- (female announcer) Production funding for Behind the Headlines is made possible in part by the WKNO Production Fund, the WKNO Endowment Fund, and by viewers like you, thank you.

- Shelby County District Attorney Steve Mulroy, tonight, on Behind the Headlines.

[intense orchestral music] I'm Eric Barnes with The Daily Memphian.

Thanks for joining us.

I am joined tonight by Steve Mulroy, Shelby County DA.

Thanks for being here.

- Happy to be here.

- Along with Bill Dries, reporter with The Daily Memphian.

Before we get started with DA Mulroy, I'll just note that early voting, depending on when you watch this, it may have already ended, ends on October 29th.

Election day is Tuesday, November 3rd.

That's federal, state, and local races, including the three House seats that cover Memphis now, and Shelby County and beyond and the governor's race or one of the Senate races.

Whole lot of local suburban races, so I won't even run through all those.

There's also three state amendments.

We're going to talk to DA Mulroy about a couple of those, but you want to do your research on those because they are confusing as someone who early voted and I had to get out the Daily Memphian voter guide to make sure I knew what I was doing with those.

And you also go to Shelby Vote, which is the Election Commission site, to figure out where you go to vote and all that stuff.

But again, the voter guide on Daily Memphian, it doesn't endorse anything, but it does give a good rundown, lots of links to articles, including interviews that we did with some of the key candidates, including Brent Taylor, Justin Pearson, Chaz Molder, Jerri Green, Heidi Kuhn.

We were unable to get Marsha Blackburn, Charlie Hatcher, or David Kustoff on the show to our immense frustration.

I will say one last bit.

The Tennessee Press Association did a governor's forum with a couple of the candidates for governor.

Marsha Blackburn was not there.

You can watch a recording of that governor's forum and just go to The Daily Memphian, search for governor.

There's a tape of the livestream that was done for that.

I think that's all our stuff.

Steve Mulroy, you are four years into an eight-year term, so you're pretty removed from the political, the running and the elections right now.

But one thing I think I wanted to start with, because it's been, I think it was February when we last had you on, it was spring, late winter, Memphis Safe Task Force, a little over a year old.

- Yes.

- If someone parachuted in, walked in today and said, "I keep hearing about this Memphis Safe Task Force," what is it?

Because it is not one thing, but from your point of view, what is the Memphis Safe Task Force?

- So there was a huge infusion of federal officials coming into Memphis, like a total of maybe a thousand that were here indefinitely.

And it is composed of three different parts.

There's the alphabet agencies, FBI, ATF, DEA, agents of all of those.

There's the National Guard.

And then there's ICE doing immigration enforcement.

And I have different opinions about each of those, but those three things together created a large infusion of federal personnel that were supposedly had a public safety mission and they've been here for a year now.

- And they are not going away.

It's always a little hard to get our arms around exactly what resources are still here, what aren't.

I guess touch on that.

What resources, at least from your office, are you still interacting with, if any?

And then also, what's worked in the last year plus?

- Sure.

Well, we have dedicated one of our prosecutors to serve as a liaison, and he spends about half his time out at the Joint Operations Center out by Shelby Farms where the task force has its headquarters.

And so we're in regular contact with the alphabet agencies, FBI, DEA, ATF, things like that.

And we're getting daily situation reports about what they've been doing.

What has worked has been that the alphabet agencies have really helped claw back on our big backlog of outstanding warrants.

We had about 10,000 outstanding warrants in Shelby County.

It had been a problem for many, many, many years and they have helped us with that.

That has been good.

- Serving warrants, finding people.

- Yes, right.

Yeah, so there are warrants for the arrest of certain people and we can't find them, and it takes manpower to find them, and they've helped find them and that's been very helpful.

National Guard, I think, not been that helpful.

They don't have the power to arrest or to serve warrants and thankfully so because they're not trained for it.

They're military people, they're not civilian law enforcement.

So basically they're just sort of there for visibility.

And while the individual National Guard members are great and I wish them well, nine to ten million dollars a month for visibility, I don't think is a good way of spending our money.

If you gave me 9 or 10 million dollars a month and said, "Use it in the most effective way to reduce crime," I would not have picked that way.

And then the third, I think the worst category is the ICE.

