at the University of Memphis, he is running for on a platform that emphasizes criminal justice reform. In candidate questionnaires and media interviews, he has pledged a slate of changes to local practices—including working to reduce pretrial detention, decreasing the transfer of minors into adult court, and prosecuting fewer lower-level offenses like drug possession.

These are all major issues in Shelby County, a majority-Black county of more than 900,000 residents. Local advocates have denounced local bail practices as discriminatory and unconstitutional, and a report released last year by a court-appointed inspector documented that people are held pretrial in the county jail “for months or years.” Moreover, Shelby County prosecutes far more children as adults than other counties in Tennessee, a process that is initiated by the DA’s office, and nearly all of the youth transferred to adult court are Black. (The rate was 97 percent in 2018 and 95 percent in 2019, according to The Memphis Flyer, compared to an overall county population that is 54 percent Black.)

Shortly after Moses was released from prison in March, a coalition of local advocates, including members of Memphis for All and Just Audit, called for a racial equity audit of Weirich’s office. 

“The reality is that disparate treatment of the Black community is continuing to take place and has taken place for far too long,” said Rucker, who is also demanding an audit. 

Andrea Woods, an attorney at the ACLU who has criticized bail practices in Shelby County, told Bolts that the harsh prosecution of Pamela Moses offers a window to how Weirich’s office approaches other cases. “Fundamentally, it’s symptomatic of a county where the DA is over-prosecuting and criminalizing Black people,” Woods said. “There’s rampant overcriminalization and racial disparities, which the DA is a key driver of.”

Weirich’s campaign did not respond to questions about Moses’s case and her broader record as DA. She has said elsewhere that the fault lies with the Tennessee Department of Correction (TDOC) rather than by her office, and that her staff was unaware that the TDOC had acknowledged the mistake. “When reporters or political opportunists use the word ‘state’ they need to be crystal clear that the error was made by the TDOC and not any attorney or officer in the office of the Shelby County District Attorney,” she said in a statement after Moses’s conviction was overturned.

Mulroy, who says Moses should have not been prosecuted for registering in the first place, says Weirich’s handling of the case “fits a pattern.” “Overcharging and overreach is a theme with this prosecutor and has been for many years,” he told Bolts in a phone interview. “Pile on as many duplicative charges as possible to intimidate the defendants into a guilty plea that they might otherwise nor feel comfortable agreeing to.” 

Mulroy says Weirich’s actions in Moses’s case also exemplify her predilection to impose a “trial penalty,” where prosecutors seek steep punishment if defendants don’t accept the initial plea deal offered. Weirich significantly ratcheted up the prison sentence she sought against Moses after Moses refused Weirich’s offer to plead guilty. “I gave her a chance to plead to a misdemeanor with no prison time,” Weirich said in February. “She requested a jury trial instead. She set this unfortunate result in motion and a jury of her peers heard the evidence and convicted her.” Mulroy says jumping from an offer with no prison time to seeking a sentence of six years is retaliation. “That’s not justice,” he told Bolts.

Under the state’s byzantine rules, it can be tricky for Tennessee residents who have lost the right to vote to determine whether they’re eligible to have them restored, and how to go about it. Tennessee is among just eleven states that does not automatically restore voting rights when people complete a sentence, and this places a heavy burden on them. The U.S. Department of Justice’s guide to rights restoration, released earlier this year, includes a three-page flow chart to help Tennesseans figure out their rights; rules vary based on the date of conviction, whether the conviction includes the word “infamous,” and the exact charge of conviction. Tennesseans who have lost the right to vote must also pay off all court debt to regain the right. 

“You add all of that up, and you ask a layman to figure it out, and it’s pretty darn hard,” Mulroy said. “I studied this for a living and even I find them confusing.”

Mulroy indeed practices and teaches election law—an unusual background for a DA candidate, but one that has become very relevant in the race. He is an advocate for ranked-choice voting, has helped file lawsuits to expand voting rights, for instance to facilitate mail-in voting during the pandemic, and recently wrote a book on the topic. He told Bolts that he thinks this experience is relevant to his seeking the DA’s position given how criminal law is wielded to decide whether people are allowed to vote. 

“The Pamela Moses case is a perfect example of the intersection between the two,” he said. “We have a racialized criminal justice system.”

Other states also have a maze of complicated restoration rules that threaten steep criminal consequences over errors, and zealous prosecutors threaten to ensnare people who make mistakes, like Crystal Mason, a Texas woman who wrongly thought she could vote while still on probation and was targeted by a conservative local prosecutor for casting a provisional ballot that wasn’t counted. This is a strong dynamic in Tennessee due to the large numbers of people who have lost their rights. Roughly 450,000 Tennesseans were barred from voting in 2020, according to the Sentencing Project; 39 percent of them were Black, compared to an overall state population that is 17 percent Black. Many more who are eligible to vote may not know it or worry about pursuing the option because of the example Weirich set with Moses. 

