Expert concludes evidence still points to ongoing ‘constitutional and legal violations’
By Katherine Burgess
The Commercial Appeal
MEMPHIS, Tenn. (AP) — Although Shelby County’s Juvenile Court made progress during the six years it was monitored by the federal government, “there is still compelling evidence of ongoing constitutional and legal violations,” an independent expert commissioned by nonprofit Just City concluded in a report on the state of youth justice in the county.
The report was requested by the organization for the 10th anniversary of the U.S. Department of Justice’s oversight of the Juvenile Court of Memphis and Shelby County.
While Just City provided lodging for and paid travel costs for Joshua Perry, former executive director of the Louisiana Center for Children’s Rights, he received no other compensation for researching and creating the report.
The report tracks changes over the six years that the memorandum of agreement between the Department of Justice and Shelby County was in place, from 2012 to 2018. Then, it “attempts to determine what has changed since the MOA’s termination.”
“Remedying those violations will take hard work by all stakeholders, working in coordination and with a shared sense of responsibility and mutual accountability,” reads the report’s executive summary. “But fixing the violations will not be enough, because Shelby County stakeholders rightly demand more than the legal minimum.”
Perry researched and wrote the report in March through June. For several years, Shelby County Government consulted with him regarding compliance with the due process provisions of the memorandum of agreement with the U.S. Department of Justice.
Perry spoke with more than 40 stakeholders in Shelby Count’s juvenile justice system and reviewed every publicly available report submitted by the DOJ’s monitors and consultants as well as other correspondence and documents to research the report.
However, the court, district attorney general and sheriff’s office declined to be interviewed or to answer written questions.
After six years of monitoring in the areas of due process, detention and equal protection, the Department of Justice ended its oversight of the juvenile court and detention center in October 2018, against the protests of newly sworn in county commissioners.
At the time, many items remained unresolved, and federal monitors said in their final reports that racial disparities and inequities persisted, with juveniles being denied due process.
Just last year, the Shelby County Commission echoed the Countywide Juvenile Justice Consortium when it voted to ask the Department of Justice to reevaluate the county’s juvenile delinquency proceedings, determining what progress has been made since the termination of the memorandum of agreement.
Perry’s report did not take a stance on whether the DOJ should reexamine Shelby County’s juvenile court, but did affirm a key finding of the Countywide Juvenile Justice Consortium (CJJC) by saying there is little transparency into juvenile justice in Shelby County.
“That lack of transparency impairs stakeholders’ ability to build a genuinely coordinated system that imposes mutual accountability and designs common strategies to work towards shared objectives,” stated the report.
The report’s recommendations include calling for the production and publication of high-quality data, the engagement of impartial experts to work toward a plan for reducing racial disparities, the ordering of disclosures in transfer cases, set and legally encode standards for its juvenile detention center.
The county should also, according to the report, revitalize its Juvenile Detention Alternatives Initiative, creating “a forum where a broad range of stakeholders meet at regularly-scheduled, publicly-accessible meetings; review shared data; set common goals; develop and oversee implementation of strategies aimed at reducing and improving detention in Shelby County; and share responsibility for outcomes.”
Notably, racial disparities remain today, according to the report, particularly among youth transferred to adult court. The DOJ found that 95.5% of youth transferred from 2005-2009 were Black. From 2012-2021, according to court data, 93.9% of youth transferred were Black in the county — while in 2020 only 60.2% of the under-20 population was Black, according to the report.
“The effects of transfer are still felt largely – indeed, almost exclusively – by Black youth, to a degree far out of proportion to their share of the County’s youth population.”
However, while the DOJ’s report was able to prove causation by accounting for variables, Perry’s report was not, he noted.
On the issue of juvenile defense, the quality has improved since 2012, when the Shelby County Public Defender’s Office did not defend juveniles at all, according to the report. However, that improvement may not apply to all youth, the report said, with half of all accused youth still represented by conflict panel attorneys who are not “insulated from political pressure” or “adequately resourced.”
And on detention, the report said there “is little independent visibility” into the operations and conditions of juvenile detention, which is run by the Shelby County Sheriff’s Office, and “there is reason for concern that stakeholders did not undertake a meaningful study of capacity and need” for a juvenile detention facility currently being built in a renovated jail.