I think the ICE enforcement has actually been counterproductive because what you've done, Eric, is you've terrorized communities, Latino, immigrant communities and the people who love them, and made them less willing to come forward and interact with the criminal justice system.

And we need those communities to be reporting crimes, providing tips, serving as witnesses, being willing to come to court, and that has a deterrent effect.

And so, I would give those three different components very different grades.

- If you had that nine million, hypothetically, how would you spend it?

- Well, I think I would spend it on recruitment bonuses to increase the complement of Memphis Police Department, maybe increase their salaries.

I would heavily invest in violence intervention programs, like Memphis Allies, HEAL 901, the 901 Bloc Squad, things like that.

And I'll note that the federal administration actually significantly cut funding to those things just before they upped the funding for the National Guard to come to Memphis.

And I think there would other be things like residential facilities for justice involved youth, like Peer Academy.

I think we should have three or four more Peer Academy.

And that's just the tip of the iceberg.

- Yeah.

Bill.

- In regards to the National Guard, there are some investigations underway for incidents involving them in which people died.

- Yes.

- What is your office's role in that at this point and beyond this point?

- Yeah, our general role in those cases and all similar cases is to decide whether a prosecution is appropriate, whether criminal charges are warranted.

So the TBI gets called in by me on a case by case basis to investigate those cases.

The TBI is investigating a number of them as we speak.

And then when their investigation is complete, they turn it over to us.

They don't make recommendations about charges, they just say, "Here is what we think the facts are."

- Here's the case.

- Yeah.

And then it's up to us to decide on a case by case basis whether to bring criminal charges under Tennessee state law.

- Do you put any time limit on that, or say to them, "Hey, you've had this case for a while.

Shake a leg."

- No, no hard and fast time limit.

But if we do think it's taking too long, we will check in with them and see what they can do to expedite.

Certainly we've done that before.

But really, my Justice Review unit, the Conviction Integrity unit that I set up shortly after I took office has a responsibility for investigating those cases.

And they are in regular contact with TBI over the course of the investigation.

- Right.

When Tyre Nichols died in the incident involving Memphis police, we got a video of it very quickly.

Why haven't there been videos released of these incidents?

- It's a good question.

And I am in favor of more transparency and bringing videos out sooner.

There have been two complications.

In one instance, we wanted to make sure that premature publication of the video didn't compromise an ongoing investigation.

And another instance, the families haven't always been enthusiastic about having the videos made public, and we've been trying to be responsive to their wishes.

But no, I think you raise an excellent point, Bill.

We probably should have done it by now and we will be doing it soon.

I have been on my staff saying, we need to get the video compiled and out there sooner, especially in these cases where there is significant public interest.

- We had Michael Dunavant, the federal US - - Attorney.

- US Attorney, thank you, for the western Tennessee on maybe a month or two ago and people could view that.

The federal resource, and you are a former federal prosecutor.

Now they have resources that you don't have at the local level.

And one of the ones that I'm fascinated by is that they lean really heavily on federal gun laws.

So that if they've got somebody who's a convicted felon who is even in possession of gun of any type, boom, they can ignore a lot and just focus on that because it's incontrovertible.

They're sitting there with a gun when the warrant was served or found in the car, whatever it is.

- Right.

- Are there tools, do you have those sort of tools when it comes to gun violations?

Because that would be state law.

- Yeah.

So two points about that.

First, to answer the second part of your question, there are state laws against possession of a gun by convicted felons, and we can prosecute and we do prosecute those cases.

The federal penalties for the analog over in federal court are steeper than under state law.

But you mentioned earlier that they have resources that we don't have.

And I'd like to point out that one of those resources is manpower.

When the federal surge occurred, they got, I think, another six prosecutors, and then they had an infusion of like 20, or 15 or 20 JAG officers temporary.

We've had nothing like that.

This state government has created two new courts, which is good, but they've provided no extra staff for us to staff them.

They provided no extra staff for our office to deal with the surge in cases that occurred when the federal task force occurred.

So I thought I'd point that out.

- Your caseload doubled, tripled, something like that?

- General Sessions daily dockets increased by 50% in the first few months of the federal surge.

That's calmed down a little bit.

