Acting on a tip that state Rep. Curry Todd of Collierville had logged time for DUI last weekend in Madison County, we checked: Indeed, he had. Todd was incarcerated from Thursday, January 31, to Saturday, February 2, at the Madison County Penal Farm.
Since Rep. Todd was, rather famously, convicted last year of a DUI in Nashville, this circumstance had us checking into whatever dire fate might await him, as the perpetrator of what looked to be a second offense. It’s more complicated, but in a nutshell, a second DUI conviction is pretty nasty — causing a mandatory revocation of one’s driver’s license for two years, a stiff fine, and the likelihood of anywhere from 45 days to almost a year in jail.
That’s the bad news. The good news for the Republican legislator, co-author of several controversial school bills affecting Shelby County, is that none of it applied. His 48-hour stay at the Madison County Penal Farm was, in fact, the time he was obliged to serve as a result of last year’s conviction in Nashville — the one and only on his record.
The change of venue and place on the calendar were at Todd’s request, and it was all worked out between the court and law-enforcement authorities of Davidson and Madison counties, explained Madison County Sheriff David Woolfork.
“That sort of thing happens all the time,” said Woolfork, who described Todd’s time at the penal farm as uneventful. What did he do there? “Oh, he tore up uniforms,” said Woolfork, who went on to elucidate that the Sheriff’s Department was in the process of revamping the uniforms of its officers and that Todd labored away at the redesign of several.
That meant, among other things, removing the chevrons from one place on a sleeve and re-stitching them somewhere else.
And why did Rep. Todd choose Madison County as the place of his incarceration? “Oh, probably because he heard what a great sheriff I was,” Woolfork said.
Or it may have been because Jackson is a place on the map between Nashville and Memphis, both the latter places housing ample numbers of inquisitive media people.
In any case, Todd was quickly free to go.
