During his campaign, District Attorney General Steve Mulroy touted promises for criminal justice reform in areas such as juvenile justice, diversity and restorative justice. 

Now that he is more than two months into office, he says he is working toward following up on those promises by collaborating with local, regional and national groups to determine best reform practices.

The latest development in his revamping of the criminal justice system is his Oct. 11 announcement of four working groups that will center on four policy topics central to his agenda: disproportionate minority contact, post-conviction justice, restorative justice and juvenile justice. 

DA hires veteran defense attorney to lead new conviction review unit

“I was hoping to get some specific and concrete recommendations about what we can be doing — things that would happen in my office and things that might require broader collaboration,” Mulroy told The Daily Memphian. 

The Daily Memphian spoke with the four leaders of the working groups about their goals. They will work with individuals and organizations both locally and nationally to seek recommendations to pass on to Mulroy. 

Disproportionate minority contact

Demetria Frank, a professor at the University of Memphis Cecil E. Humphrey’s School of Law, serves as the head of the disproportionate minority contact team. 

At the law school, Frank is associate dean for diversity and inclusion, having been named to that role last year. 

Mulroy said Frank’s team will address racial disparities at every point in the criminal justice process. 

DA fires nine employees, announces six new hires

“We know there are disparities, and I wanted the group to inform me on how to reduce them and measure them as well,” Mulroy said. 

According to the most recent figures from the NAACP, 87% of Black adults say the U.S. criminal justice system is more unjust towards Black people and 61% of white adults agree. 

Black and Hispanic Americans make up over half the U.S. prison population despite only making up 32% of the national population. 

One of every three Black boys is sentenced to prison compared to one out of every six Hispanic boys and one out of every 17 white boys. 

And although not specifically focused on juvenile justice with her team, Frank has done work in the past around juvenile justice and opportunity youth. She was appointed in 2018 to the Shelby Countywide Juvenile Justice Consortium by Shelby County Mayor Lee Harris. 

Frank underscored that youth are a group in the community that needs to be heard from, not just by the new working groups but by the DA’s office overall. 

Mulroy says crime labs are ‘state responsibility’ with focus on rape kits

“I’ve always had the philosophy that it starts with the youth,” she said. 

Frank said she plans to work with several groups and individuals including Just City and the Equal Justice Initiative as well as Russ Wigginton, president of the National Civil Rights Museum, and her colleagues at the University of Memphis. 

“One of the benefits of being at the U of M is interplay with other departments,” she said. 

Post-conviction justice

William Arnold, an exoneree from Memphis and director of the Tennessee Office of Reentry, will lead the transition team’s efforts in developing strategies toward the implementation of post-conviction justice. 

The strategies will likely be applied to the DA’s office new Post-Conviction Justice Unit, which will be led by veteran defense attorney Lorna McClusky. The unit will become operational by the end of the year.

Mulroy announces four working groups to focus on criminal justice priorities

During Mulroy’s campaign, he often cited the work of Davidson County’s Conviction Review Unit (CRU) as his inspiration for Shelby County’s own unit that would review cases for potential errors and wrongful convictions, as well as examine sentences previously handed down.

“I wanted advice for the best way to set up a conviction review unit, the scope that it would reach, the kinds of cases you would prioritize and what the best way is to set it up to form it,” Mulroy said.

According to the National Registry of Exonerations, there have been 37 exonerations in Tennessee since 1989. 

Pamela Moses is one of the most recent exonerees in the state. Moses was sentenced to six years in prison for illegally registering to vote in 2019 and was later granted a retrial until former District Attorney General Amy Weirich dropped the case in April. 

When running for mayor in 2019, Moses filed paperwork to get her voting rights restored. She said the Tennessee Department of Corrections told her that her probation had ended and gave her a certificate saying so, but then rescinded the certificate.

Moses maintained her innocence and said she did not know she was ineligible to vote after becoming a convicted felon. She said she thought her probation from a 2015 guilty plea had ended and that she could go through the process to restore her voting rights.

The guilty plea was for tampering with evidence, forgery and misdemeanor charges of perjury, stalking, theft under $500 and escape.

Mulroy, Sugarmon host work session to discuss solutions to juvenile crime

Between 1989 and 2021, 3,077 exonerations occurred throughout the United States, according to the National Registry of Exonerations. 

Of those, 375 were exonerated by DNA, according to the Innocence Project. Common causes of wrongful conviction include misidentification from an in-person lineup or photo array, misapplication of forensic science or false confessions. 

Arnold was exonerated by the Davidson County District Attorney General’s office’s CRU in 2018 after spending nearly seven years of his 25-year sentence in prison.

He was working in diversity and inclusion in Nashville when he was accused of sexually assaulting an 11-year-old boy.

The boy told his mother that “William” had assaulted him. His mother assumed he meant Arnold, but he meant a teenager with the same first name, and he didn’t correct his mother. Documents and media reports suggest the boy feared retribution from his mother, but he later told the truth.