It's not as active as it was, let's say from October to December of 2025, but it's still significantly greater than what we're used to dealing with.

- Correct me if I'm wrong here-- - Excuse me.

By the way, the situation was even worse with the Clerk's Office.

They were completely swamped.

And then of course we all know about the severe overcrowding of the jail.

It was already overcrowded and then for a while became insanely overcrowded.

- The overcrowding at the jail, I mean, does that ever affect your, I think we've talked about this before, what you do with someone who's accused.

If you know you're going to add to the overcrowding, does that come into your bail decision, your release on their own recognizance decisions?

I mean, how does that play out?

- Yes, I mean, usually on a case by case basis, we're just dealing with it based on the facts and the law, But I have spoken to my prosecutors a number of times over the last year to make sure they're, because of the jail overcrowding, to take a second look.

Are there cases of low-level offenses where the bail could be reduced, or they could be ROR'd because of the jail overcrowding.

I've also had conversations as recently as this week with law enforcement saying, "Now let's make sure that we're not missing cases "where it could be a misdemeanor citation rather than a full custodial arrest."

A lot of these low-level offenses, you could just do a misdemeanor citation, give it to them, and then they have to report to court.

- Example for non-lawyers, non-legal people of these low-level offenses.

- Oh, we'll say criminal trespass, minor shoplifting, low dollar amount shoplifting, things like that.

- One more from me, I just dropped my pen there.

Sorry, people.

One more from me on resources and the... Oh, I know, the prosecution of people, the state legislature... I'm sorry, let me go back.

The state legislature passed a law, correct me if I'm wrong here, that required you to do some extra reporting about people who were arrested by Memphis Safe Task Force.

You didn't want that law to pass because it was going to create, from your point of view, more paperwork and more just work that wasn't necessary.

- Yes.

- How does all that stand?

- Well, I've challenged both the laws that you're referring to in court.

There was a court hearing, we're still waiting for the court to rule.

So there are two different laws.

One creates what I consider to be administratively burdensome reporting requirements every 10 business days.

What we have to do is we have to by hand manually pull out just the task force cases, and then report on dispositions of those.

That is not an automatable function in our system.

We don't treat the cases differently, right.

And then report that.

And then the other law says that the attorney general can come in and audit every prosecutorial decision we make, not just on task force cases, but on all cases from bail to final disposition.

We have to open up our files, including confidential portions of our files, the attorney general has the sole discretion to share any of that confidential information with any or all members of the General Assembly.

And if he doesn't like what he sees, then he can go to the Tennessee Supreme Court and ask them to appoint a pro tem, temporary DA to take over certain categories of cases.

Essentially, an unelected shadow DA working in parallel to the duly elected DA.

I think for a number of reasons, both those laws are unconstitutional, including the fact that both of them single out Shelby County and only Shelby County, which is unconstitutional under the Tennessee Constitution.

Other than that, they're great.

- And as those cases make their way through, have the judges stayed enforcement of the law?

- They have not stayed enforcement of the law.

- Okay, so you're cranking out.

- We are still complying with the reporting law, even though we have a pending motion that hasn't been ruled on to a preliminary injunction against enforcement of the law, we are complying and we have been since day one, since May.

Every 10 business days we sent out the reports.

Now, as to the attorney general audit, the attorney general has asked for some preliminary cooperation to get the audit done.

And we've said, "Well, let's wait until we hear from the court."

The attorney general had moved to get the court to force that.

The court hasn't ruled on any of our motions, frankly, so we're still waiting to hear from the court on that one.

- Okay.

Since we've gotten into the B word bail here, let's talk about the ballot question.

- Yes.

- An amendment to the Tennessee Constitution that, in essence, creates more offenses that someone is charged with for which they could be held without bail.

Is that a good thing or a bad thing?

- I have publicly supported it.

I think it's a 60/40 question.

I'm not sure it'll actually change all that much because the current workaround is that if judges think that someone may be a danger to the community, they will just set an unaffordably high bail, right?

But I think on balance, it's something worthy of support and I have publicly supported it.

The truth is, Bill, that most states have a law similar to what this law would be if it passed, and the federal system as well.

