54 Years Defending Gault's Promise

[MUSIC] >> Hey defenders, welcome to the in defense of children podcast, a space for youth defenders. [MUSIC] >> Abe Fortis is criminally underappreciated. He's the man who's opinion in regalt, which generally created the modern juvenile court system in my opinion. He is someone who championed the rights of the underrepresented, he championed the rights of the voice, let's see championed the rights of children. He was progressive in his time in a way that almost no one would even consider it a progressive idea now. It's a basic tenon of our society that children still have rights. [MUSIC] >> We are Christina Cliser, Assistant Public Defender, Kristen Anderson, juvenile law attorney, and Kushana Latimore, Assistant Public Defender. And we are on a mission to build our community of defenders and raise the level of practice we bring each day on behalf of children thrust into the delinquency system. With each episode, our goal is to bring the experts and other defender specialists to educate and inspire us to be better defenders each and every day, we walk into the courtroom, and to learn more about the policy issues faced in Tennessee's court involved children. >> Today is the 54th anniversary of the in-ray galt decision, where the United States Supreme Court said that children have fundamental rights in America's court rooms. In the over five decades since then, the promise of galt has not been realized in the South and especially here in Tennessee. It is time to fulfill that promise, just as demands that all children in juvenile court have meaningful access to qualified council, which galt clearly held. On today's very first episode of our in-defensive children podcast, we have two amazing guests. We're going to start off the conversation today with Memphis Defense Attorney Mike Working. Later in the show, we will have a conversation with Ebony Howard, who's the deputy director of the National Juvenile Defender Center. Both of these folks inspire me to approach my work with a new lens and I hope they do that for you. Mike is the principal attorney at the Working Law firm in Memphis, Tennessee, as the current president of TACDL, which, as most listeners will know, is the Tennessee Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers. Mike and I had a conversation recently about why TACDL's juvenile committee seems to not do much within TACDL. And I likened it to trying to fit a square peg into a round hole. The name is Tennessee Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers. I often feel like adult defenders and defenders of youth are often at odds for a variety of reasons. He and I don't agree on everything, but what he said after that really fascinated me. He said, "Do you know who Abe Fortices?" I said, "Yes, why, yes, I do." I don't know much about him as a person, I admit it, but all the youth defenders know he authored the in-ray galt decision. And I went on to say that I know he holds a special place in the hearts of folks from Memphis because that's where I've heard his name invoked the most. Justice Fortice holds a very special place in many people's hearts, including mites. So Mike, tell us a little bit about your background. Well, I'm the son of a Southern College football coach, so I've been run out of most towns in the South. My dad even coached for the balls up in Knoxville and coached at Appalachian State in West Virginia. Have been all across the country from oil fields and Oklahoma to the military academy at West Point. Got to be in a lot of educated communities by being on college campuses, so I think I think I got exposed to a things more as a young person than a lot of people do, and it certainly shaped me in how I see the world today. How did you end up in Memphis? I liked the blues. That was my only connection to Memphis. I thought I'd come here for law school for a few years. Live out of John Grisham's novel, work on Veal Street and have some stories to tell when I came back East. But I just really liked Memphis. The town took to me and I took to Memphis and it's been a good fit. And there's plenty of work here to do if you're in the justice business. There's a lot of work to do all over our state. How long have you now been a defense attorney or a principal at the working law firm? I think this is my 16th year and I did start with a lot of my first cases, defending juveniles by appointment people who obviously couldn't afford an attorney cutting my teeth wherever I could get in a courtroom and now, although I did still do some of that. I also work in capital defense and a lot of more serious criminal matters. So you took cases in juvenile court before the DOJ investigation in Memphis? That's correct. And can you just give us a little sample of what that was like? Can you give us a little bit of your experience back then? I think any system that has judges in charge of appointing attorneys is doomed because there's a certain pressure on a lawyer to please the judge get along easy, that kind of thing. In an adversarial system, that's poison. I mean, I haven't been appointed a case in the Memphis juvenile court probably in 13 or 14 years. I guess I got the wrong reputation, but there's too many cases that go into adult that have not been fought enough below. And a lot of that has to do stemically going all the way to the Supreme Court and the lack of resources, lack of experts and doctors and things that are available to defense attorneys. Because the Supreme Court has now decided that the trust funds subside for that are not accessible. Yeah, no, we absolutely are going to talk about that in a little bit. I'm very concerned about that current state of affairs when it comes to that sort of about face by the Supreme Court in granting experts for defense lawyers in juvenile court. Before we get there, though, I do want to talk to you a little bit about why you and I started talking about you being on this podcast. You know, and getting ready to talk to you, I have to admit, when you asked me in our early conversations about like whether I knew who Abe Fortis was, I knew who Abe Fortis was. But I have to admit, I was really fascinated about reading more in depth about Justice Fortis' story and that I wasn't aware, for example, of how highly regarded he was as a civil rights attorney before ending up on the Supreme Court. I didn't know that he was a part of Clarence Gideon's defense team, I have to admit. I didn't know he took on many cases that most people didn't want to take on at the time. For example, the Premacarthi loyalty hearings where