A few days ago, ProPublic published a long-form piece that began with the story of a bizarre incident in Rutherford County, Tennessee, where four black children at Hobgood Elementary in Murfreesboro were arrested for a nonexistent crime. Kids as young as eight were pulled out of classes and off busses, handcuffed and transported to a children’s jail.
It all began with an investigation of a schoolyard fight video on YouTube. No one was hurt in the fight. By the time of the arrests, the kids who fought were allegedly friends again, and none of the arrested children engaged as combatants in the first place. But the kids were charged with a made-up crime on the say-so of an all-powerful juvenile court judge’s halfwit minion.
The tale is positively Dickensian. The judge is Donna Scott Davenport, who began her career as a cop wannabe, then went to law school and had to take the bar exam five times over nine years before she passed. With an apparent talent for failing upward, Davenport then got herself elected to a newly created juvenile court judge position in 2000.
She’s been running the county’s juvenile justice system as her personal fiefdom ever since, hoovering up public money, building out facilities, hiring henchmen and making up rules. It’s “God’s mission,” she says, publicly. A brief excerpt:
What happened on that Friday and in the days after, when police rounded up even more kids, would expose an ugly and unsettling culture in Rutherford County, one spanning decades. In the wake of these mass arrests, lawyers would see inside a secretive legal system that’s supposed to protect kids, but in this county did the opposite. Officials flouted the law by wrongfully arresting and jailing children. One of their worst practices was stopped following the events at Hobgood, but the conditions that allowed the lawlessness remain. The adults in charge failed. Yet they’re still in charge. Tennessee’s systems for protecting children failed. Yet they haven’t been fixed.
It’s a lengthy article that’s as horrifying as it is hard to summarize, but basically, Davenport created a detention system that stayed busy by illegally jailing an estimated 1,500 children. The detention rate in the county was astronomical, which should have raised red flags, but the state’s oversight is basically nonexistent, and the Tennessee Department of Children’s Services dropped the ball.
Nothing happened to stop this insane situation until the victimized children’s families sued in federal court under a class-action lawsuit. The county had to pay out $11 million for illegally arresting and detaining kids, and the federal judge made them scrap their lawless intake scheme.
You’d think the judgment would get people’s attention. I assume $11 million is a noticeable chunk of the county budget. But no one involved suffered serious professional consequences for their grievously harmful conduct. The same people are still in charge of juvenile justice in the county, and Davenport is now marketing her excess jail capacity to other Tennessee counties.
Davenport plays up the god-bothering angle of her “work.” She emphasizes dog-whistly issues like her policy toward children who come to court with saggy pants, telling local radio listeners she keeps extra belts in the courtroom and makes everyone tuck in their shirts. I’m sure a certain type eats that shit up with a spoon, maybe even at the hefty price of $11 million, since she’s running for reelection again even after a scandal that should have ended her employment around children forever.
Just unbe-fucking-lievable. I was too busy last week to read the piece when it first came out, but it’s the type of long-form journalism that ProPublica excels in, and it’s worth carving out the time to take in and ponder. The piece was produced in partnership with the Nashville NPR station.
As if we didn’t have enough to contend with at the state and federal level, this article made me wonder what other horror stories lurk in the 3K county governments that operate within the U.S. You can read the whole thing here.
Baud
Spare the rod, spoil the kickbacks.
MagdaInBlack
I read it, it made me ill.
Thank you for highlighting this story.
germy
This photo of her
Scary
Major Major Major Major
Good lord!
Barbara
Sue. Again and again. Not so fun fact: The Ferguson cop who shot Michael Brown was a transfer from another small town that dissolved its own police department after it could no longer afford liability insurance. Make them pay until it hurts too much to do the wrong thing. They seem to think that attitude works for the rest of us.
Ejoiner
Yeah…like others when I first came across this as a long thread post on twitter I was shocked and sickened. Glad to see that it’s getting quite a bit of exposure across multiple platforms now.
Nothing makes cockroaches run like a bright light on their behavior. These are some really horrible, horrible people.
VOR
There was a recent case about an Alabama jail. The sheriff had been saving the difference between funds allocated for feeding inmates and actual costs. He was able to pocket those funds when he retired, which came to several hundred thousand dollars. http://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2018/03/14/593204274/alabama-sheriff-legally-took-750-000-meant-to-feed-inmates-bought-beach-house
I suspect there are a bunch of little fiefdoms like this out in America.
E.
I couldn’t finish it. I got to the point where the one officer took the cuffs off the kids and responded “I understand” to the angry father who had said “fuck you” to him, and then went back to the precinct to cry. It made me feel so helpless. Just about all of this seems to have been driven by a single sociopath, the judge, but made possible by such a pervasive acceptance of white supremacy that it’s hard to see a way to fight your way out of it.
dopey-o
Oh, their crime does exist. It’s pretty obvious what the underlying crime was. Being black in the Confederacy. Being poor, black and powerless has always been a crime down here in the Lower Depths.
And a great source of revenue!
Kent
What makes this even more horrifying is that we are not talking about some rural backwoods Appalachian backwater county. Rutherford County is a large suburban affluent white county of about 350,000 within the Nashville metro area with a median household income of about $65,000. In other words, it is affluent white suburbia.
This is Rutherford County on the map.
https://goo.gl/maps/NseFQNCRC9kfjLmAA
Racism is a hell of a drug. And it is a continual stain and horror in this country.
James E Powell
That judge is just evil and no one is benefitting from her work other than people who get perverse pleasure from cruelty.