Tennessee is actually an outlier in saying that unless it's a capital offense, unless it's a death penalty offense, you are guaranteed bail of some amount.

And there are some situations where someone should be denied bail outright, and so I'm okay with it.

But if it doesn't pass, under the current system, like I said, there's an informal workaround.

Judges will set a really high bail to accomplish the same thing.

- Well, yeah.

It seems to me that it kind of clouds the question because you're talking about bail not as what someone can afford, or for a consideration of community safety.

The consideration becomes, how high do we have to set it so that someone doesn't get out?

- That's right.

Yes.

So there is something cleaner about saying, look, this doesn't require the judges to deny bail in the set of cases, mostly violent cases, and then high-level drug trafficking cases is what we're talking about.

It doesn't require them to deny bail, but it just gives them the discretion to do so on a case by case basis.

- One of the other questions involves what are called victim's rights.

- Yes.

- There's now a set in this constitutional amendment and it makes some of the existing requirements more specific.

What's your view on that?

- This is another one of these 60/40 questions.

The current state victim's rights statute already codifies most of these rights.

The main difference here is they would be constitutionalized, and therefore if the legislature ever wanted to tinker with them, they couldn't.

They'd have to amend the Constitution again.

Again, I generally like the notice and opportunity to be heard, rights that are provided to victims in the current law.

Does it need to be constitutionalized?

Not necessarily.

As a general rule, you probably shouldn't put things in the Constitution unless they have to be in the Constitution.

And if they can be handled through legislation, that's probably the better route.

But again, I think this is a 60/40 matter.

- And the wording on this too, the fine print, so to speak of it, makes it clear that these processes that are in place do not affect your ability to make decisions.

- Absolutely.

They don't affect the judge's discretion.

They don't affect the DA's discretion.

They don't affect really what will ultimately happen in any individual case.

It's just a question of making sure that the victim is notified of all court hearings and can attend, has an opportunity to weigh in about sentencing, will be notified if a prisoner gets released, things of that nature.

Again, most of this is already in Tennessee law.

It's just a question of do you want it in the Tennessee Constitution?

- And I should note, it doesn't relate to criminal justice.

There's a third amendment on the ballot.

You go to Daly Memphian, look for the election guide and get information on that one.

It's around state and property taxes.

- I'm against that one.

- Okay.

So he's against that one.

Then there's a couple charter amendments, as I mentioned at the top of the show.

- I'll quickly say that I'm an enthusiastic supporter of the first city charter amendment, library employees need civil service protections.

- Okay.

Okay.

So we got eight minutes here left in the show.

You mentioned this quickly that the legislature did put two new courts in Shelby County.

- Yes.

- They are meant to be sort of violent criminal courts focused on rape, sexual assault, crimes against children, homicide offenses.

You talked about not getting extra staffing to use them, but I mean, will it create a speedier court system?

Will it be effective that it's just focused on violent?

I mean, what's your take on how that's operating?

- The focus on violent thing doesn't really matter that much.

I mean, we have so many cases, both violence and violent to be distributed among the criminal courts.

I think that's neither here nor there.

But the fact that there are two new criminal courts is a good thing.

A couple years ago, at the same time that the state was complaining about the supposed backlog in Shelby County, they took away 1 of our 10 criminal courts, right?

That was a mistake.

They have replaced it and added one more, which is great.

That's wonderful.

We're grateful.

I think it will help to speed the disposition of justice in Shelby County.

We'll have more courts to send to farm these cases out to.

I do think though that it won't be as effective in speeding things up because they didn't give us the extra staff we need to staff these courts.

- Four years, I think I mentioned this at the top, you're four years in, you've got four more years in your term.

The DA term is eight years.

You look back at the last four years, what would you do differently?

- Oh, what a good question.

I wish you told me you were going to ask me that question.

- I never tell people the great questions.

- I know, I know.

I think I would start... I would have a different communication strategy from the get-go.

I think one mistake I made in my first year was to focus so much on communicating that I was following through on my criminal justice reform efforts, that I wasn't doing enough to remind people that we were still doing the day-to-day work of putting people behind bars who deserved to be behind bars.

And I made myself vulnerable to a false narrative of the soft on crime nonsense.

So I definitely would do that differently.