government employees were basically being questioned about their own loyalty to the government. You heard the introduction to this podcast. Justice Fortis was born in Memphis, but explain to our listeners why Justice Fortis is so inspiring to you. And why you want defenders listening to this podcast to know more about Justice Fortis than just, yeah, he penned the Supreme Court decision that's very important for us. Abe Fortis is criminally underappreciated in America by lawyers and by Memphians. The fact that we don't have a courthouse named after Abe Fortis, who is the man who argued and won the right to have an attorney in Memphis is criminal. The fact that the juvenile courthouse in Memphis, the minimum, not named after Abe Fortis is criminal, he's the man who's opinion in regult, which generally created the modern juvenile court system in my opinion. He is someone who championed the rights of the underrepresented, he championed the rights of the voiceless, he championed the rights of children, he was progressive in his time in a way that almost no one would even consider it a progressive idea now. It's a basic ten-in-of-our society that children still have rights that people have the rights for an attorney. And in that way, he was really an amazing iconoclast. I mean, he reshaped America more than almost any other person I could think of as a lawyer, much less a Memphian, and he definitely does not get the respect he deserves. He also played the blues on Beal Street, which most people don't know about, he was a fiddle player in a blues band on Beal Street, and was known as Fiddling Abe Fortis, so for sentimental reasons too, he's also a favorite man. Yeah. No, I read that a little bit about his history, I was pretty fascinated to pick up a few law review articles about him that I thought were really interesting, and also I picked up a biography, I haven't finished it, but I was. I'm pretty inspired by reading more about his story, and I thank you for that, because I wouldn't have done that if you hadn't have inspired me to do that. So, Mike, just talking about access to counsel for kids, and this is today's the in-rate-gault anniversary, and I often say that here in the South, and Tennessee in general, I feel like Gault's promise is unfulfilled. We have a long way to go in making sure that especially in our rural counties that kids have highly trained well-resourced advocates for them in court, and I just feel like we have fragmented under-resourced strategy in our state when it comes to making sure that the promise of in-rate-gault is fulfilled. You know, we have, in our metro areas, fairly specialized, highly trained well-resourced defenders who only do youth defense and have the support of some of them social workers, education lawyers, some of them haven't their own investigators, but the vast majority of our state has a hybrid of adult defenders taking a handful of juvenile cases, or judges simply appointing private counsel who might be available in the courtroom, if there's a plea that needs to happen, could you please sit with this child, and, you know, talk to them for a few minutes, you know, qualify or not, and some courts don't even appoint in many cases. In my home court, we had many children going forward without counsel, until recently we have less of that, but it was kind of systemic even in larger jurisdictions. My dream would be to create an indigent defense delivery system for kids that covers the state with highly trained well-resourced counsel for all kids, charging to link-wingsy courts. How do we move our state in this direction? How do we put this money toward this important goal when we talk about adult defenders in defenders of youth, we're often talking about the same budget and kind of fighting over, because I feel like it's all under-resourced. What are your thoughts about how we can push this forward to get more resources toward defense and defensive kids? One of the ways that I think we need to change how we deliver justice in juvenile court is it has to be reclassified as a trial court. In Tennessee, we have lower-level courts that are called general sessions courts and they treat the juvenile court system that way, and that's not the place where you have a jury, it's where you do preliminary matters, preliminary hearings to set up the case. Sometimes they almost get treated like small claims courts and people postpone work that can be done in the real court, but the problem with juveniles is a big part of what's supposed to happen in juvenile case is you're supposed to determine whether the child is amenable to correction, or there's no saving this kid and they should be sent to adult court for adult punishment. In criminal court, you deal with guilt or innocence first, sometimes for years, and then after that's done, you figure out what descendants and the punishments should be, but juvenile court's almost a reverse because you have to figure out if this child is amenable to proper guidance and get them back on the right path. And there's a push by prosecutors a lot to just transfer them to adult court and treat them like everybody else. The problem is that without the resources, you can't dig into someone's real social history, you can't dig into the fact that someone started selling drugs when they were 14 because they were homeless, you know, they have a learning disability, which if they got the right IEP individual education plan at their school, they can get on the right track and get things right, or that they are a good student. But their dad got shot and their mom is a drug addict and so they're raising three siblings, you know, get them in a group home somewhere where they have proper guidance instead of just being homeless and trying to make a living at 15. And so we had this fundamental disconnect in our system where we're judging the children as if they're in a trial court where they have the children have all the consequences of being in this big trial court, but our system's not giving them the resources to have a proper defense in a trial court. And that really is against the spirit of the in-regal decision and since this is your first episode, I don't know if any listener necessarily knows exactly what that means, but prior to even for us being a Supreme Court judge who wrote the in-regal opinion, courts used to treat children as if they were apparent stepping in and intervening and what the court always wanted children to do was just admit they're wrong and they would punish them. And before to said no, that's not what we're going to do. In-regal actually was a