The Permanent Record

On this episode Josh speaks with newly elected Juvenile Court Judge Tarik Sugarmon. We learned about his career from public defense to finally taking over duties at the Juvenile Court. Judge Sugarmon comes from a family with a very distinguished history of standing up for civil rights, and he carries on that tradition.

We're back with a special interview of the newly elected District Attorney in Shelby County, Steve Mulroy. Steve was elected on August 4th and took office on September 1st. His first week in office was marred by some of the worst incidents of crime that Memphis has seen in a long time. We discussed that first week and what it was like for him personally. Steve and his staff of more than 200 pe...

Liliana Segura is an award-winning investigative journalist covering the United States criminal justice system. She currently writes for The Intercept. Liliana covered the recent federal execution spree set in motion last summer by the Trump administration. We invited Liliana to share from her unique perspective, having traveled to Terre Haute, Indiana for all 13 executions. We also talked a littl...

"The number of women in American prisons has risen at an alarming rate over the past three decades. In this episode, we talked with Pat Culp, the Executive Director of WEBS Memphis - Women Empowered to Become Self-Sufficient. A native Memphian, Pat has spent the last 28 years providing women in our community with valuable opportunities to return home with marketable skills and the confidence t...

Kelley Henry has spent her career fighting for people facing the death penalty in Tennessee. Currently, she is fighting for Pervis Payne who, despite consistently maintaining his innocence, is set to be executed in December. The day before we recorded this interview, a Shelby County judge ordered DNA testing in his case - a significant victory for Kelley and her team. We sat down with Kelley on Co...

In October of 2018 The Marshall Project featured the work of Mark Loughney, an artist who is currently incarcerated. We began conversing with him through email and snail mail and started collaborating on an exhibit, which is still in the works. We decided it was time to talk with Mark voice to voice and let our audience hear what life is like inside and how his experience with art has affected him...

In this very special episode, we talked to “America’s Next Top Lawyer”, Furonda Brasfield former America’s Next Top model contestant, turned attorney and Executive Director of the Arkansas Coalition to Abolish the Death Penalty. Just City Court Watch coordinator and State organizer, Joia Erin facilitates a conversation with Furonda about the COVID-19 outbreak at Cummins State Correctional facility...

The United States leads the world in incarceration of children, and Liz Ryan and the Youth First Initiative are leading the effort to change that. Youth justice is a frequent topic of conversation in Memphis, and Shelby County is considering a major expansion of its youth detention facility. For this episode of The Permanent Record, we talked to Liz about challenging the misconceptions of children...

State Representative Andrew Farmer lives in Sevierville, Tennessee and represents the 17th House District. He serves as Chair of the Criminal Justice Subcommittee, and we suspected he had a family connection to Dolly Parton. We invited him on the podcast to find out about both.

In this very special episode, we talked to Raymond Santana - one-fifth of the group now known as The Exonerated Five. Raymond and four other young men from NYC were wrongfully convicted of raping a woman in Central Park in 1989. They are now the subject of Ava DuVernay's Netflix series, When They See Us . Seventeen years after being fully exonerated, they are finding their voices again. Raymon...

Steven Hale is a staff writer for the Nashville Scene. He has been a media witness to three of Tennessee’s most recent executions. His written accounts of those experiences are very moving and provide critical insight to the politics and mechanics of capital punishment in Tennessee. Since the State has set more execution dates, including one in October, we asked Steven to join us to give his first...

Noura Jackson was charged and convicted of killing her mother in a 2009 trial that made national headlines; however, citing significant missteps by the prosecutor in the case, her conviction was unanimously overturned by the Tennessee Supreme Court. The lead prosecutor on the case was Shelby County’s current elected District Attorney. Maintaining her innocence, Noura entered an Alford plea to mans...

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 rece...

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...

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 implicatio...

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 popul...

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, du...

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 D...

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...

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...

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 wha...

With election season in Shelby County in full swing, we present one of two recent interviews with the candidates for County Mayor. David Lenoir has played SEC football, started a mutual fund, and served two terms as Shelby County Trustee. He is now the Republican candidate in the race for Mayor. When recently discussing the challenges facing our community, Lenoir pointed to his faith and said this...

With election season in Shelby County in full swing, we present one of two recent interviews with the candidates for County Mayor. Lee Harris has been a City Councilman, a State Senator, and is now the Democratic candidate in the race for Mayor.  A native Memphian, when asked about moving home to Memphis instead of a taking a job on Wall Street after law school, Sen. Harris said,  “I’ve always bee...

Our guest for this episode is Luther Ivory. He shared some of his experience growing up in Memphis during the Civil Rights era, including a very significant evening at Mason Temple on April 3, 1968. Today, Luther Ivory is mostly retired from his job as an associate professor of religious studies and director of African American studies at Rhodes College. He has also planted and pastored multiple c...