Criminal justice reform is needed to prevent innocent people from languishing in prison | Plazas
The Paul Shane Garrett case exposes that the criminal justice system oppresses people without means and gives authorities who misuse their power the ability to ruin people's lives.
- David Plazas is the director of opinion and engagement for the Paste BN Network Tennessee.
Criminal justice reform has become a bipartisan issue in Tennessee and across the nation, but the fixes are too often piecemeal. They must be systemic.
That is because there are too many cases of innocent people languishing in jails and prisons who face a quixotic battle to clear their names, access justice and return to productive lives as free citizens.
This is wrong, costly to taxpayers and harmful to society.
The recent story about Paul Shane Garrett is a case in point.
Twenty years after his arrest, an innocent man starts to get justice
In 2001, news reports portrayed Paul Shane Garrett as a man who lived a double life.
During the day, he was a married tow truck driver, respected by his boss and his customers for his work ethic and politeness.
At night, he allegedly became a monster who pursued sex workers and had a predilection for choking them.
One of those women, Velma Tharpe, was murdered the previous year and Metro Nashville police were sure it was Garrett who killed her.
An Aug. 31, 2001, story in The Tennessean reported that authorities were investigating Garrett for “’several’ other slayings over the past few years.”
Police said they secretly recorded conversations with Garrett multiple times, but he always denied killing anyone. Nevertheless, he was arrested, and in 2003, Garrett pleaded guilty to manslaughter and was sentenced to 15 years in prison.
The problem is he didn’t do it.
That is why, 20 years later, District Attorney General Glenn Funk is seeking to vacate Garrett’s conviction of voluntarily manslaughter.
A review of the case by Funk’s office that started a decade ago shows a detective made inaccurate statements, prosecutors went along with it and an innocent man went to prison.
This was a miscarriage of justice.
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Garrett case shows massive flaws in the criminal justice system
The August 2001 Tennessean story also reported that the same MNPD detective, Roy Dunaway, “said that police have taken a blood sample from Garrett to be used in a DNA comparison with semen found on Tharpe's body last year.”
What wasn’t publicly revealed until decades later is that police had evidence that the DNA at the murder scene did not match Garrett’s and, in fact, it was linked to another man, according to a story published in The Tennessean last Sunday online and in print on Tuesday.
Garrett’s attorneys say Dunaway lied on the stand and prosecutors knew it.
The D.A.’s office acknowledges there were errors and omissions. That is why Funk, who was elected in 2014, filed to vacate the conviction on May 12.
That’s 10 years after investigators knew something was amiss with the case.
The DA’s office started reviewing Garrett’s case in 2011 under Funk’s predecessor Torry Johnson.
"I do not believe we can permit Garrett's conviction to stand," said Kathy Morante, a former assistant district attorney who reviewed the case. She now works at MNPD’s internal investigations unit.
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That is bad enough, but what’s worse is that Garrett’s attorneys say he became worn down, languishing in jail awaiting trial, because he could not afford to pay the bond and that is why he took a plea deal.
That exposes two sins of the criminal justice system:
- People without means too often cannot get a fair shake
- Authorities who abuse their power ruin lives
Seeking to vacate Garrett’s conviction is the right thing to do. Funk and his staff deserve to be commended for taking an action that might have come across as “soft on crime” in the recent past.
And Garrett is not alone in having spent years behind bars unjustly. This needs to be a wake up call for state lawmakers and local officials to enact criminal justice reforms that do everything possible to ensure innocent people do not end up incarcerated.
Tennessee’s system still favors punishment over redemption
Tennessee’s Board of Parole has been notoriously hostile to requests by inmates for clemency or by wrongly convicted ex felons for exoneration.
In 2017, former Gov. Bill Haslam exonerated Lawrence McKinney, a Memphis man, after he spent 31 years in prison for a crime he did not commit. He was released in 2009, and he had been fighting for exoneration from the parole board and throughout two gubernatorial administrations.
It took another year for McKinney to win a $1 million award from the state Board of Claims for being wrongfully incarcerated — or about $32,000 for every year served.
The parole board turned a blind eye for years to Cyntoia Brown, who was serving a life sentence in Nashville for a killing she said she committed in self-defense. In 2019, Haslam granted her clemency.
Even though criminal justice reform has become an issue both Republicans and Democrats have embraced, there is a lot to fix in the system in order to call the system just.
In recent years, including this past legislative session, reforms have been piecemeal at best and not systemic.
This year, Gov. Bill Lee signed legislation enacting prison reform, but he also agreed to extend prison sentences for certain crimes.
The legislature, however, missed an opportunity to reduce barriers for ex felons who have served their time and seek to get their voting rights restored. Three bills in that vein failed to pass in 2021.
More than 400,000 Tennesseans of voting age — or about 1 in 12 — are restricted from voting due to a felony conviction, according to the Nashville-based research organization ThinkTennessee.
The average daily costs to house an inmate in Tennessee is $86.25, according to the state's Department of Correction. That amounts to more than $31,000 annually that taxpayers fund. In 2019, TDOC reported there is an average state prison population of 30,453 inmates.
While there has been an emphasis on prisoner rehabilitation, the Garrett case shows there are much larger issues related to innocence, investigations and prosecutions that need fixes too.
In recent years, municipalities have begun enacting their own reforms. In 2018 in Metro Nashville, for example, eliminated a $44 daily jail fee and a $35 pretrial fee. These fees added up and people who could not pay them were stuck in limbo, unable to work or provide for themselves or their families.
The bottom line is we need mechanisms in place to avoid incarcerating innocent people. And when they are wrongly convicted and imprisoned, Tennessee owes them better, quicker and more transparent access to real justice.
David Plazas is the director of opinion and engagement for the Paste BN Network Tennessee. He is an editorial board member of The Tennessean. He hosts the Tennessee Voices videocast. Call him at (615) 259-8063, email him at dplazas@tennessean.com or tweet to him at @davidplazas.