prank phone call that resulted in a kid getting like six years in prison, okay, until he was an adult, like he was going to be like 13 to 19 in prison over a prank phone call. And the a prior step is now constitutional rights apply to kids, they still got to have the right to an attorney, they still get the presumption of innocence, they still have to have proper resources. And when the choice is you can say you're innocent and get sent to a trial court, punished as an adult, and then we'll give you resources. Or you can admit your guilty and will keep you in juvenile court and maybe give you some rehabilitation. That is directly against what the galt decision was, what justice fortices legacy was, and what juvenile justice is supposed to be the whole point of that decision is that children are still American citizens entitled to full constitutional protection. And our system is much more like galt in practice than it is supposed to be. I couldn't agree more. I guess my question though to you is how do we move our state forward based on what we know the research supports and that's that if we in fact had the resources to give to kids if they wind up referred to the juvenile court. Lawyers, social workers, you know, if we had the services in place in some of our rural counties where kids could get access to those services. We know the research supports that those kids may not recidivate, they may not go on to become your client in adult court. And so it seems to me that the amount of resources that we could put in juvenile court will actually save funds in our state. How can we move this sort of message forward that it's important to fund in agent defense in juvenile court? Well, at the moment, I think it's by making people uncomfortable and soon, which is the way for us did it in Gideon. And if that's how we have to do it, that's how we have to do it. We recently filed two additions in the Supreme Court as an organization, tactile did seeking to give people the resources at the proper lower level courts. There's no reason that you can't have an investigator for 18 months or a year or something like that. It's not like evidence stays in pristine condition. No case gets better the older it gets. And there's no reason that you should be in jail for two years before you can investigate your case. We're just going to have to have a lawsuit. It looks like we've asked the Supreme Court to change its own rules. And if they won't do so, we'll have to ask a federal court to do so. But we can't have our state set aside resources for children and then the Supreme Court overrule and say we're not the lawyers and I want to use those resources. What do you think is going on right now with the Supreme Court in sort of this about face of deciding that lawyers appointed cases in juvenile court aren't going to be able to access funds for investigators or experts for trial, transfer or appeal? Well, number one, we have a very conservative Supreme Court that is very pro law enforcement. They've created dozens of exceptions to constitutional rights. There are two former prosecutors on the Supreme Court right now, but number two, I think that they repeatedly claim they're in a budget crunch. And they're in a budget crunch from the fact that for the first time in 23 years, the rate was raised so that lawyers would be paid $10 more. It's gone up to $50 an hour. That's much lower than attorneys are normally played, but it's put a crunch on the budget for funding for the poor to have a proper legal defense. So our state has been running out of budget surplus. There's no reason for this fund to be in danger or depleted. We have hundreds of millions, if not billions, set aside for children's education in Tennessee from the lottery funds that aren't being used. Perhaps we should have some lottery funds diverted to have proper children's legal defense. There's no question that we have the money. We just need to have the proper policy of the constitutional right should apply to everyone. It's a no brainer. Yeah, it seems like a no brainer. So let me just ask you really briefly about the Abe Fortes Foundation. Would you be willing to talk about that for a little bit and tell us what inspired that. What does had an ongoing debate about whether it should reform as a 501c3. It's a bar association organization. 50 years ago, one factor was formed as a criminal justice reform organization and to train lawyers. It was able to get lots of grants and all kinds of things. Now people are much more restricted about that. It's a 501c3 is what you're required to do. So bar associations are really available to do that. But what we want to do with the Fortes Foundation is carry out the intent of giddy and engulfed and do it in a way where we do work hand in hand with tactile to the Fortes Foundation. We can apply for more money to really train lawyers people currently who maybe can't afford to come to attack the event. We can do a foundational pay for that. We'll train lawyers who are willing to take those juvenile cases. We might help them get resources that the Supreme Court denies them. It can be assembling an adult case as providing trial clothes to give the defendant decency when they appear rather than to appear in their jail uniform or some clothes that look like a hobo from a 70s thrift shop that have been in the public defender's closet for two decades. There are kind of ways that we hope to advocate for criminal justice reform, but really focused on leveling the playing field inside the courtroom. Tactile with 1400 members has sprawled into this really amazing thing that can be working on lobbying and can be working on all kinds of projects. Apparently, you're building a database of police misconduct and Tennessee, but you know, the Fortes Foundation will really focus on the nuts and bolts of giving people proper defense in the courtroom, who otherwise cannot afford it. We want to be able to give practical tips also to defenders as we do this podcast and a couple of things I'd like to just ask you, like for example, if someone wants to talk to you about accessing maybe some of those funds. How do they apply to access those funds? And then also what are your thoughts about if there's an attorney out there in rural Tennessee who's being denied access to funds for an expert or investigator and they have a serious transfer case that they need help with. Give some advice to anyone listening out there who they can reach out to for help. So our first step will be to raise the funds. We are kicking off the Fortes Foundation on June 18th in Nashville. We're