Dedicated Public Servants | The Kids of Rutherford County

The Promise

Nashville Public Radio

Society & Culture

4.9 • 777 Ratings

🗓️ 23 November 2023

⏱️ 39 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

The lawyers settle with the County, which agrees to pay the kids who were wrongfully arrested and illegally jailed; the hard part is getting the kids paid.

Credits: “The Kids of Rutherford County” is a production of Serial, The New York Times, ProPublica and Nashville Public Radio. It was written and reported by Meribah Knight with additional reporting from Ken Armstrong at ProPublica.

The show was produced by Daniel Guillemette with additional production by Michelle Navarro. It was edited by Julie Snyder and Jen Guerra. Additional editing by Anita Badejo, Sarah Blustain, Tony Gonzalez, Ken Armstrong and Alex Kotlowitz. The Supervising Producer is Ndeye Thioubou; research and fact checking by Ben Phelan, with additional fact checking by Naomi Sharp. Music supervision, sound design, and mixing by Phoebe Wang. Our Standards Editor is Susan Wessling. Legal review from Dana Green and Al-Amyn Sumar.

Original score by The Blasting Company. Additional production from Jenelle Pifer. Mack Miller is the Executive Assistant for Serial. Art by Pablo Delcan. Sam Dolnick is a Deputy Managing Editor of The New York Times.

Transcript

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0:00.0	In the spring of 2017, after a preliminary injunction hearing, a federal judge ordered Rutherford County to stop using the filter system, their policy for illegally detaining kids.
0:14.2	The impact of that decision was massive.
0:17.5	The number of county kids sent to jail dropped by almost 80% over the next year,
0:22.8	which was good for the kids of Rutherford County,
0:25.5	and that injunction was also good for Wes and his legal team,
0:29.3	who were still pursuing a lawsuit against the county.
0:32.3	Like we thought, great, we've got the injunction,
0:35.5	and then, you know, they're going to have to settle this thing
0:38.9	or face a trial and we have all these good arguments and we're going to get these experts,
0:43.9	and we would have a really great shot at convincing a jury of the value of these claims.
0:49.7	So Wes and the two other lawyers on the case, Mark and Kyle, started gearing up for the trial of their careers.
0:57.1	They did more depositions of jail and court staff and hired an expert witness to testify on the trauma and impact of jailing kids so young.
1:06.5	And in preparation to wow a jury, they hired a photographer to take specialized photos of the
1:11.9	jail.
1:13.1	Their plan was to put VR headsets on jurors so they could feel what the kids did, being
1:18.0	locked up in a tiny cell.
1:20.9	But there's a problem with gathering all that evidence.
1:23.4	That's a ton of damn money.
1:25.5	Here's Mark.
1:26.5	I remember getting the expert witness bills and being like, oh my God, you know.
1:30.9	And so we'd get the bill, and then there'd be another one, like a month later,
1:34.9	for another $10,000 or $15,000.
	...

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