Election Day for the 2022 Davidson County primary is May 3, and one of the highest profile races is for district attorney. No Republican primary has been scheduled, all but guaranteeing that the winner of the May primary will take office after the general election. Incumbent DA Glenn Funk is facing two Democrat challengers: federal prosecutor Sara Beth Myers and former assistant district attorney P. Danielle Nellis.
More: Davidson County district attorney candidates answer community questions
All three candidates joined This Is Nashville in studio on Wednesday to answer community members’ questions about their views on criminal justice and what they hope to achieve if elected. Listen to the full roundtable here.
Below you can read or listen to the candidates’ answers to a few of our top questions.
QUESTION: One of our listeners, Nick Lindemann, told us that he “hasn’t the foggiest” idea of how to differentiate each of you from your opponents. What makes you and your platform different?
Glenn Funk: I’m the only candidate in this race that has a record to run on, and I’m proud of the record that I’ve run on. When it comes to innovations, I’m constantly looking for innovations to make sure that Nashville is a safe place to raise a family, to protect our families, and make sure that we’re a safe place to grow a business. I started a restorative justice program along with Judge (Sheila) Calloway in the juvenile court, and after four years, I’m proud to say that program is so successful, it only has a 4% recidivism rate. I started the Behavioral Care Center, and trying to eliminate or decriminalize mental health issues. And I’m proud to say that my partnership with Daron Hall in the Sheriff’s Department has seen that population, after 18 months, end up with a recidivism rate of less than 15%. I’m the one that started the Steering Clear program where we’re no longer putting people in jail for driver’s licenses, but instead helping them get their driver’s licenses back, saving our city about $50 million in incarceration costs every year.
Sara Beth Myers: I don’t just talk about change. I actually get it done. I founded a nonprofit eight years ago called Advocates for Women’s and Kids’ Equality. We have drafted and passed nine pieces of state legislation, predominantly within the area of domestic violence, sexual assault and human trafficking, to get real results and update the law where there are major gaps. A DA should be a policy maker as well, because we have the ability to see the system from 30,000 feet and see what needs to be changed. So as your DA, I will be a policy maker and make real systems change. In addition to that, I have professional integrity. I will not break the law while I’m in office. The current DA has broken the law consistently over the past eight years, even as recently as yesterday, when he violated the Little Hatch Act and had his own employees coming in during office time and actually campaigning for him while he was there on a DV forum hosted by the National Coalition to End Domestic and Sexual Violence. (Editor’s note: In a statement, Funk told WPLN that members of his office are free to talk about their accomplishments, which, he said, is what they did “on a Zoom call where assistants in the office talked about their successes in prosecuting domestic and interpersonal violence cases.”) That’s something that you won’t see for me. I will not violate the Little Hatch Act or commit felonies.
P. Danielle Nellis: I love that question. The difference between me and my opponents is that my opponents are your status quo candidates. What they both said to you in both of their openings is, for the past eight years and for the past decade, they have actively held leadership positions in our criminal justice system, focused on the prosecution of crimes, and yet, the statistics tell us that what they are doing is not working. I’m the only candidate of the three that has a written policy platform — as I tell people, it’s 18 pages of light reading — and it focuses on those four principles that I mentioned. It has very practical solutions (on) how we change our pretrial assessment and community partnerships so that we’re doing supervision in the community instead of holding people in custody and we’re connecting with the resources they need to address the root causes. It talks about sentencing and how we should change the way we see the cases, how we address the cases and how we don’t use mechanisms traditionally that have a disparate impact. And what we know is the result is that still we have systemic issues and disparities here in our community, and we see that by those who are held in custody still.
QUESTION: Listener Anne Roberts asked, “I am wondering why DA Funk chose to pursue (the recent RaDonda Vaught case) as a criminal prosecution and what the other candidates would have done in the same situation.”