going to have a birthday party for Abe Fortes who would have been 111 that weekend. So we're going to have a kickoff event talk about who he was the legacy. He's left us as Tennessee lawyers and what we hope to accomplish in his name with this foundation and hopefully we'll raise a little money that night and we'll be able to start putting some of this into action and be able to give examples of how we've helped attorneys who are in these desperate situations. I think one of the first major examples is we have a boot camp for young lawyers who have never defended a case of trial called the trial college and Tennessee criminal defense college. They send lawyers out to a state park. It's kind of going to the proverbial woodshed and you know they stay in a hotel for about a week and all three meals a day and all that and we teach classes all the time they get like two years of legal education credits that are required for lawyers but not everybody can afford it. So the Fortes Foundation will sponsor five attorneys to go this fall and if you're someone who has only been a lawyer for two years you've probably never done a trial because of the pandemic and corporate rooms being closed. So you know we'll pick a few people and show them how hopefully we'll know how we're doing six months from now. There's no requirement for that right now and I don't know that there ever will be but it is a mission of the Fortes Foundation to also help a tactile achieve its purposes which are to raise the bar of legal defense in Tennessee. I see a kinship between the organizations but I don't you're not required to be a tactile member to have involvement with Fortes Foundation. Okay and then if I'm an attorney out there who is being denied funds from the AOC for experts or investigators in a juvenile case who do they reach out to for help with what tackles doing to challenge that. A really great committee of indigent defense lawyers. We have Don Deener former public defender of Nashville and Mark Stevens of Knoxville. There's a local attorney of Josh Hedrick and then there's there's several lawyers from the very large Tennessee law from a vast variance Sims which has done great things in pro bono defense capital defense and otherwise. We filed the petitions are publicly reviewable publicly available if anyone wants to request a copy of them I can I can answer an email and send them copies but the Supreme Court in addition to our demand that the Ruby have been to ask us for recommendations which we will be submitting next week. Don't forget we need experts in trial transfer and on appeal unless they're going to change the appeal process in Tennessee for kids which I'm all for but that's another podcast. So what I'd like to do is just ask you a couple questions here at the end just to kind of wrap up if that's okay with you. So what is one message Mike that you would like defenders in our state to hear regarding defensive children specifically what if you could just get a message out there to the world of defenders who are taking these cases in our rural counties and our urban centers. What's just a message that you'd like them to hear. You're not alone. It's very hard to stand up in a courtroom with the government is paying for the judge and the prosecutor and the bailiffs who have bullets and you know stand with the kid that needs your help but you're not alone. Every public defender has their membership and tackle paid for and we have a list serve where you can send an email not to you know hundreds of other members. And anytime you have a problem in a courtroom you could just fire up an email and you're going to get dozens of people who try to help you right there on the spot. You know it may feel lonely sometimes but you're not alone that would be the main thing. There's a lot of people who want to help you keep your backbone stiff and stand up for people. Mike if you could give defenders one let's just end on a justice for this quote if you could give defenders one justice for this quote that inspires you or is something that maybe you sometimes quote in court. What's your what's your favorite justice for this quote what would you pick. Well one of the my wife's a teacher and I got in trouble a lot as a school child for being outspoken but he wrote the tinker verses to moan school district opinion where where children were black armbands to protest the Vietnam war and they were suspended from school. First that very much in line with galt and get in that everyone has constitutional rights he wrote it can hardly be argued that either students or teachers shed their constitutional rights to freedom of speech or expression at the school house gate. And I think that the main thing about justice for this is everybody has rights everybody has rights and no matter how much the system tries to dehumanize your client. As long as that person it doesn't even have to be an American they're an immigrant if they're in the United States of America they are protected by our constitution and they have rights and they have the right to be treated with dignity at all times by our court system. So I would just say spirit of justice for this is treating everybody with respect that they deserve as an American. Thank you so much Mike for agreeing to chat with us today I really do look forward to seeing if we can fit that square peg into the round hole you know that Tennessee criminal defense lawyers association that also has to you know talk about kids and you know sort of other terminology other than criminal defense I do think we can work together and hopefully do some amazing things in our state. I really do appreciate you're joining us today. I do too and as we're coming up on our fifth anniversary I've been looking a lot of what the founders of tactile did and among their original five or six committees that they wanted the members paying attention to all the time was juvenile justice and so it's always been something that should be at the forefront of tactile and was when it was formed and I hope it will be an adventure and thanks for having me. In this first season of in defense of children we are featuring a series focusing on supreme court decisions that changed how children are treated in juvenile courts for a podcast geared toward defenders of children there was really no other place to start other than taking a deep dive on the case that gave children the right to an attorney in juvenile court. The in-ray galt decision was decided in 1967 and the goal today is to help us think of new ways as we as defenders can continue to push to ensure the