Judge Donna Scott Davenport, who oversees Rutherford County’s juvenile court system, will no longer teach at Middle Tennessee State University, according to an email sent to faculty and staff Tuesday evening.
Davenport has come under national scrutiny for her oversight of a system that had been illegally arresting and detaining children for years. The issues were highlighted in a recent WPLN News-ProPublica investigation.
Davenport has been the juvenile court judge for two decades and has taught criminal justice at MTSU as an adjunct instructor for many years. She’s also an alum of the university and gave a commencement speech for graduates in 2015.
The email to faculty, signed by university president Sidney McPhee, was one sentence. It said that Davenport, “whose actions overseeing Rutherford County Juvenile Court have recently drawn attention in national media reports, is no longer affiliated with the University.”
In a separate email to WPLN News and ProPublica, a spokesman for the university said MTSU does not comment on personnel matters and that the president’s note “will likely be our only statement on this matter.”
Davenport, through a county spokesperson, declined to be interviewed for our earlier story and has not yet responded to a new request for comment sent to her Tuesday evening.
But the county spokesperson did share a statement from Rutherford County Mayor Bill Ketron: “I share our community’s concerns over a news story that was recently released involving Rutherford County’s juvenile justice system. This is the subject of an ongoing lawsuit in federal court and, therefore, the County is very limited in what can be discussed. With that said, changes to the system were put in place in 2017 to ensure that the County is strictly following required federal and state laws regarding arresting and detaining of juveniles.”
In the days after ProPublica’s investigation of the juvenile justice system in Rutherford County, Tennessee, one state lawmaker wrote that she was “horrified.” Another called it a “nightmare.” A third labeled it “unchecked barbarism.” A former Tennessee congressman posted the story about the unlawful jailing of kids and tweeted, “The most sickening and unAmerican thing I’ve read about in some time.” The NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund called for a federal civil rights investigation. A pastor, in his Sunday sermon in Nashville, said: “We can’t allow this madness to continue. These are our babies.”
This story was last updated at 4:45 p.m. on Wednesday. Ken Armstrong contributed to this story.
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