A former captain at the Metro Nashville Police Department will not face criminal charges for an alleged assault against a subordinate in 2016.
A prosecutor from the Davidson County District Attorney’s Office tells WPLN News she believed a crime had occurred but could not press charges because the officer had waited too long to file a report with law enforcement.
“In this particular case, while I believe we could have proved offensive touching, assault, because of the statute of limitations, we are not allowed to bring that charge,” says Assistant District Attorney Tammy Meade.
Courtesy Metro Nashville Police Department Nashville Police Captain Jason Reinbold retired last November.
State agents started to investigate then-Captain Jason Reinbold after a local organization that supports sexual assault survivors laid out multiple allegations of sexual misconduct against him from current and former MNPD employees.
The group, Silent No Longer, shared the accusations with the mayor’s office, the police department and state officials. The Tennessee Bureau of Investigation then tried to corroborate the claims.
Only one of Reinbold’s accusers agreed to speak with investigators. WPLN News is not naming the woman, because she is potentially a victim of a sex crime.
Because she was the only one to come forward, the TBI was unable to fully investigate any of the other claims. Reinbold has denied the allegations against him in the past. He could not be reached for comment before publication.
Afraid to report
The allegation at the center of this investigation dates back to 2016, shortly before the police department moved out of its old headquarters downtown. It was first investigated in 2019, after the woman reported the incident to the city’s human resources department.
The former officer told Metro HR that Reinbold had called her into his office and, after chatting for a few minutes, stood up and locked the door. Then, she said, he asked to touch her breast.
The woman said she was scared and flustered because he was her captain. She didn’t know how to respond. So, she blurted out a yes. Then, she said, he groped her breast.
“She then walked out of his office feeling embarrassed and humiliated,” HR investigators wrote in a 2019 report.
“She said she was too intimidated to report it at the time, and that she was not ‘strong enough to come forward then,’ but she is a different person now,” they wrote. “After this incident, she felt that things ‘went downhill’ for her at work.”
By then, the officer had waited about three years to file a complaint, after she had left the department on a medical disability pension. Metro HR determined it was “unable to substantiate the claim,” according to a 2019 fact finding report, because there were no witnesses or video recordings, and Reinbold denied that it happened.
The report was forwarded to a deputy chief at MNPD, but no record of an internal investigation appears in Reinbold’s personnel or disciplinary files. A spokeswoman for MNPD noted Metro HR’s determination and said the department is “not aware of any other internal complaints against Reinbold regarding sexual misconduct.”
The allegations resurfaced in August 2020, after Silent No Longer told reporters at a press conference that multiple women had accused Reinbold of misconduct. But by then, Meade says, it was already too late.
The prosecutor says she considered two charges: sexual battery and assault.
Sexual battery, Meade says, requires the state to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that an intimate part was touched without permission, for sexual gratification. She says sexual intent can be difficult to prove in court. And in this case, she believed the touching was about more than sexual gratification.
“This was a supervisor-supervisee type situation. And the real point of the interaction would have been power and control, not sex,” Meade says.
Even if the prosecutor thought she could have proven the case in court, she says the statute of limitations would have already expired.
Meade says she felt confident she could have charged Reinbold with assault, which includes touching that “a reasonable person” would consider “extremely offensive or provocative.” But for that charge, which is a misdemeanor, the statute of limitations is just one year.
“I hate telling victims that. I hate not being able to help them,” Meade says. “It’s always disappointing to me when I have to tell someone, you know, ‘I believe you. I would love to be able to do this for you. But the statute of limitations says I cannot.'”
The prosecutor says she had no reason to disbelieve the former officer. And Meade could understand why the woman, like so many victims of sex crimes, didn’t share her story right away, even as an officer deeply versed in the legal process.
“She didn’t sound like an officer. She sounded like a woman who had been victimized,” she says. “And the reason she didn’t report made sense to me. Everything she said made sense.”
Though Meade understands why survivors may be afraid to report to law enforcement right away, she suggests they file a report as soon as possible, so prosecutors have time to file charge.
‘Then what do you do?’
But some victims’ rights advocates say that’s unrealistic for many victims of sex crimes. They say statutes of limitations can make it difficult for survivors of sexual assault to get justice through the court system. Only about one-third of rape and sexual assault cases are reported to law enforcement in the first place, according to the Bureau of Justice Statistics. And for those that are reported, the chances of prosecution are slim.
That’s partially because of restrictive statutes of limitations, says Kelly Peters, director of advocacy at the SAFE Clinic in Nashville.
“I personally don’t think there should be statute of limitations when it is a sex crime or a crime against a child or a crime against a vulnerable adult,” she says. “Because we know so much about PTSD, because we know so much about not just the physical reaction but the emotional reaction. And because of that, we know that not everybody is going to come forward right away.”
Peters says it could take years for a suppressed memory to surface or for someone to find the courage to disclose an assault. In the meantime, they could lose their chance for prosecution.
“There are some individuals that I’ve worked with that didn’t report, and it was getting time to where they were about to hit the end of their statute of limitation and they didn’t know what to do,” Peters says. “They weren’t emotionally, mentally ready to make the report, but then they had to deal with, ‘I know if I don’t make the report by this date, I’m never going to be able to make the report, because the statute of limitation is going to be up.’ And then what do you do?”
The statutes of limitations for sex crimes vary widely from state to state and from offense to offense. In Tennessee, victims have 15 years to report an aggravated rape — sometimes longer if the victim was a child. But for groping, defined as sexual battery, the limit is just two years in most cases; it can be extended in certain cases, like when a gun is used to coerce someone.
State lawmakers acknowledged in a 2018 study that Tennessee’s criminal statutes of limitations “are a matter of legislative choice” and that “there is no science for calculating the precise duration.” Rather, they’re meant to protect people accused of crimes from wrongful convictions when memories have faded or evidence has disappeared.
But national advocates for sex crimes victims argue these arbitrary deadlines ought to be eliminated altogether for such cases.
“The United States is a patchwork of statutes of limitations,” says Camille Cooper, vice president of public policy at the Rape, Abuse and Incest National Network, or RAINN.
Some states, Cooper says, have eliminated all statutes of limitations for felony crimes, while others give victims only one year to report to law enforcement. She says many victims are already reluctant to come forward and that a ticking clock only makes it more difficult.
RAINN is lobbying states to both get rid of their time limits to report sexual assaults and to require law enforcement officers to receive training on trauma, so that survivors won’t be afraid that they’ll be judged or retraumatized if they report.
“You have to be able to allow every survivor to access the justice system,” Cooper says. “Right now, survivors in most states are barred. They’re time barred from being able to access justice.”
This story was produced as part of APM Reports’ public media accountability initiative, which supports investigative reporting at local media outlets around the country. Support also came from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.
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