promise of galt is realized in our court rooms. The second half of this episode we get to have a conversation with the amazing Ebony Howard who is the deputy director of the National Juvenile Defender Center which this year is celebrating its 25th anniversary as an organization supporting defenders of you throughout the country in many different ways. Ebony recently joined NJDC after working at the Southern Poverty Law Center and we are so grateful she has joined us for today's conversation. Ebony, welcome to in-defensive children podcast before we jump right into today's topic. Can you just give us a little bit of background about yourself. Sure. So I grew up in Louisville, Kentucky born and raised there. I attended Howard University because I wanted to be an activist and when I got to Howard I was one of the founding members of Amnesty International. And our group focused on human rights abuses in the black diaspora and it was there in that context that I learned about juvenile justice and youth justice and the need for the liberation of black and Latinx children. I started to look really into what the inequalities were like for kids in the juvenile system and how there was a large racial disparity for black and brown children. And there I decided that I wanted to devote my professional career to empowering those children, giving those children a voice so that they could fight for themselves. And I had to decide what I wanted to do with my career and I thought about getting a PhD in education. I thought about studying African studies and I thought about law school. And finally I decided to just look around it, who around me was doing what I wanted to do and Mary and right Edelman who founded the Children's Defense Fund is a lawyer. So I went to law school and that was the sole calculus was what she did. And so then I went to Georgetown where I was in the juvenile justice clinic with the amazing Chris Henning who taught me how to be a lawyer. And I since then have been focused on and call to do this particular work. And so I'm I'm ecstatic to be at NJDC. I am ecstatic to be a member of a community that fights on the side of children. When did you join splc I joined splc in 2009 and I joined as a juvenile justice policy specialist. And that role I worked with family courts across Alabama to implement procedures and policies that would reduce the tension populations and also implement objective instruments so that we could try to filter out the biases of court stakeholders when deciding who should be revoked on probation or who should proceed through the petition process. And from there my time at splc grew into doing litigation and I was lead counsel on several cases, one of which involves a case against the Birmingham Police Department for allowing school resource officers to use mace against children and Birmingham City high schools. I spent a lot of time from there working up litigation doing lots of policy work at splc on criminal justice issues generally. And then for a short stent about a year and some change I was a federal public defender and Birmingham. And then after that I went back to splc to work on criminal justice issues and it was maybe a couple of years after that that I ended up with NJDC. Before we talk about NJDC, I can't skip over your reference to Mary and right Edelman and her connections to Tennessee. Have you ever visited the Children's Defense Funds Haley Farm here in Tennessee? No, no, no, I've never been to the Children's Defense Fund Center there, but I did do a brief internship in undergrad at the CDF offices in DC and have long read about and been inspired by various programs from CDF. Like she has always been a source of inspiration to me, like looking at her path and looking at what she accomplished was so incredibly inspiring to me, but I really want to visit it one day. Yeah, well, make sure you let me know when you're coming. Sure. So when I moved to Tennessee and became a public defender, I didn't know much about NJDC and all of the resources that it has to offer defenders. For those who know nothing about NJDC, can you just give our listeners a brief overview of what NJDC is and what it does for defenders because it's sad to me that when I started as a defender of youth 15 years ago, I honestly didn't know it existed. And I sort of came upon it because I had a few people bring me into it. Tell us a little bit about NJDC and why it's so important that defenders be connected to it. More archingly, NJDC's main mission purpose for existing is to ensure excellence and defense for young people. And the way that we do that is by working with attorneys who represent kids in juvenile court, we call them youth defenders because we honor children and adolescents. And so we call them youth instead of juveniles. The way that we work with youth defenders is we provide training and technical assistance, everything from I have a legal question that I need help with or do you have a template motion on this particular subject to implementing programs that help public defender offices who want to specialize in juvenile defense. We run the gambit on providing that type of direct in the trenches, training and technical assistance to youth defenders and to public defender offices who represent kids. We also produce publications that provide guidance on various aspects of the juvenile system, whether it be the importance of not having fines and fees imposed on children, whether it be looking at the ends and outs of contract counseling. We try to put out guidance that will inform defenders and other court stakeholders about what needs to happen within the juvenile justice system to protect children and to improve outcomes. We also engage in policy advocacy, whether it be in coalitions with other youth interested organizations and then something that we're really known for is our state assessments where we go into states when invited by the state Supreme Court and we do a assessment of the state of defense for kids in several areas. And then that results in a set of recommendations that we put forth and encourage advocates, stakeholders to use those recommendations to enact change for kids. NJDC.info, am I right about that? There is just a wealth of information for defenders, including the racial justice toolkit, which has been amazing for defenders who are able and thinking it's important to raise race in cases and it's been an amazing resource for defenders. You saying the racial justice toolkit also reminded me of this. NJDC does all this work using a racial justice lens. NJDC for 25 years has