If each of the state’s juvenile courts operate a little differently, much of the current framework for the Memphis and Shelby County Juvenile Court comes from a 2012 agreement with the U.S. Justice Department.

The agreement, which was between Shelby County’s elected leaders and the Civil Rights Division of the Justice Department, ended in 2018, but it called for aggressive monitoring of the court’s daily business as well as its long-term trajectory.

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More than a decade ago, Justice Department officials announced findings from their years-long study into Shelby County’s juvenile court system at the same time they announced a “Memorandum of Agreement.” That began a period of federal oversight into Juvenile Court. 

Then-Juvenile Court Judge Curtis Person Jr., then-Shelby County Mayor Mark Luttrell and then-Shelby County Sheriff Bill Oldham signed the agreement.

How it all began

The DOJ began looking at the Memphis and Shelby County Juvenile Court after a 2007 request by Shelby County Commissioner Henri Brooks, who had worked there.

Brooks’ request came after the Democratic majority on the commission sought to appoint a second Juvenile Court judge shortly after Person won election in 2006.

Person had been the hand-picked successor to the late Juvenile Court Judge Kenneth Turner, who had been Juvenile Court Judge since 1963.

The County Commission then pushed a move to elect multiple Juvenile Court judges; Person immediately sued the commission and won.

Brooks formally sought a Justice Department review of the court as a coda to the political and legal dispute.

The review of 66,000 case files — covering five years — began in August 2009.

There were multiple discussions between the court, the Civil Rights Division and expert monitors before the 2012 report was released and the agreement was signed.

When Justice Department attorneys came to Memphis in 2010 and 2011 with the team of juvenile justice experts, they had good news and bad news for leaders of Shelby County Juvenile Court.

“What we were told in both meetings … is that this is the first time the Civil Rights Division has ever investigated a juvenile court to this depth,” Larry Scroggs, Juvenile Court’s chief administrative officer and chief counsel during that period, said at the time.

“They were somewhat drawn to this court by the improvements or the modifications, the reforms, that we had underway,” he said. “But they felt like they could build on what was going on here to create a model for juvenile justice in the nation.”

The report that followed was the fourth comprehensive review of the court’s operations in a five-year period. But its impact was larger than the other reports because of the Justice Department’s weightiness.

The agreement kept Juvenile Court in charge of its own operations and even allowed Person to object to the most damning of its conclusions: that Black children were more likely to be detained and face harsher punishments than white children for the same offenses.

The report that came with the agreement, however, was unflinching and specific in its conclusion that a court, which for decades touted itself as a model for other juvenile or family courts to follow, was anything but that.

The 2012 report’s findings

While it didn’t directly challenge Person’s denial, the review flatly contradicted it.

Thomas Perez, who was then-assistant U.S. Attorney General, said at the time:

“Notwithstanding the progress we observed in a number of areas, we found serious and systemic failures in the juvenile justice system in Memphis and Shelby County that violate the constitutional rights of children appearing before the court. We found that African American children were treated differently and more harshly during key points in the juvenile justice process. ...

“Race was a statistically significant factor in determining whether a child would receive lenient treatment such as a warning or a more serious sanction.”

The Justice Department’s report concluded the local juvenile detention center “violates the substantive due process rights of detained youth by not providing them with reasonably safe conditions of confinement.”

Those due process violations included failing to notify children and their parents of charges in advance of hearings and sending children to detention when they were arrested on weekends or holidays without warrants because hearings didn’t take place on those days.

The system for deciding to transfer children for trial as adults was also found lacking.

The Justice Department report concluded Juvenile Court referees and magistrates made those decisions “after making cursory or no inquiries into the children’s background or social factors, which are required by the state’s law,” Perez said.

In some cases, the court didn’t hold hearing on the matters that determined whether a child would be tried as an adult.

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A 2007 report by the National Center for State Courts cited the case of a teenage girl charged with murdering a 10-month-old infant left in her care.

The teenager’s defense attorney had witnesses prepared to testify about the girl’s history of exposure to domestic violence and previous sexual abuse. The defense also had witnesses — including a medical examiner, another doctor and two police officers on the case — who were prepared to testify that the infant’s mother had a documented history of child abuse and had caused some of the injuries to the infant’s body.

The referee heard none of that testimony and the prosecution presented no witnesses before the referee transferred the case to criminal court.

The Civil Rights Division concluded that it “doubt(ed) the juvenile court’s ability to handle matters involving allegations of serious violent crimes.”

“While the magistrate may have arrived at the same decision after considering the requisite evidence,” the report said of the case of the aforementioned teenager, “his fundamental misunderstanding of the role of juvenile court contributed to the child’s case being transferred to criminal court, which may not have been the most appropriate forum for her accountability and rehabilitation.”

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The Justice Department also found resistance “to the idea that (Juvenile Court) would be stronger overall with a more adversarial system.”

And it noted the court’s internal culture “frequently discourages an adversarial testing of facts for children and misinterprets the proper role of defense counsel.”

When he was the Shelby County District Attorney General, Bill Gibbons made the position of Juvenile Court prosecutor part of his office, changing the custom of having that person appointed by the Juvenile Court judge.

The Justice Department concluded the position of juvenile defender should also not be appointed by the judge.

The juvenile defenders are now part of the Shelby County Public Defender’s office as a separate slate of defense attorneys who specialize in Juvenile Court cases.

Political changes

By the time of the Justice Department agreement, Person was nearing the end of his eight-year term of office and hoping to turn the court over to his hand-picked successor, Dan Michael, who had also been hired by Turner.

Michael beat City Court Judge Tarik Sugarmon in 2014 in the first of their two county ballot matchups and immediately inherited the Justice Department agreement.

The court’s cooperation with the Justice Department and its monitors went from grudging cooperation to vocal opposition as President Donald Trump’s election signaled a dramatic change at the DOJ.

Such reviews and memorandums as well as consent decrees were abandoned as were similar reviews of police departments and other local law enforcement agencies.

Six months into Trump’s presidency and the tenure of U.S. Attorney General Jeff Sessions, Michael, Luttrell and Oldham sought to end the memorandum of agreement.

Bill Powell, who was county government’s criminal justice coordinator and who led the group within county government that had been working with Justice Department officials since the agreement started, resigned his position in protest.

In October 2017, Sessions ended the parts of the memorandum where monitors found the court in compliance. He then ended the remainder of the memorandum a year later.