But the other adults involved are also to blame. I read the story and I will allow that maybe I don’t know all the facts, but the cops are fucked up for doing this. The principal should have stalled them and secretly sent the kids home by some means. When the Nazis show up, you don’t bring the Jewish kids to the office. So what if the cops arrest you? You’re an adult and you are supposed to protect children.
Zelma
After reading this article, I concluded that misanthropy is the only approach to the world. The older I get, the more convinced I become of this truth.
OzarkHillbilly
Very happy my son didn’t have a similar god botherer supervising him during his troubles. I’d have been sorely tempted to introduce her to her maker.
I wonder how much was covered by insurance, assuming they had insurance. Lord knows they will sell you a policy to cover just about anything.
Betty
Juvenile courts are the easiest to subvert. I am sure there are many stories of abuse around the country. There was a outrageous case in Pennsylvania a few years ago, but there were consequences. The judicial system has the power to remove these misfits. In an unrelated matter, PA Supreme Court judges were removed for misconduct of a much less egregious violation. Public exposure helps.
Ohio Mom
This story reminds of the news a few years ago that a judge IIRC in Pennsylvania was sending gobs of children to jail and getting gobs of kickbacks in return.
Was Davenport making money off of this, sounds like it since she’s working hard on renting out the now empty cells.
I’m also reminded of the “secret” Cambodian bombing campaign. It wasn’t a secret to the Cambodians. Think of how many people were watching Davenport’s (and the judge from PA) scheme in operation, and just standing by.
thebewilderness
Every time another story like this is reported I wonder when we are going to stop being shocked and start addressing the corruption in our so called justice system. The 2008 kids for cash scandal seems to have been forgotten instead of sparking widespread investigation.
trollhattan
@germy:
Ye gods, you found Uber Karen, the Karen cult’s leader.
SpaceUnit
Never be born in a red state. My advise to any fetus would be to self-abort the moment you’re able to detect banjo music.
Cause if they detect your heartbeat first you’ll be completely on your own.
Ohio Mom
Here it is: https://apnews.com/article/pandemics-pennsylvania-coronavirus-pandemic-wilkes-barre-courts-73983471fb75311725e31e2c1955e095
The Pennsylvanian judge who got kickbacks for sending kids to a for-profit dentention center wants out of jail because COVID. His plea was denied.
Just a little glimmer of hope, sometimes justice is served, eventually.
Leto
@Zelma: can I ride along with you at a socially acceptable distance? Or maybe you have a news letter to which I could subscribe?
AliceBlue
I predict that this woman will be elected to Congress in the near future.
waspuppet
So, are her own kids old enough to have been picked up for statutory rape yet, or are they still young and innocent enough that they’re “just” grabbing girls’ behinds?
Roger Moore
@E.:
It may be driven by the one judge, but a system that lets itself be taken over by a single sociopath has much deeper problems. Any system should have a system of checkpoints that keep a single bad person from running amuck, and they obviously all failed in this case. The whole system needs to be investigated from top to bottom, and every person who should have intervened needs to be looked at. This is the worst kind of systemic failure, and in a just world the whole system- police, courts, jails, and the higher-level system that turned a bind eye to what was happening- would be turned over to someone else.
Leto
@trollhattan: I honestly thought that was Patrica McCloskey at first glance. They came from the same Karen mold.
scav
Tennessee: Where Children aren’t just cheap labor but are renewable natural resources to exploit.
trollhattan
Speaking of things horrifying, this.
Five-hundred bucks, that’ll show them. At this point you may be wondering who owns and operates this Brookdale Senior Living Center in tony Folsom, a wealthy Sacramento suburb? Surprise!
Glad to know beatings of residents are not condoned by the owners, three time zones away. I can assure all that they are billing their residents somewhere in the $6-8k/month range for these fine services, and that the line workers are pulling minimum or slightly higher than minimum wage. SOMEBODY is getting a fine profit off this bidnez.
trollhattan
@Leto: Have they ever been seen together? What if it’s the same Karen?!?
Let’s see a photo of the judge waving a pistol.
stinger
I probably don’t want to know the answer, but what percentage of these arrested kids over the past twenty years were black?
Another Scott
In the late 60s in suburban Atlanta, I was maybe 8 and was with about a dozen white friends playing in the apartment playground and someone got the brilliant idea for us to make a campfire in the nearby pine woods. We didn’t have any matches, so the ringleader took us all to a neighbor’s apartment and as we all stood there he said that his mom wanted to borrow some matches. She happily went inside and came out with a bag of about 100 books of various kinds.
(I remember thinking – how can he be such a convincing bald-faced liar, and how can she believe him so readily??)
We went to the woods, started a fire in the straw, and, obviously, it eventually got too big and we ran away. Me, being an incompetent arsonist, ran out through the playground and people noticed. The fire department quickly put the fire out, and I and my mom got to talk to the police.
I wasn’t thrown in the cop car or handcuffed, but I was made to understand how serious it was and I had better behave in the future…
Maybe it was all the lead in the air then, but I don’t think that my experience was all that unusual back then. Maybe even now. But there are far, far too many cases that are like this one that ProPublica talks about. There should never be any, and those responsible for these outrages should do hard time. They are terrorizing communities and ruining lives.
Cheers,
Scott.
Ken
No, most of her income is from a chain of pizza parlors she owns.
(Kidding, I think. Hope. But it’s always projection, isn’t it, so I’m waiting for the reality behind that lunacy to come to light.)