Glenn Funk: The victim in that case is Charlene Murphey. She was a 75-year-old woman who went in to have an MRI. She was supposed to be given some Versed. Instead, RaDonda Vaught, through her gross neglect, went through 18 different stop signs, 18 different places where she had to either override a system or ignore what her training was. She didn’t get her administration of the drug even verified by the nurse that was on her left elbow at the time. She injected a patient with something that was not a relaxer, but a paralytic. Even though she knew that it was a paralytic because it was right on the top of the vial, she still injected her with a paralytic and left her to die over a 30-minute period alone, unable to call out for help. Even if she had been able to call out for help, which she couldn’t because she was paralyzed, she wouldn’t have been heard because RaDonda Vaught had left her alone. When I got that file in from the TBI, I looked at and it looked like it was obviously gross neglect to me. But I said, “Hold on a second, let’s see what the other medical professionals think about this.” We had 30 medical professionals, including expert witnesses, all review it. They all said, yes, this is gross neglect. We then indicted the case. Once we indicted the case, we took it to a jury trial. A jury that included two medical professionals, one of whom was a nurse, convicted RaDonda Vaught. Right now, she has lost her license and cannot get it back because of the conviction. Our job is public safety, and we wanted to make sure that the public was safe and she could not continue to be a nurse.
Sara Beth Myers: This is a really important observation, because it’s not just the Vaught case. This is just the latest in a series of misjudgments that we can attribute to the current district attorney. I’ve made it very clear on the very day of that verdict, I came out with a statement explaining that I will not be prosecuting medical professionals who make even tragic mistakes, which happen every day, for what constitutes civil medical malpractice. We have a regulatory and administrative process for that, in addition to a whole civil side where there are civil medical malpractice claims every day. It is a huge overreach of our criminal justice system to be prosecuting health care providers for civil medical malpractice. And while that was a tragedy and my heart goes out to the family, we cannot be doing that, because where do you draw the line? You know, how many health care professionals are we going to be prosecuting as a result of this? What I have heard from Mr. Funk is he’s doubling down. He’s absolutely proud of that prosecution, and I think that that is unacceptable and it is a misuse of office resources. We need to be focusing on intentional violent crime. That is our problem here in Nashville. This DA has dismissed 87% of domestic violence cases, 65% of gun cases and 78% of child abuse and neglect cases over the last year. That’s according to MNPD data. (Editor’s note: Funk disputed these claims in an interview with The Tennessean.) So our focus needs to shift from prosecuting nurses for unintentional mistakes to prosecuting intentional violent crime.
P. Danielle Nellis: First and foremost, I want to make sure that in this conversation, we are recognizing that the victim certainly lost their life and that their family is having to walk through a very public grief process. And I want what I say to in no way diminish their grief process. I also don’t want to challenge the authority of a jury to come to a conclusion, because we believe that the most just and fair way to resolve cases is to take them to trial. But in this case, I would not have charged Ms. Vaught with what she was charged with. I do believe this is a classic medical malpractice case, and what I know of the incumbent is, unfortunately, he has shown over and over his choice to make politically motivated decisions. We’ve seen it with the Andrew Delke case, where he failed to hold Mr. Delke accountable and give the justice our city deserved, and Ms. Hambrick and her family deserved, by taking it to trial. The same with the Josh Lippert case and Jocques Clemmons case prior to that. So I think what we need to do is put a district attorney in place who will not abuse their discretion and certainly look at cases as they are. I do not think Ms. Vaught should have been charged for a medical malpractice issue. The charges were indicative of the systemic failure in the DA’s office, and we must put somebody in place who is able to use their discretion wisely.
QUESTION: Longtime Nashville resident Delores Butler asks, “As district attorney, how would your office approach prison reform and root causes of crime?”
Glenn Funk: My background as both a criminal defense attorney and a prosecutor gave me a perspective that no one at this table can match. Twenty-five years as a criminal defense attorney, a year as a public defender. So I understand how crime impacts families. I can fully humanize the victims from my time as an assistant district attorney and my time as district attorney. I can also fully humanize the folks that are charged with crimes, because all these impact not just the victim and the defendant, but also their families. So what we’re trying to do is we achieve a proper balance between public safety and fairness. Being the district attorney isn’t choosing between the two. It’s boldly demanding both. That’s why we’ve brought a balanced approach in my office. As far as making sure that we reach out to the community, I have diversified my office. When I took office, we had one African American DA, 69 white DAs. Now we are 28% African American or Hispanic, and we’ve got 33% of our leadership is African American or Hispanic.
