At the end of a corridor on one side of the Judge D’Army Bailey County Courthouse is the office of the General Sessions Court Clerk. The wood-paneled walls and thick doors are on the side of the courthouse that is below street level but still the first floor of the circa 1910 structure.

“People ask me how I got this office,” General Sessions Court Clerk Ed Stanton Jr. said. “I got it from John Ford.”

Stanton is referring to an office that is something of a surprise in a hallway that doesn’t see a lot of foot traffic. Ford, a Democratic state senator at the same time he served as the clerk, created the office three clerks ago — Republican Chris Turner, Democrat Otis Jackson and Stanton, who is a Democrat.

Stanton will be leaving the office in less than a year. He announced recently he won’t run for re-election in 2020.

Stanton reportedly passes on court clerk re-election bid

He was appointed by a majority of the 15 General Sessions Court judges to the position in 2011 after they suspended Jackson following Jackson’s indictment that year on four counts of official misconduct. Jackson was later granted judicial diversion on the charges, ironically one of the legal functions for which paperwork is handled by the clerk’s office.

Stanton ran for a full four-year term as clerk in 2012, won the popular election and then won re-election in 2016. He announced earlier this month that he won’t seek a third term.

“I have seen other people stay too long and get bitter about it,” Stanton said without dropping any names.

Within days of his decision going public, Democratic Shelby County Commissioner Eddie Jones filed his qualifying petition for the March 3 county primary election, and fellow Democratic commissioner Reginald Milton said he is considering the race as well.

Eddie Jones files for General Sessions Court Clerk on 2020 ballot

Gortria Banks, finance administrator with the clerk’s office, and Deirdre Fisher have also pulled qualifying petitions for the March Democratic primary.

Former Probate Court Clerk Paul Boyd has pulled a petition for the Republican primary.

The clerk is the only countywide office on the 2020 ballot that starts with the March primaries. The winners advance to the August county general elections that will include five nonpartisan races for seats on the nine-member Shelby County Schools board.

Stanton came out of retirement after 28 years of working in appointed and civil service roles at the courthouse to take on the job eight years ago. Those past jobs included administrator of the civil divisions of General Sessions Court — a state court that is unique in its combination of civil and criminal divisions.

“This is the largest court clerk’s office in the state of Tennessee,” Stanton said of the 150 employees including 17 appointed by the clerk himself. There are 15 courtrooms, civil and criminal, and 11 judicial commissioners who are the first stop in the legal process for cases of all kinds.

The operations of the clerk’s office are spread across five offices, including satellite locations and the 24-hour clerk’s office at the Walter Bailey Criminal Justice Center. That office gets defendants before a judicial commissioner for possible release or continued detention after they are booked.

The office oversees 100,000 criminal cases a year and more than 65,000 civil cases.

“It’s paper, paper, paper,” Stanton said.

And when paper gets lost or there is a dispute about exactly what kind of paperwork is necessary and legal, it can put the clerk in the spotlight suddenly.

This past February, Stanton was summoned before the Tennessee Supreme Court to explain the four-year effort by Marcus Deangelo Lee to have his criminal record expunged after he paid court costs as required and then sought proof of the expungement.

Shelby County expungement practices questioned by Tennessee Supreme Court

The rare summons from the court drew immediate changes in the clerk’s office.

Also, expungement fees by the state were first lowered and then abolished by legislation although a local fee remains.

Stanton said he is open to working with advocates of reforming the bail system and is watching a federal appeal of an Alabama court case. That case questions the constitutionality of court costs and fines that keep those convicted linked to the criminal justice system after they’ve served their time.

“We follow the last rule first. The laws are ever-changing,” Stanton said.

“We will comply to whatever the law says. We don’t have any stake in the percentage one way or the other,” he said. “We just know that whatever the law requires, that’s what we are responsible for. I think we’ve done a good job at that.”

A new digital system for the criminal division put Stanton and his office between county government’s IT division, which was moving to eliminate the county’s print shop for the courts, and the criminal division judges, who insisted on paper originals and copies as a necessary part of the legal process.

“We had the capability of doing e-filing in criminal, but the judges ordered me – they sent me a paper order,” Stanton said with a laugh. “Our IT said, ‘We are not doing any more printouts.’ So I took that information from IT to them and they said, ‘You are going to have paper.”

The result is the clerk’s office has a copy crew that begins to print documents of the day for the criminal divisions at 6 a.m. every weekday.

Waiting in the wings is a digital system for the civil divisions that Stanton said should be a much smoother transition based on lessons learned the hard way in the criminal divisions.

“We all learned a lot with trying to implement a new system rather than trying to transfer information in one week and walking off,” Stanton said. “It may take one year now running side by side.”

Down the hall from Stanton’s office is a row of video monitors that show the day’s schedules for the various civil and criminal divisions of the court — an innovation during Stanton’s tenure that replaced the old paper dockets attached to a bulletin board. He likens it to the video boards at airports that constantly change as flights come and go.

The office is also working on a set of three pay grades for clerk’s office employees that would put courtroom clerks at the top level followed by clerks working the counters and dealing with the public and clerks in the file room at the entry level.

All employees now start at a base pay of $29,250.

“I’m hoping to be able to get the ear of the county,” Stanton said.

“They are the heartbeat of the courtroom. They can make or break a judge,” he said of the courtroom clerks assigned to a particular judge who usually plays a larger role in the selection and retention. “We try to accommodate the judges with the best personnel we have. I have judges who from time to time say, ‘It’s not working. Can you get me someone else?’ We do that very discreetly.”