OzarkHillbilly
@stinger: I’ll bet you can make a guess and get within 5% of the correct number.
OzarkHillbilly
@Another Scott: I got you beat. I was arrested for the first time when I was 2.
Kent
@stinger: I think you already know the answer to that question. Also bear in mind this county is 90% white.
Mike in NC
Another Monday in America.
SpaceUnit
@OzarkHillbilly:
We want details.
And a mug shot.
Baud
@OzarkHillbilly:
We’re talkimg about unjust arrests in this thread.
Soprano2
To me the saddest thing about this is that I bet a lot of those white people in the county have been perfectly happy with this state of affairs, because it keeps “those kids” under control. And yeah, for some reason the thing about baggy pants particularly offends white people. I don’t like how it looks myself, but I wouldn’t penalize a kid for dressing like that (although I might tell them they should look more appropriate in court!). White people will tolerate a lot if they think it controls crime.
dmsilev
@OzarkHillbilly: “Toddling, with intent to loiter”?
Cermet
This practice should be absolutely no surprise – this exact technique was done by all southern and many midwestern states from the 1880’s up to (in some cases) through the 1950’s. Teen to young black men were routinely arrested (for not, say, having work papers available), tried and then sentenced to one year in a glug (aka chain gangs) and forced to work to pay back the ‘fines’ for being arrested & trial even if they were found innocent! These inhuman conditions that were extremely dangerous were assigned to these men such as to dig in mines, work in steel mills, besides the more famous road crew/construction gangs. Nothing new here.
Skepticat
Read this with horror the other day and was rude to a Tennessee driver a bit later. Apparently this power-hungry, entrepreneurial godbotherer got only the suffer part of “Suffer the little children.”
J R in WV
@VOR:
Back when I actively collected rocks and minerals, my collecting buddy and I spent a lot of time in rural Kentucky. In fall we would see political signs, and the most common signs were for county jailer, which always surprised and confused me.
I finally learned that county jailer was really profitable, because they were all given monies to feed the prisoners, and if they didn’t spend that money on food they could keep the extra money and buy a beach house and a $85,000 truck that they personally would own. So the most profitable elected position in Kentucky~!!~ And no oversight who cared about the jailed prisoners.
And the prisoners would have scurvy, and pellagra and rickets, all of the malnutrition diseases.
Peale
She’s been there for 20+ years and it keeps getting worse and worse no matter how draconian she is.
And don’t get me started on the “When I was growing up, parents knew how to take the strap to their kids and kids ran around outside all day playing kick the can and we liked it” bullcrap that underlies all of this.
Chief Oshkosh
I could not get through the article (I tried to read it when it when TPM first highlighted it). I’ve been close friends for decades with people who have devoted their careers to criminal justice reform. At least two of these fine folks specifically work on juvenile justice issues. This story just made my head explode, and when I talked to them about it over the weekend, they said that there are similar examples of this all over the country.
Jesus wept
…and I did, too.
OzarkHillbilly
@SpaceUnit: My 3 yo brother and I “broke” into the back yard of a house where the owner had left the gate open so the pool repairman could get into fix it. If it wasn’t nailed down, it went into the pool. Everything from barbells to porch furniture to rocks to liquor to… The owner came home and started screaming and my brother and I took off. But not before she recognized the neighborhood hoods. (we were notorious) She called the cops and the cops came for us a few hours later. It was terribly traumatic, especially when the cop was trying to get the cuffs to fit my tiny little wrists. And then he almost shot my dog.
It was terrible, terrible I tells you! I still have nightmares 61 years later!
And it’s all true! I swears! Well… All the way up to the cops coming for us. I took a few liberties after that point. But he did almost shoot my dog!
Rob
I read/skimmed tweets about it and (I think the actual article), and also Betty C’s post. The whole story is freaking disgustingly horrible.
Omnes Omnibus
@Cermet: That doesn’t make it any less outrageous.
Another Scott
@Peale: +1
I blame reading. It’s all been downhill since written text displaced memorized stories… //
Cheers,
Scott.
cain
@VOR: Reminds me like movies like “Heat of the Night” where you know those cops have their own fiefdom with a cop friendly judge to boot.
Black folks have been living this nightmare for generations.
Martin
We should have nuked Murfreesboro from orbit. I’ve yet to learn anything redeeming about that city, except its possible value in concentrating white assholes away from more progressive urban areas.
cain
@OzarkHillbilly: How much of that money went to the lawyers??
Kay
@Roger Moore:
It is, and I feel like that wasn’t addressed in the Pennsylvania case – while I was pleased the judges were held accountable there are a whole group of people and agencies in the juvenile justice system and they all failed. Just off the top of my head there’s the child welfare agency, juvenile probation and the attorneys and/or guardians who are appointed for the children. Each of the agencies has a director. You have to clear them all out. They absolutely, 100% knew this was going on and they went along.
They could claim whistleblower protections.
I was thinking – they’re all mandated reporters. Could you turn that around and make a claim that the mandated reporters didn’t report, when it’s system agents themselves that are abusing children? I don’t know why not. It would be a way to reach everyone involved and at least sort it out as to all the people who are responsible, thru commission or ommission.
Grumpy Old Man
Gosh, wouldn’t be handy if someone shared the home address of that judge with the public so interested citizens could stop by and have a frank exchange of ideas with her?
Ken
@Another Scott: The rot started long before that, probably the late Devonian when our ancestors gave up this for stomping around on land.
