An innocent man imprisoned for a decade is set to receive the city’s largest payout for a wrongful conviction.
On Tuesday, the Metro Council approved a $1.2 million settlement for Paul Shane Garrett, who sued the city and five former Metro Nashville police officers after serving 10 years in prison for the 2000 murder of Velma Tharpe.
However, it isn’t the dollar figure that surprised lawyers and reporters in this case, but rather the an opinion written by former Davidson County Criminal Court Judge Mark Fishburn. He criticized then-District Attorney Torry Johnson and MNPD for knowingly leaving “an man innocent man in jail for 10 years,” said Nashville Banner editor Steven Cavendish during Monday’s episode of This Is Nashville.
Fishburn called it “a failure at every level of local law enforcement.”
“I’ve never seen anything like that,” continued Cavendish, who reported on Garrett’s case with NewsChannel 5. “Lawyers that I’ve talked to had never really seen a sitting judge just kind of rake a department over the coals like that.”
Irregularities began in the case shortly after Garrett was arrested in 2001.
“From the beginning, there were always doubts kind of lingering … within the DA’s Office. There was a situation where the the cops in the case really pressured Garrett in interviews and really kind of cobbled together what they said was a confession,” Cavendish said.
After spending two years in jail, Garrett pleaded guilty to the murder to avoid a life sentence and possibly the death penalty. He sought to have his conviction overturned after he was released from prison in 2011.
“But there were some things that came up sort of in the interim that were problematic. Notably, the Tennessee Bureau of Investigation got a hit in their CODIS system,” Cavendish said.
In 2004, DNA found at the crime scene matched with a man named Calvin Atchison, but Garrett and his lawyer were not told this. Atchison was arrested for Tharpe’s death in 2021.
In 2011, MNPD cold case detectives found very little documentation that linked Garrett to the murder. During this time, DA Johnson, former Assistant District Attorney Kathy Morante, former Police Chief Steve Anderson and others from MNPD held a “clandestine” meeting to discuss the lack of “credible evidence” connecting Garrett to the crime. However, the district attorney took no steps to clear Garrett’s name.
The Conviction Review Unit under DA Glenn Funk reopened Garrett’s case in 2021 and ultimately vacated his conviction.
Cavendish’s reporting renewed interest in Garrett’s case, which largely faded from the public consciousness.
The press doesn’t “cover the courts anymore. In the ’90s, when The Tennessean and The Nashville Banner were going head to head … you had multiple people in each newsroom covering different facets of the court every day,” said Cavendish.
“Now, you’re lucky if somebody is even reading court dockets on a regular basis. … How many possible cases like Garrett’s are out there? How many different interactions have people had with the justice system that were as screwed up as this one? And you don’t have that right now because we don’t have the same bandwidth as a functional press.”
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