“It does instill fear in the citizens when harsh laws are passed that criminalize what could be innocent behavior,” Linda Harris, a Memphis attorney who ran in the Democratic primary for DA and lost to Mulroy, told Bolts. 

“What we’re talking about is individuals …who want to vote, they want a part of selecting other leaders,” Harris said. “So why is that a crime? Why is it a crime for people to want to vote? I don’t understand it.”

Mulroy says that, if elected, he would try to counter any chilling effect felt by residents who are unsure about their eligibility. “If I were DA, people should not worry about having their right to vote killed or intimidated by a prosecutor who is looking for ways to prosecute voters,” he said. “If a person is honestly unsure, and thinks they have a good faith basis for thinking that they can register or they can vote, then they won’t have to worry about being prosecuted if it turns out they’re wrong.” 

He also criticized the felony disenfranchisement laws at the heart of Moses’s case, as well as other voter restrictions championed by state Republicans like voter ID rules.  “We’re really just preventing huge numbers of people from voting who should be allowed to vote,” he said. 

But Mulroy also did not rule out prosecuting people for registering to vote when ineligible, only saying that ”these kinds of crimes” would be a “very low priority” for his office. He told Bolts that DAs shouldn’t rule out whole categories of charges, as they should consider individual circumstances. He has also said he worries that making categorical promises would invite state Republicans to intervene and transfer cases to other prosecutors. 

He has staked similar positions on the death penalty and abortion. “It is definitely the case that it would be a very low priority for me,” he told The Daily Memphian about prosecuting abortion cases. “Prosecutors should never say never, in large part because there’s a Tennessee law that would allow for the appointment of an independent prosecutor and basically stripping jurisdiction over that class of offenses away from the DA. But also just as a general prudential matter, DAs should not be in the habit of overruling things or ruling things out forever in the abstract.” He has also criticized Weirich for lobbying for harsher laws on reproductive rights.

On Thursday, Shelby County voters will decide the practices of the DA’s office and decide these major issues. And yet thousands of residents will be barred from participating because of their past entanglements with those same systems. Moses herself is permanently prohibited from voting, but she has called people to action, telling Bolts, “If you can’t get your right [to vote] back, support the people who are going to Nashville pushing for laws to be changed, show up with them: There’s strength in numbers.”

The post Tennessee DA Faces Voters, Months After Prosecuting Activist for Wanting to Vote appeared first on Bolts.

Two weeks ago, Moses was granted a new trial after The Guardian revealed errors by state officials in her case, though the charges still hang over her head. Moses was released on bond on Feb. 25.

Moses spoke with Bolts about her ordeal and what led to it—Tennessee’s harsh disenfranchisement rules, a punitive and discriminatory local court system, and the suppression of Black voters. Moses, a Black Lives Matter activist in Memphis who was barred from voting after a 2015 guilty plea, has denounced these practices long before her recent prosecution.

More than one in five Black adults are barred from voting in Tennessee due to criminal convictions, compared to seven percent of the rest of the state’s population, a number that reflects vast racial disparities in who is prosecuted and how severely. Last week a local group of advocates demanded a racial equity audit of Shelby County DA Amy Weirich’s office, pointing to past scrutiny into its practices; Weirich responded by calling their demand “divisive and inflammatory.” In addition, people seeking to regain voting rights are faced with Tennessee’s notoriously confusing and burdensome process of even determining eligibility, let alone actually restoring their rights.

Moses says this legal labyrinth keeps people from even trying to reclaim their right to vote. While she believes the attempt to punish her for getting it wrong—or rather, for following the state’s faulty guidance—is meant to intimidate others from exercising their rights, she also says she hopes that people will instead be inspired to press for change. 

How has this ordeal impacted your life?

My life is just not the same. You can’t just come back out of jail and pick up where you left off, especially with the loss of my dog. It’s just really hard. I don’t sleep much, I’m up all night, and when I do sleep, I don’t sleep well. 

Just being in jail and separated from your family is a tragic thing. But to have to be in jail and see all the other injustices, it’s a humbling experience. I feel like I shouldn’t have been there, but there’s nothing I can do about what has happened. I just have to move forward. 

Why was it important for you to register to vote and have your rights restored? 

