“She was cruel, she was evil, she was completely biased, everything she was not supposed to be,” said Sheryl Guinn of Rutherford County Tennessee Juvenile Judge Donna Scott Davenport after a report released by ProPublica and Nashville Public Radio revealed she has been incarcerating juveniles at alarming rates.
The report revealed the Rutherford County Juvenile Detention Center, which is about 30 miles southeast of Nashville, locked up 48 percent of all kids that came before Judge Davenport meanwhile the state average was only 5 percent.
At the center of the report, a 2016 case involving students from Hobgood Elementary School in Murfreesboro, Tennessee. Eleven young Black kids were arrested for simply watching two boys ages 5 and 6 fight off school grounds.
The arrested children were charged with “criminal responsibility for conduct of another” in essence, the children were punished for not trying to stop another person from committing a crime or in the case in question because the kids did not stop the boys from fighting, they were arrested.
The alleged crime the kids were arrested for does not exist, which means not only were they arrested but some of them were jailed for hours for a crime not on the books.
Charges quickly were dropped against all 11 children, but not before damage was done.
Guinn says Rutherford County, Tennessee, saw an influx of Black residents moving in from neighboring Nashville due to gentrification. She believes Davenport used her position to incarcerate Black youth at disproportionate rates as a response to an increasing Black population.
“I think honestly, people just got scared, in Rutherford County, I think the white majority, their position was, all of these people moving in, and we’ve got this influx of things happening and basically, we want something done about it and I think Donna Scott Davenport was one of those people who wanted something done,” said Guinn.