SpaceUnit
@OzarkHillbilly:
I see. Well, a couple years of breaking rocks in the prison yard would have served ya right.
cain
@Roger Moore:
Ultimately, I think the responsibility also falls on the voters in that district as well. Shaming that community is something that needs to be done.
Barbara
@Peale: And yet the people voting for her no doubt have children and grandchildren with the same manners, use of technology and scattered dining habits. It’s just a load of brain dead drivel that let’s them pretend it isn’t all about race.
Benw
I read as much as I could. Those poor kids
Cacti
I will only be surprised if the judge ISN’T taking kickbacks or cash bribes.
Cermet
@Omnes Omnibus: Not at all; I was just showing that this racist thinking is still very much in the DNA of amerika; slavery was in full force until then (1950’s) yet how many people even here know this fact? Never taught in our schools and explains why (yet for another and major reason) Blacks never had the ability to accumulate generational wealth that is so routine in this country for whites.
hueyplong
@Martin: Let’s spare a thought for Steve Hasty from Murfreesboro, whose COVID ordeal famously featured the frightful inability to get free refills when he was forced to get his sweet tea in the drive-thru of a fast food joint closed to dine-in due to the pandemic.
Kay
It’s a shame none of the lawyers in the juvenile cases appealed. She gets overturned all the time. They probably flag the appeals coming out of that court at this point. They all know she’s a bad actor.
No motion to supress the fuzzy video, no habeas petitions, no one is doing any work at all.
Kay
Yikes. That can’t happen. The probate court in that county is all fucked up too. Just start investigating them too. In the meantime, call a halt to all of it, before they do any more damage.
Le Comte de Monte Cristo, fka Edmund Dantes
@J R in WV:
Ten-twelve years ago, I had a case involving a guy who committed a horrendously violent attack against a woman he had dated. Unfortunately for him, the woman he attacked was the sister of the jailer of the county where the prosecution took place. He didn’t have a very good experience in that jail up until the point that his brother hired me – then everything stopped.
AliceBlue
@trollhattan: Brookdale is in the process of taking over/buying out senior assisted living facilities across the country. My mother spent the last five years of her life in a senior living facility; the last two years Brookdale took it over. The staff was very caring and conscientious and I never heard of any incidents like this. But the costs immediately went up and the quality of the food went WAY down.
Peale
@Kay: Was wondering the same. The adoption was obviously being contested by a living parent. The child is in foster care. How can that possibly be allowed? If that’s the case, then why not just start snatching children and giving them away?
matt
Well, you get them in the system young, that much easier to keep them from voting when they get older.
Ivan X
Weird you put this up, I just today read an equally horrifying story about a different scary and corrupt form of juvenile detention: The Shadow Penal System For Struggling Kids
Dorothy A. Winsor
As always, there’s a group the law protects but does not limit, and a group the law limits, but does not protect.
laura
Kids as young as eight were pulled out of classes and off busses, handcuffed and transported to a children’s jail.
All the kids arrested were black girls. One tried to get the boys to stop fighting. This abomination of misogynoir needs to be made clear and called out, but often gets lost in the miasma of institutional racism. Call it by it’s name – misogynoir.
Aaron Rodgers Mustache
@AliceBlue: imagine the primary battle between her & kkklay travis. shades of geo. wallace never being outn…’d again.
Roger Moore
@Grumpy Old Man:
A substantial fraction of those people would be stopping by to congratulate her. This kind of thing can’t keep happening for this long without substantial public support.
scav
Heaven forfend we say there is anything systematically dicey in Rutherford County, TN!
Kay
@Peale:
Well it isn’t allowed. So the adoption went through and then this happened:
The child who had been adopted. By someone else. It’s a disaster. It CAN happen- a problem with notice to an absent parent or not identifying a parent at all but you’re right- THIS parent was very much in the picture- he or she was appealing the loss of parental rights. So two sets of people had parental rights.
I mean, she’s horrible but don’t miss that she’s also completely and utterly incompetent- she’s just making shit up in there. They have to suspend her or something and they should certainly review each and every ruling she has ever made. The cases have to be re-heard. We’re just seeing the worst ones- she’s churning this shit out every day and it’s “the record”.
LongHairedWeirdo
I started to read that article, and I saw the overwhelming sense of leadership by people who are absolutely sure that no one knows how to handle children, certainly not parents or teachers or principals. No, the only people who should be handling children are those who know nothing about being a child, but know that being tough is absolutely necessary If a child throws out a stream of profanity toward one of the screws[1], gotta put ’em in jail, not in timeout.
I wonder if slavery created a deep seated toxin in the soul of America. I mean, look at work: a large percentage of the people who write and enforce the laws believe in what I call the slavery principle: the way to get the desired behavior is to make the consequences unbearable. It will always favor force, because there are far more control-ees than controllers, so you have to keep the control-ees beat down.
And it’s stupid, because people work a lot harder toward a desired reward than to avoid getting hurt. Children (with simpler joys and shorter attention spans) are especially vulnerable to learning to do their best to get something nice.
[1] “screw” is a common term for the prison guards (at least in fiction); in this case, it applies to anyone who thinks a child’s profanity is deserving anything worse than a timeout and refusal to acknowledge the child until addressed without them.
Kay
@Peale:
When Theranos finally got busted they had to WITHDRAW the faulty blood tests, because the tests went into medical records which will be read and relied upon for that patient in every future encounter with the medical system. A million of them. Voided. It’s the same idea here. They have to correct her entire record.
