WPLN and ProPublica’s joint investigation of the juvenile justice system in Rutherford County, Tenn., is a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize’s feature writing category.
The investigation was co-reported by WPLN’s Meribah Knight and ProPublica’s Ken Armstrong as part of ProPublica’s Local Reporting Network, which pairs local newsrooms around the country with funding and support from ProPublica. Together, Knight and Armstrong exposed the lack of accountability in a system in which children in Rutherford County were illegally arrested and jailed, all under the watch of a judge who was locking up kids at the highest rate in the state.
“I am incredibly humbled by this recognition and thankful to the Pulitzer jury for this honor. To recognize the power of local journalism, at a time we need this coverage more than ever, is inspiring,” Knight says.
WPLN News Director Emily Siner edited the story along with ProPublica editors Sarah Blustain and Susan Carroll. ProPublica deputy data editor Hannah Fresques and research reporter Alex Mierjeski contributed to the investigation.
The project stemmed from a 2016 incident in which police officers arrested four Black girls at an elementary school in Murfreesboro, Tenn. They and seven other children were accused of watching a scuffle and not stepping in to stop it. The incident stuck with Knight, who had just moved to Tennessee and was working on other projects at the time. She revisited the story in 2021, in partnership with ProPublica.
More than 50 Freedom of Information Act requests later, Knight and Armstrong illuminated the systemic issues that allowed those arrests — and subsequent jailings of four of the children — to happen. The series’ first story showed that the children were arrested for “criminal responsibility for conduct of another,” a crime that does not exist, in an investigation led by a police officer who had been disciplined 37 times. The arrests happened in a system overseen by a judge who failed the bar exam four times, in a county where the written policy for detaining kids violated Tennessee law yet escaped the notice of state inspectors year after year.
The reporters also discovered that Rutherford County jailed kids in 48% of the cases referred to juvenile court, compared with the statewide average of 5%. Some children were held in solitary confinement, a practice a federal judge called inhumane. Knight’s follow-up investigation, co-reported with Fresques, showed that the county was jailing a disproportionately high percentage of Black children.
“Some of these abuses of power had been documented before, but what Meribah and Ken did that was so remarkable was to connect the dots. No one else had pored through depositions to explain what people were thinking, or had used documents and data to show systemic failures,” Siner says. “Their reporting and storytelling made the issue impossible to ignore.”
The investigation spurred immediate demands for reform. Eleven members of Congress wrote to U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland, calling for the Department of Justice to open a civil rights investigation. Tennessee’s governor called for a review of Judge Donna Scott Davenport. Middle Tennessee State University cut ties with Davenport, who had worked there for years as an adjunct instructor, and state legislators introduced a bill to remove her, citing an “appalling abuse of power.” In January, Davenport announced she would retire this year rather than run for reelection.
The investigation has received critical acclaim and several awards, including a John Jay/Harry Frank Guggenheim Award and a News Leaders Association Award. It was also a finalist for a National Magazine Award.
In addition to her work as a fellow in ProPublica’s Local Reporting Network, Knight is also the reporter and host of the Peabody Award-winning podcast “The Promise,” an immersive series from Nashville Public Radio about inequality, housing and education. She started as a reporter at the station in 2016.
About the Pulitzer Prize
The Pulitzer Prizes were established by Joseph Pulitzer, a Hungarian-American journalist and newspaper publisher, who left money to Columbia University upon his death in 1911. The 19-member Pulitzer Board is composed of leading journalists or news executives from media outlets across the U.S., as well as five academics or persons in the arts. They are now considered one of the highest honors in American journalism.
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