The Permanent Record

Emily Bazelon's latest book Charged: The New Movement to Transform American Prosecution and End Mass Incarceration explores the critical role of the elected prosecutor in our criminal legal system. It prominently features the case of Noura Jackson, which resulted in an overturned conviction because of misconduct by the current Shelby County District Attorney General. Emily came to Memphis recently to promote her book, and she joined us in-studio for her second interview on The Permanent Record. We talked more about the power of elected prosecutors and even chatted about politics and the 2020 election.

Earlier this year, the Marshall Project and local journalist, Wendi Thomas, filed a lawsuit against the Memphis Shelby Crime Commission over its failure to disclose financial information and other records. Simone Weichselbaum, who covers national policing policy for the Marshall Project, was investigating the claims often made by Memphis officials that an increase in the number of police officers has a direct impact on violent crime. Simone ran into a dead end when the Crime Commission refused to provide requested information, so they filed the lawsuit.

We talked to Simone about the importance of transparency when making public safety policy; some of the unusual things she discovered about the Memphis Police Department; and the challenges of diversity and inclusion in journalism. We hope you enjoy our conversation.

Carrie Johnson ist the Justice Correspondent for National Public Radio’s Washington Desk. She covers a wide range of emerging justice issues, law enforcement stories, and legal affairs. Carrie is one of our only repeat guests on The Permanent Record. Check out her first interview (Episode 16) in our four-part series on the media. For this episode, we spoke to Carrie about the practical implications of the recently passed First Step Act and the politics that made its passage possible.

The new year brought new Federal criminal justice and prison reform, so we're devoting the next few episodes of the Permanent Record to examining the First Step Act. It has been widely praised and was broadly supported by a bi-partisan coalition that has become very rare for Congress. President Trump recently signed the bill, and when it goes into effect it will reduce our federal prison population. But what else will this bill do -- and what are the next steps we need to take for more meaningful reform to occur? In this episode, we discussed these questions and more with Mark Holden, General Counsel to Koch Industries, one of the bill's most outspoken supporters.

Rudy Valdez is a filmmaker committed to making cinematic, meaningful documentary films that inspire social change. We invited him on The Permanent Record to discuss his latest film, The Sentence, a documentary about mandatory minimums and sentencing reform that he shot and directed over the course of a decade. It’s available now on HBO.

Every time we sentence a person to jail or prison, we also sentence a family to a life without that person. The demands on the families of incarcerated people are often overlooked, but Veda Ajamu’s family is all too familiar with the many burdens of having a loved one locked up. For this episode, Veda gave us a vivid look at how her family has struggled to stay connected to her brother, Robert, during his decades in the Federal prison system.

Veda lives in Memphis and works for the National Civil Rights Museum; she is also very active with FAMM, an organization devoted to preserving the dignity of those on the inside and supporting their families as they try to stay connected. Check out FAMM’s video featuring Veda and then give our latest episode a listen.

In mid-October, Tennessee announced that Edmund Zagorski would be executed on November 1, 2018, and the State intends to use the electric chair to do it. If carried out, it will mark the second execution in Tennessee this year, after nearly a decade without one. Native Tennessean Shane Claiborne recently wrote a book about the death penalty in America. The book is called Executing Grace: How the Death Penalty Killed Jesus and Why it’s Killing Us. In light of Tennessee’s grim return to capital punishment, we invited Shane on The Permanent Record to talk about what’s wrong with the death penalty, how we got here, and where we’re headed as a state and a country.

Check out Shane’s book www.executinggrace.com

Dr. Margaret Vandiver is a retired professor of criminal justice at the University of Memphis and a strong supporter of Tennesseans for Alternatives to the Death Penalty. She has studied state and collective violence, ranging from the use of the death penalty in America to contemporary instances of genocide. She is the author of Lethal Punishment: Lynchings and Legal Executions in the South and also volunteers with the Lynching Sites Project here in Memphis. John Ashworth is the executive director for the Memphis Lynching Sites Project, and also joined us for this episode. John spent several decades in the military and the airline industry before taking the lead in this important work. We discussed some of the critical issues facing our criminal justice system today and why it’s important to have a space to discuss the past.

The Daily Memphian is a brand new local media outlet, and its first issue included an expansive investigative piece -- “A Reluctance to Record”. It's a must-read that reveals yet another instance where part of the criminal justice system in Memphis is an extreme outlier -- the Memphis Police Department does not record homicide interrogations. We thought this critical issue deserved even more attention so we asked the author, Marc Perrusquia, to come on The Permanent Record to discuss it. Perrusquia is Distinguished Journalist in Residence at the University of Memphis, heading up the newly established Institute of Public Service Reporting. He is also reporting for the Daily Memphian and worked for more than 29 years at The Commercial Appeal, where he won numerous state and national awards for his work. Hear what he has to say about his months-long investigative reporting on this story.

We’ve also posted the full audio of two recordings referenced during the interview.

Cordell Walton “Packaged Confession”

https://www.dropbox.com/s/3q8uc5p0m786e79/Cordell%20Walton%20confession-1.m4a?dl=0

Cordell Walton Preliminary Hearing 09.17.2018 Detective Eric Kelly Testimony

https://www.dropbox.com/s/37oyilwdaiorawg/Sept%2017%20prelim%20hearing.m4a?dl=0

The Shelby County general election is less than a week away, and your host is a hopeless political junkie. So, for this special episode, Josh convened a special election roundtable with two of Memphis' top political reporters. Ryan Poe of the Commercial Appeal and Bill Dries of the Memphis Daily News have been covering elections up and down the ballot for this and many elections past. Hear what they have to say about the County Mayor's race, the new County Commission, and the impact that the Juvenile Court oversight has had on this election. Plus, a lot more!