Mai Naem mobile
This American life piece from a few years ago is just as bad. Drug court in Jawjah. Been a while since I listened to it but I got chills listening to it because it seemed like it could happen to pretty much anybody. I think it was a three parter and they won a bunch of awards for it. https://www.thisamericanlife.org/430/transcript.
I don’t understand how there isn’t some kind of state or federal supervision which catches this stuff. This judge doesn’t get all this crap done on her own. Also forget becoming a judge, how the hell was she allowed to take the Bar exam five times to become an attorney?
Roger Moore
@Barbara:
Let’s be fair. Complaining about how today’s youth are doing everything wrong and everything is going to Hell is a genre at least as old as writing and probably considerably older.
I’ll admit the “kids are calling from cell phones rather than land lines so nobody really knows where they are” is a new one to me. It falls apart even more easily than the rest of them, since the period when there was usable caller ID was very short. I could call from a land line, and my parents had no clue where I was calling from. I would guess the same thing was true when this judge was growing up.
jackson
II know one federal judge in TN. I called her office about this. Sheryl Lipman. Call people. Sheri. Anyone.
germy
Fair Economist
@Kay:
I don’t think she’s incompetent. She’s evil. She didn’t err in that custody/adoption case, she intentionally and maliciously did the wrong thing. If she’d just messed up she’d have obeyed the clear and repeated orders from the appeals court.
Tony Gerace
@Barbara: That’s right. Maybe the NAACP could pay some high powered lawyers to get this done.
Eolirin
We need to be enforcing civil rights laws extremely aggressively, and if those laws are insufficient to deal with these kinds of situations, we need stronger federal laws. It’s pretty clear that this stuff isn’t going to get addressed by the communities perpetrating it, they’re okay enough with it to keep electing people like this.
Kay
That’s what has to be done. Fix it.
scav
@Fair Economist: She sees herself as both above the law (if expressed by other judiciary) and the source of law (jailing children for laws that don’t exist) and none of the legal, judicial, administrative powers have corrected the matter, nor has the electorate. Media hasn’t even bothered to report on this for apparently years. This. Is. How. Rutherford. County. Tennessee. Wants. It. There’s a lot of complicity.
Woodrow/asim
@Cermet: Thank you for pointing out the history here. That people like my Dad would have grown up with this as The Norm all over the South – and from what I’ve read, far too much of The North, as well.
Yes, it’s shocking. No, we should not accept it as normal. Yes, we should fight it (anyone know the orgs who no doubt assisted in pushing back on this?)
I will say this. As someone who grew up just outside Jim Crow, I get, really damn well, the frustrations that cause people to vent by saying we should bomb a place filled with racists, or self-abort if you’re in the womb. Trust me, I grew up in a land too similar to this, a place with a university that literally fought tooth and nail to not allow people like my family to ever attend, up into the 1980s.
And because I grew up there, I also know that you and I and all honorable Americans have real work to do, to make things right. And that work cannot include slicing off the areas racism is prominent at, as ideals don’t respect geographical boundaries — nor are they well-suited to being eradicated via bombing campaigns.
Also, too: again, I know it’s a vent. I get these are jokes. Yet: Black folx live in these spaces, too. To want to harm and punish the White racists in ways — even joking — that also would harm the already victimized Black folx seems…unwise.
Maybe we can vent about these issues in ways that are inclusive, er those who are being harmed wander by and read our words?
Enhanced Voting Techniques
@Cacti: I agree, all the ranting about morality sounds like a give away that judge is on the take.
Racism is the cover “the other need to be put their place” but the real object is the pick the pockets of those white voters. Anymore proof racism is an idiot’s game is the way people let their taxes get stolen by bunch corrupt hacks just as long as the hacks abuse a minority or two doing it.
piratedan
@Kay: and maybe someone should get around to disbarring her.
Kay
Except I don’t even think they’re “convictions”. I think she’s using some emergency petition process that was intended to shelter children in emergencies (to avoid hearings and a record), in which case they have to get rid of the prosecutor too.
Kay
@piratedan:
Oh, I agree. I’m a big fan of holding powerful people accountable. The US Attorney got involved in the Pennsylvania case. Maybe that will happen here too. It isn’t a couple of bad apples. It’s hundreds of people allowing this to continue. They have to clean house.
Roger Moore
@Kay:
My guess is appeals are rare because she’s careful to do her worst to the kind of people who don’t have the resources to fight back. The public defender’s office- or whatever the equivalent is for juveniles- is probably woefully underfunded, in on the deal, or both. This is a systemic problem, and whoever is defending these kids is part of the broken system.
NotMax
Anyone – ANYONE – in a position of public trust who posits he or she is acting on or fulfilling the authority of God ought to be summarily canned.
Jager
@Another Scott:
My North Dakota hometown had a curfew from 10 pm to 6 am for kids under 16. When I was 12, 2 of my friends and I pitched a tent in Mike’s backyard and slept out. Around 5:30 (the sun has been up since before 5) in the morning, we decided to walk 8 blocks to a cafe for breakfast, a couple of blocks from the restaurant. We were strolling by a softball complex, a local cop comes up the street, hits his lights, does a Brodrick Crawford Highway Patrol turn in the street. We’re little dumbshits and we take off running across the softball diamonds. The cop drives over the curb, speed past us, spins his car around on a basepath, leaps out, gun in hand, and screams “Stop or I’ll shoot.” He hauls us to the station for curfew violation. We were sitting on a bench across from the desk Sgt and enjoyed the heavy-duty ass-chewing the cop got.
Another Scott
@scav: I decided to take a look at the reviews on Indeed:
First two:
Maybe the first one was text-to-speech or something??