There are a couple of staffing decisions that I won't get into that I probably would have done differently in hindsight.

I think I probably would have started sooner on our time to disposition initiative, but better late than never because we are making really great progress in that.

- Describe that.

- This was a concentrated effort to speed up the rate at which we are disposing of cases.

In Shelby County, in General Sessions Court with the misdemeanor cases, we're actually okay.

Our average time to complete a case is, say three months or so, which is on par with the national average.

But in the felony courts, I inherited a system in which we were way too slow.

Two and a half years average time to dispose of a felony case.

The national average is a little under a year.

And so we've been making a concentrated effort to get that number down.

We've been making great progress.

We've gone from like 750 days, two and a half years or whatever, to most recently down to 600 days.

And we are on track, knock wood, is this wood, by the end of the year of reaching the goal that I had set, which is to get us to a year and a half average time to dispose of a felony case in Shelby County, which is still not on par with the national average, but is a lot better.

- Bill.

- That's pretty hard because some of that's not under your control.

- Precisely.

Precisely.

We're waiting for TBI lab results, the judges are in charge of the schedules.

The defense attorneys are constantly asking for resets.

So there's only so much we can do.

One of the things we did do, Bill, was to focus on that part of the criminal process that is under our control, which is how quickly are we preparing indictments for our grand jury unit, and how quickly is our grand jury unit going to the grand jury and getting indictments?

And I am pleased to say we have made dramatic, dramatic improvements on both of those metrics, and that is great credit to my staff.

Every month we go over the statistics and we say, "Where do we need to improve?"

And they really have stepped up their game.

- One thing, and I think this is probably true of the whole criminal justice system, you mentioned the soft on crime narrative, that there's a lot of arrows in your direction at this, that, or this other person.

He didn't take him to trial.

He settled for 10 years, 8 years, 5 years, not the maximum.

- Yep.

- When you look back at that, are there cases you wish you'd handled differently and tried pushed harder or is there... I mean, even your predecessor, I believe, and I know certainly Bill Gibbons, the Republican before Amy Weirich, who's still involved in the Crime Commission, has talked about, "We're never going to take everyone to trial.

That doesn't happen."

But then individual cases of a horrible thing that is in the TV news or on our site or wherever, people just go, "How could that possibly happen "that this person only got X number of years, not a life sentence?"

- Right.

- How would you look back, and again, in your next four years, in terms of communicating those decisions to the public?

- Yeah.

Well, so a lot of those individual cases that were controversial were situations in which it wasn't our decision, right.

Decision was made by a judge without our active involvement.

A lot of those cases are cases where we had significant proof problems that people didn't understand.

We actually couldn't have succeeded at trial.

We had to settle.

Are there individual cases that I would look back on and say, yes, we should have done it differently?

Yes, but a lot of those I didn't know about beforehand.

I mean, we have 40,000 cases a year.

I can't possibly be involved in the disposition of all of them.

There have even been times when a settlement hasn't been consummated yet.

We haven't signed on the dotted line, and a victim has come to me and I have said, "On second though you're right.

Maybe we need to rethink this."

So there have been individual cases.

But the one thing I do want to point out as a general note is, the data is pretty clear that to be effective, punishment needs to be swift, and it needs to be certain, but it need not be severe.

Sentence length itself is not that good a predictor of repeat offenders.

- You talked about a soft on crime narrative.

A lot of that narrative came from State Senator Brent Taylor, who's running for US House.

- I've heard of him.

- You've heard of him.

Came out this week and he admitted to sending unsolicited nude photos of himself to people.

- Yes.

- Did you have comments, saying that he's been a huge critic of yours, tried to get you recalled.

He's been on this show and the Daily Memphian, any thoughts?

- The only comment I'll make about that is that I give him credit for imagination.

He has broadly redefined the definition of the phrase youthful indiscretion.

- All right.

We will leave it there.

Again, we had Brent Taylor on.

You can get that full episode.

I'm sure we'll have him on again in the future, win or lose in any of these races he's in.

But thank you both.

Thank you, Steve, for being here.

We appreciate it.

Thank you for joining us.

If you missed any of the show, go to wkno.org, YouTube or The Daily Memphian.

Thanks very much, and we'll see you next week.

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