worked towards a status quo that specialization in juvenile defense and youth defense is necessary because children are different. The way that lawyers represent kids is not the same as how you would represent adults and so we take pride in that we have a community of youth defenders who are skilled at representing children, a continuation or a evolution on that idea is that we've learned so much about race and about bias and about how bias permeates the judicial system. We know that in addition to having a lens of specialization, we also have to have a lens of racial justice. And so like you said, we have our racial justice toolkit that assists defenders in raising issues of race within court hearings so that they are vindicating the humanity of their clients. We also have a racial justice training series that we've been doing that is intensive and focuses on biases our own biases as defenders as well as how to raise arguments and really grapple with the trauma that our black and brown clients suffer by virtue of living in a country that continues to struggle with equity and equality. So before we continue to talk a little bit about NJDC's work on assessments and the right to counsel and assessing the quality and access to counsel piece, I'd really like us to back up just a second and just talk about the in-regal decision and just give our listeners really an idea of the evolution of that decision and the importance of that decision on our work. Would you mind just giving our listeners a backdrop for today's conversation discuss the facts of the galt case in the context that gave birth to that case. Of course, of course. So the birth of galt, you know, starts with a woman calling the police one day because her neighbor her 15 year old neighbor was making crank calls to her. And the calls were of a loo and I think the case as sexual nature. So it's two boys making crank calls and they get the police called on them. One of the boys was Jerry galt, the police went to Jerry's home where him and his friend were and the police officer who went arrested him. Jerry's parents weren't there. The officer did not contact Jerry's parents. The officer did not leave a note for Jerry's parents. He just arrested him and took him to the detention center. And eventually Jerry's parents found out that he had been arrested and found out that there was going to be a hearing the next day. And again, no one told Jerry's parents that from the police station or from the court system, they found out. So at this court hearing, there is Jerry, his mother, the officer and the judge. The woman who called the police was not there. So he didn't have the opportunity to confront her. There wasn't a recording of the hearing in that there wasn't a person to transcribe it or a person to record it. And the substance of the hearing wasn't reduced to writing like in a memorandum. So people who are familiar with notions of due process are probably appalled at this point because there weren't any. So the judge at that hearing said that he would think on it and Jerry was taken back to the detention center, but there wasn't any reason given us to why he needed to be kept there. So a couple of days later Jerry got out and went home and police officer left his mother a note that said there would be a hearing a couple of days later wasn't when any type of letterhead it wasn't a formal notice Jerry was never told who's being charged with at the hearing. So he decided that Jerry should be committed to the custody of the state industrial school until the age 21 and he was charged with a statute that made it illegal to make live phone calls because he was underage. And because the juvenile law said that he could be committed to the state industrial school until the age of 21 who was. So again, lots of due process violations after a series of appeals and court hearings, the case makes it to the United States Supreme Court and we have birth golf. And so what the court found the what the Supreme Court said is that children are ultimately entitled to due process and delinquency proceedings and what that means is two things one. They are entitled to a lawyer when their liberty interests is at risk and they are entitled to notice other charges and so when the court made this holding there are some interesting things that really shaped the way that juvenile court is viewed and the spirit of it. The court talks about how due process is to law what the scientific method is to science, it gives it order and when you have order and when you have clarity, you have truth and you have justice. The point that the court made it's really important is that there was this argument that if you have these types of rules and this types of order, then it prevents juvenile court judges from being compassionate and caring. So that flat out rejected that and said that the absence of principles does not equate to thoughtlessness, compassion and individual treatment, but actually to arbitrariness. So you can have both you can treat children like children, you can have the leniency that we want to have with kids because we know that they are developing because we know that they are still growing and they will make mistakes and have to be held accountable. It's to be held accountable in a way that's different than adults, but you can also give them fairness, you can also give them lawyers who are going to advocate for their expressed interest. And so that's really what galt stands for and galt is our baseline and it spawned a progeny of case law and a progeny of this wonderful community of lawyers who are dedicated to protecting. Children who are probably in the most vulnerable and precarious situations that they will ever be in. And so people who represent these kids are a very special breed of folks because they are protectors of innocence and of adolescence and they are very much in the legacy of galt and everything that it stands for. You know as you describe the facts of galt I can't help but think that it sounds like a little bit you're describing some courtrooms that I've seen recently. Excluding my own I'm not going to throw my own under the bus but you know I have participated in assessments in other states and NJDC has how many assessments have you all done I was counting 28 but I could be wrong about that number. It's 28, it's 28. Yeah that's a lot of assessments of our states and how they provide counsel for kids. And I can personally attest to working in this community for over the last 15 years because this predates me and I know this for separate conversation but for trying to get