“Unnecessary lawsuits”??!
(sigh)
They should shut it down and knock the buildings down and turn it into a park.
Grr…
Cheers,
Scott.
Kay
@Fair Economist:
They all hate to be overturned.
I think I’m sticking with both mean and dumb. Oh, and hugely arrogant, as they always are. I’m sure she’s very firm and decisive in her dumb opinions, which she thinks matters, that she genuinely “believes” she’s right.
Raoul Paste
@Baud: Absolutely fantastic
Kay
@Roger Moore:
They don’t have to appeal it though. They can ask someone else. Lawyers still do pro bono. One of them would have done it. They can do as many or as few as they want. It would be better to have someone from out of county anyway. Get eyes on what’s going on in there. File a real defense and start making a record.
Roger Moore
@scav:
This is what they really mean when they talk about “Law and Order”: perpetuating the social order under color of law. They are going to keep enforcing the law as it existed a hundred years ago regardless of what the law today is.
Woodrow/asim
I really recommend the work of the 1619 Project on this question. What follows is just my opinion:
Chattel Slavery was already a stain on vast swathes of the rest of the world, when the United States was founded. Indeed: The act of what Columbus and the many who followed him did, was to violate on nearly every level possible any human being they could find “over here,” for decades.
There’s no United States — at least, a successful one — without a system that chained and used generations of Black folx. What happened to set up the current system is that people with guilty consciousnesses and too much time on their hands, built up “religious” and “scientific” reasons to keep my ancestors in chains. That’s the baseline for all this; people developing systems of thought to grow racism among the masses.
Indeed, I just picked up Gould’s THE MISMEASURE OF MAN to re-read, and it’s another source on how racist thought had evolved over the centuries. White people really put a lot of work into keeping Black folx down, and because that work doesn’t have geographical boundaries, it was too easy to convince the post-Civil War Federal government, eventually, to just…let people be racists again, if they wanted too.
See, racists really don’t want a race war. They want people scared of that war, for the same damned effect other terrorists aim for. Just without the personal hard work and sacrifice, because Free-Dumb. And certain media and social elements work to make that happen.
And that’s the thing. It wasn’t slavery itself that created racism. American Racism is created from the belief that certain people deserve “everything,” without putting the work in. And if they have to abuse others — including people in their own damn family, much less someone they’ve grown up being told is less, to get that? Sure.
All of this crap, is just self-reenforcing to ensure some groups do the grunt work for others, no matter the moral and ethical framework the country is supposed to run under. And, of course, to feel good about it.
That’s all it is.
Kay
Guffaw. So sleazy. Just as an aside I’m old enough to remember that the NYTimes treated questions about gifts with the Clinton as an earth shattering national story for months.
This is like “those goofballs were so disorganized!”
That paper is just a continuing campaign contribution to the Trump Family. I bet they get the 10,00 text messages.
OzarkHillbilly
@SpaceUnit: You should’ve seen me out in the yard lifting the 10# sledge over my head time after time.
JML
Tremendous reporting by ProPublica. Horrific story.
Comrade Colette
@Kay: Link? I can’t figure out what the topic is here, and I don’t have a subscription to the FTFNYT. Thanks!
Betty Cracker
@JML: It really is an amazing, in-depth piece. You gotta wonder how much potential reporting like this is being lost with the collapse of local media. If it were up to me, the U.S. would redirect every penny currently propping up the fossil fuel energy sector to shoring up and expanding local newsrooms instead. Seems like a no-brainer. One industry is choking the planet, whereas the other is a pillar of democracy that is crumbling before our eyes.
Gravenstone
@OzarkHillbilly: Always been an overachiever, eh?
GoBlueInOak
There isn’t enough room in Hell for the punishments that judge deserves.
Peale
@Barbara: She runs unopposed so all she needs is 0 votes and she wins. And terms are apparently 8 years. So she’s campaigned twice.
Low Key Swagger
Just contacted my connect with the ACLU. Unbelievably it wasn’t on her radar, though she did explan she has been caring for her ailing mother (whom recently passed) and she was furious when I explained it. I’ll hear back and update.
Frank Wilhoit
@LongHairedWeirdo: @Woodrow/asim: The deep-seated toxicity that you are talking about is sadism. It is a category error to talk about “racism”, because that assumes that the identity of the targets is essential — or even that the targets are who you think they are, which they are not. There have always been multiple classes of targets and they have all always been allegories. First you decide to break heads, then you decide whose heads to break, and it never matters whose: the most convenient target is chosen, from each moment to the next. Do you think you can reform a bully by preventing him from picking on fillintheblank? No: you reform a bully by hitting him harder than he ever imagined anyone could be hit, so hard that the shock never fades, does he live another hundred years.
JML
@Betty Cracker: You’re 100% right: there’s a lot of this that’s being missed because the local/regional newspapers that did this reporting are becoming hollowed out wrecks, running mostly national stories from the wire and a little from the crime/politics beat from the capital/big city. Few newsrooms even have an investigative unit any longer, and the ones who do…half the time they’re doing sensationalized and half-baked “consumer reports”.=, it seems. It’s not good. there are some good non-profit publications doing great journalism…but it’s hard. The financing isn’t easy and they often seem to be getting staffed up with a lot of newbies willing to take a poor salary for the experience, part-timers, and old-school reporters heading to retirement but still have some fire in their bellies.