At the time I was seeking public office, and you had to be properly registered in order to run. I was trying to follow the law and the instructions that I was given by the Shelby County Election Commission. And it was important because we live in a state where the poverty rate is very high, as well as the illiteracy rate. The simple things that we take for granted, such as schools, and parks, and things that I always had access to—it was disturbing seeing how you can’t even go swimming at a public pool anymore because they close all those things down. It was important for me to give the people in my community a voice so they can have those types of opportunities, because I felt like it would make the city safer. I was really doing this for Memphis, not just myself.

Tennessee’s rights restoration rules are notoriously confusing and burdensome. What was it like navigating them and trying to figure out if you were eligible? 

What made my situation so hard was that it wasn’t clear when my sentence was over. It wasn’t clear when I came off probation, what kind of probation, what year, what month, what day, what my jail credit was. Nothing was clear. And so, as a person that didn’t understand, I went to the custodian of records with the department of corrections, seeking guidance, and they said I was off of it. I presented them with a form that I also took to the court that said that I still owe court costs, which for some reason has something to do with your right to vote, but they signed the papers anyway. And then I took it to the department of corrections. They signed it. They verified it twice. That’s what made it so complicated: All these different layers of people and process that you have to go to just to get one thing done. 

A public agency gave you a certificate that said you were eligible. What was your reaction when prosecutors still charged you for registering?

When I was first charged, I was confused. I just knew that they had to have the wrong person. I had no idea because the charge was illegal voter registration, I didn’t even know what they were alleging. 

Do you think other people who want to vote give up rather than try to navigate this complicated system you describe?

Oh, I don’t just think, I know. Before I went through this, I was registering people to vote, and I would run into people who were convicted felons. And I’m not talking about newly convicted felons, they had charges from the 80s. They wanted to vote, but they were like, “I’m a felon, I can’t vote.” Everyone saying, “I’m a felon, I can’t vote,” “I’m a felon, I can’t vote.” I said, “You just need to get your rights restored.” And everybody said, “How do you do that? Oh that’s too much trouble man, I don’t feel like that.” It’s discouraging.

Do you worry that the way you’ve been treated will dissuade others in the future, that it will have an intimidation effect?

I think that the goal was to scare people, but it could boomerang. It could scare people, but I hope that it doesn’t. I don’t know what people are going to do. What I do know is that there are a lot of people who are inspired by the fact that this happened to me, like, “I’m gonna start voting more. Because that happened to you, I got to vote.” And we got another group that is like, “Man, this makes no sense at all. They need to change the law.” 

Do you believe that that race played a factor in how harshly the prosecutor’s office or the court treated you?

Oh, absolutely, at least from the prosecutor’s standpoint. I think that absolutely my race, my socioeconomic status, and my political beliefs, is what motivated them. I don’t think, if I would have been of another race, that this even would have amounted to a prosecution.

What political beliefs?

That I believe Black lives matter, and Black voters matter. I’m so vocal in saying that everywhere I go. I wear earrings that say it, I made a song about the DA and the racism that we experience as Black people in Memphis, so she knew that I wasn’t crazy about her. It didn’t have anything to do with her being a Republican; it has everything to do with the way she selectively prosecutes people. 

When I was in jail, this last time, there were women who’d been sitting in jail, waiting to go to trial, for years.  They were all Black. They were all poor. And they just been sitting there waiting to go to trial. That’s what I see: I see injustice in the jail, on the streets. [Editor’s note: Pretrial practices in Shelby county have been under scrutiny for keeping people locked because they are too poor to afford release; a recent report by a court-appointed inspector found people being held “for months or years.”]

The DA’s office has defended the six-year prison sentence you received at the trial saying they proposed a lesser sentence as part of a plea deal. Why didn’t you take the plea deal, and were you worried about being punished for going to trial?

Because that’s how I got into this situation, by taking a plea for something that I didn’t do. I tried to get out of jail, so I pled guilty like most people that can’t afford to make half a million dollar bond. I pled guilty to something that I didn’t do, and I told myself that I would never do that again. I would just have to sit and wait until somebody said I wasn’t guilty. So that was the main reason why. 

The second reason, why should a person waive their right, their constitutional right to trial by jury? If the Constitution says we have that right, why do Black people have to give up their right?

What would you tell people in Shelby County who have lost the right to vote, or who may just be reading the coverage of your case? What would you want them to take from your ordeal?

I want them to know that they have a constitutional right to vote, and everybody should try to exercise it. If you’re a felon, you should try to get your rights back. If you owe court costs, see if you can get a judge to waive it. If you can’t get your right back, support the people who are going to Nashville pushing for laws to be changed, show up with them: There’s strength in numbers. If five people go asking them to change something, they’re not going to do it. But if 5,000 people show up and say we want this change, it’s gonna happen. It’s called democracy.

The interview has been edited for length and clarity.

The post “The Goal Was to Scare People, but It Could Boomerang.” appeared first on Bolts.