MEMPHIS, Tenn. — There are victims of this pandemic, who’ve never been sick a day in their lives: business owners, bartenders, waitresses, small business owners. And kids - kids who need direction, discipline, and love.
It brings us to the Shelby County Juvenile Court. The quarantine, the stay at home order, have combined to create big challenges for Judge Dan Michael.
“I don’t believe this is going to end overnight,” he says. “I believe we’re going to be looking at long-term issues on how we handle our courts in the future.”
Judge Michael checks to see how many juveniles are being held in their detention facility. 58 on this day. He doesn’t like that, Michael said, because they need programs and help to straighten their lives.
He says, “We are focusing our work over the next two weeks, on hearing every single one of those cases, so that we can get those children out of detention and into programs and things they need to turn their lives around.”
Something else has been going on. Even though there is no school, the number of juveniles arrested has dropped.
According to Judge Michael, “A typical day for us in a detention hearing would be 12 to 15 children. Now, our detention hearings - we’ll, on some days, we didn’t have any because there were no arrests.”
Judge Michael says the same thing happens every summer.
“I believe it’s because they’re back in their zip codes,” he says. “They’re not mingling with children from other areas where there may be conflicts. And they’re staying home.”
There are a lot of cases that need to be heard, and as many as possible will be done by computer teleconference.
“I don’t believe this is going to end overnight,” Judge Michael says. “The last thing we need to do is pack a courtroom with 50 or 60 people for hearings. That’s just not safe.”