Media consolidation is ripe for some serious trust-bustin’ anti-monopolistic attitude. (seriously? I have to wonder if the next Big Idea to cross socio-political lines is fighting the monopolies again. Big Tech, Big Ag, Big Media, Big Pharma…)
Old School
@Comrade Colette:
The Southpaw tweet shared by Kay references this:
Enhanced Voting Techniques
Much truth to that. Racism just merely makes it easy for the inbred dimwits on the top to set the level of abuse since thinking isn’t their thing.
sab
@Kent: Isn’t that same county as Murfreesboro, which has a big state university, Middle Tennessee State U.
Enhanced Voting Techniques
One of the real eye openers on racism was talking to blacks from Africa, they simply can’t tell the difference between a White American and an African American because we all sound the same to them – loud mouthed, pushy, over opinionated Americans. The stupid shit we freak about like hair styles and music preferences is just invisible to them.
NotMax
@Old School
“No matter what we do or how they’re treated they eventually smell like camel.”
//
lowtechcyclist
@Frank Wilhoit:
When one group of targets has endured for centuries, while others have spent time as targets, then allowed to assimilate into the ruling class, something besides bullying is going on.
‘Racism’ seems to be the appropriate word.
MisterForkbeard
@Old School: I agree with Southpaw/Kay: There’s two possible interpretations for this:
1: The Trump admin got rolled by the Saudi’s (not the first time)
2: Someone in the Trump Admin took the real girls and replaced them with these.
So: Incompetent and/or evil. Got it.
Ken
@MisterForkbeard: Why not both?
3. The Saudis gave fakes, and someone in the Trump administration stole them and replaced them with indentical fakes.
Or as NotMax put it, “That’s twice in as many months that we’ve got an order for camel hide died as white tiger.”
Gvg
@Peale: it can happen legitimately. Kids are removed from abusive parents all the time. Once parental rights are terminated, the child becomes eligible for adoption. Obviously that woman didn’t do that properly but I have seen plenty I thought it wasn’t happening fast enough. I was a foster parent. Every time I got a call for a badly injured kid….some patently belong in jail.
my local system had guardian ad litums appointed for serious or long term cases. There were not enough for all kids.
My nephew was adopted this way.
Low Key Swagger
@sab: Yes. It’s a pretty decent school.
Another Scott
@Enhanced Voting Techniques: I think it’s more of a human thing than an American thing.
When J’s parents were living with us we had home health aids helping out. An Ethiopian woman would help out during the day, and women from Nigeria and Mali would take turns helping out in the evenings. Once I heard the former mutter under her breath in exasperation about “those Africans…”
People are too often tribal. What defines the tribe sometimes varies.
Cheers,
Scott.
Steeplejack (phone)
@Comrade Colette, @Old School:
Link to thread.
Winston
@Old School: Link : https://www.businessinsider.com/saudi-royal-family-gave-trump-fake-tiger-cheetah-fur-robes-2021-10
Professor Bigfoot
@Martin: don’t look now, but all the “less wealthy” people who’ve been squeezed out of Nashville properly have moved to the ‘burbs— I have fam in Smyrna, for example.
Nashville just ain’t the same city I ran away from 40 years ago.
Roger Moore
@Woodrow/asim:
The really sad part is I don’t believe this is true. We had slavery because the people doing to colonizing came from a society that saw slavery as a natural way of doing business. That doesn’t mean slavery was essential to the colonies being successful. I sincerely think the colonial project could have been successful with purely free labor. It might have been slower, and it almost certainly would have been less profitable to the richest people in Europe- and yes, those two things are deeply connected- but it could have happened without slavery.
I think this is a real danger to a lot of the narrative around slavery. We want to think something so terrible must have been necessary in some way, so the suffering of the slaves had some meaning to the success of the country. My deepest fear is that isn’t true. Slavery was only useful as a way of making sure the profits wound up in as few hands as possible. All those enslaved people suffered and died for nothing nobler than keeping the rich from having to share their wealth.
Baud
@Another Scott:
That’s an East Coast/West Coast thing.
condorcet runner-up
the people running this horror show should be locked up for a very, very long time, the same way that it happened to Judge Ciavarella in the kids for cash scandal in PA.
this is abjectly horrific, and the people perpetrating this scheme are fucking monsters.
i hope federal charges are planned for all of the individuals involved, just like they did in PA.
Another Scott
In other news, …
Yup. Getting the news out matters. A lot. That’s why they try to keep this stuff hidden.
(via dsquareddigest)
Cheers,
Scott.
Another Scott
@Baud: Sure, but she didn’t catch the irony of being from Africa herself.
Yes, Africa is horrible for tribalism too (Hutu/Tutsi is an infamous example), even when one ignores the north/south and east/west divides. And racism is indeed America’s original sin and needs to be addressed in serious ways. Not to be trite (as I too often am), but it’s a human problem that has been exacerbated by white supremacy but is a problem beyond that.
I don’t know if there are better ways to talk about it, and don’t really know if somehow framing it as a human problem makes it any easier to address. But it’s out there.
FWIW.
Thanks.
Cheers,
Scott.
debbie
@Another Scott:
If only Bolsonaro was next! ?
debbie
@Another Scott:
Your story really illustrates just how crappy training has become.
apocalipstick
@germy: Dolores Umbridge lives.
debbie
@germy:
Ten on the Trump Scale!
debbie
@OzarkHillbilly:
I’m surprised that at that age, you two didn’t go for a swim.