Arnold applied for assistance from the CRU in 2018, and he was released from prison in April 2020, pending a new trial. His conviction was vacated that June.

“I was the first person that the first conviction review unit in Tennessee was able to help,” Arnold said. “So I have some lived experience of being in prison and also helping folks after being incarcerated.”

He said he plans to help establish guidelines that determine what cases are reviewed and by whom, as well as ensure the unit is independent, effective and fair.

He will work with transition team members Josh Spickler, executive director of Just City; Jacob Brown, Apperson Crump law firm; Sunny Eaton, Director of Nashville Conviction Review Unit; Marissa Bluestine, Assistant Director of the Quattrone Center for the Fair Administration of Justice at the University of Pennsylvania Law School; and Janiece Lee, Senior Investigator at Lee Investigative Services.

Restorative justice

Mike Carpenter, a former Republican Shelby County Commissioner and current Director of Marketing and Development for My Cup of Tea, will lead the efforts in the restorative justice working group. 

Many of Mulroy’s campaign promises centered on restorative justice, which is a criminal justice approach in which a meeting is organized between the victim and the offender and sometimes with representatives of the wider community.

In June, he said the DA’s office’s existing restorative justice program, which was founded July 2020, was insufficient and that it took on only 88 cases in two years, compared to the 200,000 cases that are heard in Shelby County each year.

Mulroy said he hopes to determine whether to expand the existing restorative justice program, called Community Justice Program, or to start from scratch. He also hopes to come up with best practices for the new or expanded program. 

Exclusive: DA’s office, MPD unveil Cold Case Unit

“We’re not trying in any of these cases to reinvent the wheel or start from a blank slate,” Mulroy said. “We know there are models that work well around the country. And we want to shamelessly plagiarize from those models and see what works best.” 

Other communities that have restorative justice programs include Oakland, California; Cambridge, Massachusetts; St. Paul, Minnesota; and Madison, Wisconsin.

A 2007 University of Wisconsin study found that a restorative justice program in Barron County, Wisconsin, led to significant declines in youth violence, arrests, crime and recidivism. Five years after the program began, violent juvenile offenses decreased almost 49%. Overall, juvenile arrest rates decreased almost 45%.

Findings from an Impact Justice report found that of the 102 youth who participated in a restorative justice program in Oakland, only 18.4% were determined by the court to have committed another delinquent act after 12 months, compared to 32.1% of the control group of youth whose cases were processed through the traditional juvenile legal system.

Leaders discuss solutions to ‘bend the curve on violent crime’

“What’s happening in other cities, there’s a wide variety of restorative justice programs and opportunities out there that we need to take a look at and determine if they’re a fit here and how we might utilize those,” Carpenter said. “So I think, at the end of the day, what we want is a set of recommendations for the DA about how to establish and run a robust restorative justice program.” 

Carpenter will work with Spickler, state Sen. Raumesh Akbari, state Rep. Mark White, Assistant District Attorney Tracye Jones, Fair & Just Prosecution and Tennessee Voices for Victims.

Juvenile justice

Mike Working, founder of the Working Law Firm, serves as the head of the juvenile justice team. 

In addition to starting his own law firm in 2006, Working has also played the role of college football coach and restaurant co-owner. 

Mulroy said Working’s team will be largely focused on reducing initial contact between youth and the criminal justice system as well as improving intervention and reducing the recidivism rate among the age group. 

The most recent figures from the Shelby County Crime Commission, led by former Shelby County District Attorney Bill Gibbons, show that both minor and major juvenile offenses are up over past year. 

Two new leaders appointed to Shelby County Juvenile Court

Since about 2014, what the Commission calls serious juvenile offenses were rising steadily until they hit a big dip in 2019. They’ve been picking up again since 2020 and were up 20.7% last year, according to the Commission. 

Minor offenses, what the Commission calls delinquent juvenile offenses, were still up last year similar to major offenses but at a significantly lower percentage from 2020. In 2021, delinquent juvenile offenses were up 5.5%. They had been on a consistent decline since 2011 but had small spikes in 2018 and in 2020. 

Working said that although disappointing, the numbers for juvenile crime aren’t surprising given that many of their supports and ties to the community, like their schools, were shut down for so long during the pandemic.

Mulroy added that the data makes it clear why the time for reform is now. 

“It underscores the urgency of a focus on juvenile justice and reform and why we’re focused on different approaches,” he said. 

Those different approaches could include a break with efforts being done at the state level, Working suggested. 

“The same models that the state uses for juvenile justice don’t necessarily work here,” he said. 

Working will work with Akbari, Frank, Kevin Rardin, Brice Timmons, Shawn Page of Memphis-Shelby County Schools, Jennifer Balink of Kindred Place, Katy Spurlock of Urban Child Institute, Janet Goode and Cardell Orrin of Stand for Children.