Criminal Law
A Tennessee County Illegally Sent Children to Jail by Charging Some With Non-Existent Crimes
For years, a suburban county near Nashville, Tennessee, illegally locked up children and in at least one instance used bogus charges to justify it, according to a bombshell ProPublica investigation published Friday, as part of a system that sent kids as young as seven to jail.
According to ProPublica, Rutherford County, Tennessee, used what county officials called a “filter system” starting in 2008, which left it up to the discretion of jailers to decide whether a child arrested and taken to the juvenile detention center should be released, though Tennessee law only allows for children to be held under specific circumstances.