Renie
Judge’s control over everything reminded me of the recent stories of the Murdaugh dynasty’s control over their town in South Carolina. Very weird happenings still not solved.
https://www.cnn.com/2021/09/13/us/murdaugh-deaths-timeline/index.html
apocalipstick
@Skepticat: She should be introduced to the millstone and neck portion of that reading.
glory b
The judge took 9 years and 5 tries to pass the bar exam, so maybe her being there wasn’t God’s will after all.
The juvenile justice system there is such that both Juvenile magistrates, the head of the facility and the commissioners (whose only requirements are that they have a high school diploma and TN driver’s license) who decide on charges, are all appointed by the judge. The commissioners got a copy of the statute and read it to decide what to charge.
As the icing on the cake, the kids fighting were 5 and 6 years old, and they decided they were too young to charge. Instead, they charged the kids watching the fight for not intervening.
The woman who ran the facility told police that they could figure out how to detain any kid they wanted to hold, no matter the reason.
Also, the PA judge was from Luzerne County and he’s doing 28 years.
glory b
@Renie: The Murdaugh Murders podcast is horrifying and fascinating. A member of the family has been the solicitor (like a DA) since 1920.
Ruckus
@Old School:
The guy they gave the gifts to was a fake human so really what’s the problem?
Just in case it’s not apparent – this is snark.. Or maybe not.
Renie
Just saw on Twitter Joy Reid is covering this story about Judge Davenport tonight.
apocalipstick
@Another Scott: Not far wrong. Socrates thought writing was making the yutes soft-headed. Ralph Waldo Emerson thought that the watch was making humanity stupid by eliminating the need to tell time by looking at the sun.
Renie
@glory b: It is such a weird story with the family members being killed even the housekeeper and no one knows who has done the killings. Then the guy tries to make it look like someone tried to kill him on the road. Very bizarre.
The Pale Scot
@Soprano2:
And the thing is baggy pants is so 1995 to 2015. At least in the coastal places and a couple of others. I got clued in to this rolling with a guy from East NYC who worked in Newark NJ. He’d joke about how the Newark folk were still wearing last years styles including the droopy drawers. The droopy drawers came from guys in jail having their belts taken away. That became a style for a couple of years, but it isn’t effective “thug gear”. Hard to fight, or dance with your pants around your knees. It’s dropped to dummy gear. Like the women I have seen in downtown ST Pete around the boat/yacht docks wearing extremely holed distressed bluejeans. That was a thing in NYC 10 years ago? And it looks really ridiculous on a fluffy 40 year woman from Wisconsin. It’s a heroin chic thing, you need a 200 dollar top and 300 dollar shoes to pull it off. Or Lady Miss Kier’s vintage fashion chops
LongHairedWeirdo
@lowtechcyclist: Frank is actually a bit closer to the point I was trying to make, actually. I’m not trying to downplay racism in the least – I’m trying to suggest that while the original sin of slavery was bad, it set up people who constantly had the idea that the proper method of motivating people was the lash.
I guess I’m trying to say “racism was the soil and the fertilizer, but now we have an additional, homegrown bigotry that is tied to racism, but is no longer merely racism.” Like, if people won’t work for crap wages, ending unemployment enhancements is the right thing to do to force those lazy people back to work. There might be some racism there, but there’s a deeper callousness, a toxic indifference, to the welfare of the people.
J R in WV
@Cacti:
Come on Cacti, kickbacks ARE cash bribes… and of course the judge is taking bribes under the table. Or perhaps doing that fascist Nazi crap for the pure joy of being a Nazi… maybe.
Frank Wilhoit
@lowtechcyclist: I’m just going to assume that, by now, multiple other people have pointed out the problem with what you have said here.
Roger Moore
@Another Scott:
Sure, but it’s important to understand the colonial powers encouraged tribalism as part of a divide and conquer strategy. They did their best to make sure the people they were trying to rule hated each other at least as much as they hated the colonial overlord. I’m not saying that the hatred and distrust didn’t exist before colonialism, but the colonialists did everything they could to keep the people they colonized fighting amongst themselves so they would never combine to overthrow their colonial masters.
LongHairedWeirdo
@Roger Moore: I would like to think that the US could have been a free nation from the getgo, but it probably wouldn’t have been the America we know today.
A free society might well be able to outcompete a slave society, but a collection of free workers might not be able to outcompete a slave owner… especially in the south, where people who have a choice might not be willing to labor in the summer heat.
Part of me… well, part of me wants to believe America could have been built with freedom. But another part of me wants to stare deeply into how it didn’t, and not flinch or look away, until we’ve found the root causes.
Soprano2
@The Pale Scot: I hate those jeans that look like they should be thrown out. I refused to buy them even when they were popular because I can’t wear them to work. Women around here still wear them. Yuck.
topclimber
@Roger Moore: I hope to discuss this more with you on a thread that is still alive.
boatboy_srq
I keep saying that the modern Reichwing takes Dickens, not as cautionary tale, but as instruction manual.
Another Scott
@Roger Moore: Excellent point and one that should not be minimized.
Thanks.
Cheers,
Scott.
eddie blake
@trollhattan: karen the hutt.
BellyCat
Injustice elsewhere?
Centre County PA has a privilege for attorneys called a “walk-through”. An attorney can file a new claim and then submit undocketed materials directly to the newly assigned judge for consideration and signature without notice to the opposing parity. And the judge will sign them without giving the opponent the opportunity to be heard — especially prevalent if the opposing parry is pro-se (unrepresented).
This is impermissible ex parte communication. Big no-no. Violation of 14th amendment, too.
Happy to discuss with any interested parties.