an assessment in Tennessee but I can't get my Supreme Court to invite you guys. Despite the fact that we ask and ask and ask the answer has always been no but thanks so much for asking no what gives because it wasn't until recently. I can tell you that things weren't recorded here that counsel wasn't being given to kids like there's absolutely a need for us to assess how things are in Tennessee. What do you think is behind a state's kind of unwillingness to allow NJDC to come in and just sit and help us move forward with this conversation and not be intimidated by it. Yes you know Chris I live in Alabama and before I came to NJDC I was one of those people who wanted NJDC to come to my state and do a assessment and my Supreme Court also said no but thank you so I definitely get the feeling I'm definitely been there. And generally about states who are hesitant to allow NJDC to come in I think that it is a fear of the unknown. It is a fear about what's going to be said and about when you pull back these different layers what's going to be there and if the recommendations that come from NJDC are going to be disruptive to the current status quo that people feel like is working the best for them because they think it's the most cost effective way. Which oftentimes it is not because they think that at least the best outcomes for children which most of the time it does not so I just think that being scrutinized in that way is difficult for a lot of stakeholders who are invested in holding a system together. I think that the states where we have done assessments and the various stakeholders that we have worked with in those states will say that working with NJDC is pleasant that we try absolute best and successfully work with all stakeholders that our purpose and going in and doing assessments is solely to support the children in that state and to support the youth defenders in that state. And there isn't some ulterior motive to demonize people or to make people look bad. It is to have the best defense system possible. Another reason that spans not just to states who are hesitant to do assessments with NJDC but it's kind of a statement about the state of juvenile defense generally and how it's viewed to people who are outside of our community. It's not valued in the way that it should be. I mean even in progressive movements we've seen in the past several years a consciousness of the need for reform with regard to the prison system and looking at mass incarceration. But people curiously remove the juvenile justice system from that effort even though it's a clear pipeline. You don't know the number of children that I met in family court and then later on years later met them in adult court. So they're obviously connected but there's just something about the juvenile system that so many people on both sides of a political spectrum don't recognize that it's this key pivotal point that we need to be paying attention to. And perhaps that's because on one side the juvenile system is viewed as light. It's viewed as you know not that serious not having far reaching consequences. We know that being involved in the juvenile system has a connection and is a indicator of future criminality. We know that being in detention increases the likelihood that children will drop out of school the way that we care for these young people who are involved in the juvenile system is really important and that it requires that we invest a lot of time. Energy and thoughtfulness into how we manage the system, how we created and how we transform it so that at least to the best possible outcomes for young people. Part of why I find this whole thing perplexing is that my state in particular in the last couple of years Tennessee has gone through at least three separate task forces to bring stakeholders together to reform reform reform reform. Let's see what we can do to do this better and our entire indigent defense delivery system down to how we are delivering indigent defense for children. Traveling to Massachusetts to look at models that might be better models for doing this. In all of these task forces recommendations, the legislation that ultimately came out of it was so lacking in much reform at all. It just really got watered down to what I personally think was very little to no reform, frankly, when it came to truly helping kids. And I don't feel like it's about the money. I don't feel like it's about the resources always. I do feel like that our state is flush with some resources. We had a conversation with another lawyer on the same topic and he also supports the idea that we have the resources. But it's a question of really not going with our gut. It's a question of going with the research and data and science about what actually works and what is helpful for kids. And often that feels like from a legislative perspective for some reason a very difficult task when it comes down to ultimately supporting reforms. Do you have any thoughts about that? I do feel like my state cares about wanting to do this right ultimately and makes recommendations. For example, makes recommendations to reform our appeal statute or to have counsel earlier in the process, you know, not every reform I would like. But at the end of the day when it comes to making legislation to help kids, it just gets watered down to almost nothing. What are your thoughts about how other than through an assessment process? How Tennessee might be able to move forward in a way that actually makes some real reforms for kids? Yeah, so I completely agree with you, Chris, like everything that you said, I've seen this in other states. I've seen this in my home state of Alabama and it's odd. It is odd that people legislate tours and stakeholders in the system won't take objective evidence base research and use it to create best outcomes, especially when oftentimes taking that path will lead to. Increase public safety and cost saving. So I think it's odd, but I think that what happens is I think politics happens, you know, I've seen this with criminal justice reform and I've seen it with juvenile justice reform. I think that a set of recommendations that are data driven are put in front of legislatures and on the surface, everybody is cool with it and everybody agrees that these things need to happen and then the sausage is made and things are chopped and screwed up and something completely different comes out based off of different deals that have to be made in favors that have to be made and how you know, legislation about one thing impacts another piece of legislation and they have nothing