Rutherford County’s embattled juvenile court judge has her first challenger in more than 20 years.
The county’s senior judicial commissioner, Jacob Flatt, announced his plans to run against Judge Donna Scott Davenport in the 2022 election this summer.
In an emailed announcement Tuesday, Flatt said he’ll be running as a Republican.
Judge Davenport, who also ran as a Republican in the last election in 2014, came under scrutiny after WPLN News and ProPublica published an investigation into the court system’s troubled history of illegally arresting and detaining children. The county recently settled a class-action lawsuit over the practice and will pay up to $11 million in damages.
Davenport has overseen the juvenile court system, as the county’s first and only juvenile judge, since 2000. She has said that she plans to run again.
Courtesy of Jacob Flatt Rutherford County’s Senior Judicial Commissioner, Jacob Flatt
Flatt has been Rutherford County’s senior judicial commissioner since 2019. Prior to that he was in private practice. Flatt also clerked for the county’s longtime General Sessions judge, Ben Hall McFarlin, Jr. He holds a bachelor’s degree in criminal justice administration from Middle Tennessee State University and a law degree from Nashville School of Law.
WPLN and ProPublica’s reporting spurred immediate calls for reform. Eleven members of Congress wrote to Attorney General Merrick Garland calling for the U.S. Department of Justice to open a civil rights investigation. Tennessee’s governor called for a review of Rutherford County’s juvenile court judge. Middle Tennessee State University cut ties with the judge, who had worked for years as an adjunct instructor and been its commencement speaker in 2015.
In the wake of the investigation, which gained national attention, one state lawmaker vowed “to make sure this never happens again.”
Other colleagues in the Tennessee legislature described the situation in Rutherford County as a “nightmare” and “unchecked barbarism.”
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