Sara Beth Myers: The DA’s office should be listening to our community and that is something that I also hear over and over again. Where is the DA’s office? It’s reactive. We need to shift that to being proactive and out into the community. That’s why I’m restructuring the office to make sure that assistant DAs are assigned to neighborhoods to build those relationships so that we can understand the why of the crime and then target resources to prevent kids from ever going into the system. That’s the first step on crime prevention, but then, through a lens of equity and civil rights, we have to understand where we are. We have to understand the landscape. And that means doing that first civil rights criminal justice audit, by race, gender, nationality, sexual orientation and religion. Where are those disparities precisely in our system so we can make that systems change? Because predominantly in our jails, there are a disproportionate amount of people of color. As a federal civil rights prosecutor, my victims were incarcerated, and I’ve seen it firsthand. I think prison reform and bail reform should be at the top of our agenda.
P. Danielle Nellis: The way we address our over-incarceration, and many of the other systemic issues in our criminal justice system, is by changing the lens through which we see each case. One of the principles of my policy platform is restoration. Restorative justice is asking the questions, “What is accountability? What is harm reduction? What is healing?” We have to do that for every case, not just some that we deem appropriate for diversion. Yes, we have a diversion program currently, but only 65 people who have gone through that in juvenile court. So we must not only change our lens, but we have to set up programs that are addressing crimes at their root cause. That includes a neighborhood courts model. I think Nashville is the perfect place to set up that type of restorative practice. I think we also have to expand our pre-trial assessment. In doing so we are, as each person is coming in contact with the criminal justice system, identifying that root cause and pairing them with community-based resources so that we don’t have an over-incarceration. And certainly looking at the fact that 60% of the bodies held in custody right now are still Black and brown bodies, which is indicative of a systems failure.
QUESTION: A lot of your job takes place in your office or in the courtroom. How do you plan to show up for the community after the election cycle?
Glenn Funk: Even over these last eight years, I’ve stayed in the community, in public service work, working with nonprofits and attending houses of worship beyond just my own — I attend Westminster Presbyterian. It is important, to not just me, but my entire office. It’s important for the 70 assistant district attorneys to get out and be engaged in the community, which we are. We encourage that level of community engagement — attending community meetings, participating in nonprofits. I believe that the criminal justice system can bring the community together. In too many cities, the criminal justice system tends to be divisive and tear the community apart. But I think when Nashville works together, we can have tremendous accomplishments.
Sara Beth Myers: So visibility is not enough. Just being seen somewhere is simply not enough. Just showing up doesn’t do it. We need meaningful participation in conversation. That’s why I will restructure the office as district attorney to assign assistant DAs to neighborhoods to have quarterly listening sessions in those neighborhoods, to hear what the issues are that are adversely affecting the people in that community and how we can help. But not just the DA’s office, how we can align with the resources that that community needs. If it’s nonprofit resources, if it’s coming from a faith community, how can we make sure that we’re preventing the crime and solving the issues in those specific locations? Because they look different in all parts of town. I’ve also served on a number of boards throughout my time in Nashville since 2006, and I founded my own nonprofit. So on the board of Thistle Farms and communities and schools, and then created Advocates for Women’s and Kids’ Equality, I walk the walk. You will see me, but not just in location, but meaningfully.
P. Danielle Nellis: I think it’s hugely important. I am from Nashville. My family’s been here for six or so generations and I have been in community. I serve as a Sunday school teacher. I have been selected as a fellow to our Nashville Bar (Association) because of my service in the diversity, equity and inclusion space. Indeed, I have recruited the two or three most diverse classes of interns the DA’s office had ever seen, which has led to the most diverse hiring. So I’m certainly in the community doing the work, but more important than that, we have to see the entire office in the community. We must align the office with neighborhoods and not just precincts or people who we know closely. We must align with neighborhoods. So the neighborhood sees all the people who are in the office, not just those who look like them. I don’t know if you’ve seen, but several of our wonderful ADAs have been out, but it’s often those who match the demographics of the community, and we know that tokenism is racism. So we want to make sure that we are meeting community where they are, that we’re meeting the needs of the community, that we’re aligning with community, opening up two lines of communication. Oh, and I should have mentioned I’ve been a basketball coach and served in that capacity as well, so I’m in community and ready to continue to do the work.
Updated April 14 at 9:00 a.m.
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