to do with each other except for the people who are working on them. And so I think that politics happens and so to answer your question about what else could happen in Tennessee, what I have seen happen and other states with just a system reform generally is that there is a crisis. It pushes people that pushes the legislatures to have to make a change. So I'll use Alabama for example with criminal justice reform, the prison system here in Alabama has been at like 127% capacity for the longest time so much so that the state has been sued multiple times and the federal government decided to get involved. So at that point that the legislature decided that the task force that they made would actually do something and so unfortunately it takes a push from outside forces to make a legislatures act and one way that youth defenders can participate in that is by engaging in policy work. And by working with community leaders and working with their own legislatures to say these are the things that we see that have to change and we are holding you accountable our community can ban together to be a powerful lobbying block. And the community can ban with youth interested organizations to look at the state of youth defense or the juvenile justice system generally in their county in the state in their city and they can decide that we are going to create a pressure for legislatures so that they have to be accountable to more than just themselves when they are having these conversations. It takes a long time and it takes a lot of different influences and it takes a broad coalition of people but it's possible. It's just hard. I'm sitting here thinking about our legislators and how hard it is to really push the needle when it comes to real reforms that help kids, especially in our courtrooms. So what I would like to do to end our conversation today Ebony is just ask you a few questions to just end us on a positive note what we're trying to do with this podcast is really inspire defenders to be better defenders in the courtroom including myself which you inspire me. You know give defenders tips and you know things that they can hold on to and hopefully think about when they're in the courtroom standing up next to their kid and feeling alone. Our rural defenders feel very alone in some of our smaller courtrooms because they are they might be the one defender who is in court once a month. And then the rest of that month kids might come in without council but then that one day a month they are supposed to be on and working on behalf of the kids who they are scheduled to represent that one day. It's a really disjointed system that we have in Tennessee. So what is one message you would like defenders in our state to hear regarding defensive children specifically or just a message that Ebony Howard would like if you could just share a message with defenders in our state. What would that be? That you aren't alone that I know that you're physically alone I know that this is so hard and you feel like there are so many other things that you could be doing that wouldn't be this hard but you aren't alone there is a community of us. The community of people who stand with you who will support you who will be there for you and NJDC will do that at NJDC we strive to be of service to you defenders who are in court having to do all the things that you just said and we want to be of service to you because we know that you stand in the gap between really horrible and foul things that can happen to children. And positive life outcomes and so reach out to us reach out to us because we will be with you we will stand with you and we just implore that you do not give up because you are powerful and you are fierce and you are a warrior in a battle for the adolescents of so many children and so please don't give up and please let us help you. You mentioned earlier that Marianne Edelman really inspired you. Is there an inspiring quote from either the golf decision or a subsequent Supreme Court decision, a previous decision or something from Marianne Edelman that is inspiring that we can end on today. You know, there are actually two quotes not from a decision or from her but there are two quotes that I use for two different situations that always resonate with me. So when I'm worn out and war torn as my grandfather would have said roller hard and put up wet. The quote I always look to is one by Dr. King and it is your self sacrificing devotion to your purpose in life and your unwavering faith will carry you through times of difficulty. And then when I need to be fierce, when I need to be brave, when I need to just conquer ironically, the quote I think of is by Beyonce and it is sometimes I go off, sometimes I go hard, I take was mine because I'm a star and I play. So yeah, so that's me. If a listener out in the world is hearing this podcast and hearing about the organization for the first time, what do you recommend as far as steps on reaching out and getting involved. You can go to njdc.info and click on our contact us tab there. You can reach out to us via phone or fill out the form there and we can get with you. Also, if you want to sign up for any of our toolkits like our racial justice toolkit or if you want to sign up for our defender resources, we can look you up there. And then we also have several listservs that are geared towards you defenders and you can find all that information on the website. And I would also say that each state has regional representatives who they can also reach out to that can also be found on the website for sure. Love it. Love it. Thank you so much, Ebony, for talking to us today. It's just really been a pleasure and I really thank you so much for your time. Thank you for having me, Chris. I really enjoyed it. I enjoy you. You're awesome. And I'm just really happy to be asked. Take care. Defenders. Thanks for joining us. We hope this podcast was as inspiring to you as it was for us. We hope to drop a new episode as often as possible. In Defense of Children podcast, aims to bring these informative conversations with top thought leaders and experts in our field so defenders can listen whenever and wherever they are. We hope to build a community and become the best lawyers we can be for these kids. And finally, we want a world where policymakers rely on this data and science rather than their gut. And so we hope that this adds to their understanding. If you have ideas for episodes you want to listen to, drop us an email at [email protected]. That's [email protected] just like it's spelled and we will do our best to set it up.